What do you do beyond combat?

[nato]

I have been around D&D and RPGs for a long time, but am a little short on real experience. My one group of friends is going to try a game for the first time.

I want to get beyond hack & slash combat-heavy dungeon-crawl games (no offense to ppl who like that! We are just trying this specifically to get something more than combat like from computer games).

My question is what exactly do you DO besides combat? Like, specifically. After all, the rules for RPGs are almost entirely combat rules.

The phrase I most often see is "political intrigue." What exactly is this and how do you make it fun in an RPG? My guess is create a bunch of different power groups vying against each other, with alliances switching ... but after you create this web, what do the PCs actually DO in it? How is it fun?

Any ideas besides the political intrigue phrase? All I can think of is puzzles.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading.

 

[tjoneslo]

Other suggestions:

Investigations: A crime or other mysterious event has occured. The characters need to figure out what happend by talking to people and gathering clues on the scene.

A lot of political intrigue involves talking to people, attempting to convince them they need to do things for the character (or the people the characters work for). A suggestion for doing political intrigue is to "create" between two and five groups, all of whom want the same thing (usually poltical power). The characters work for one (or more ) of these groups. Their job is to figure a way for their group to get the thing everyone wants. To make this more interesting, have the players each head a different faction, and make them come up with plans to bring the others down.

Build stuff: I have a few characters in my game obsessed with building mecha... Even though they don't really exist in the campaign. This requires gathering tools and material from various random sources.

 

[DMH]

If you want to do the politics thing, there are 3 books that will help- Dynasties and Demogauges (its sister book Crime and Punishment is also excellent) and Splintered Peace (a sourcebook and adventure) both from Atlas and then there is the Second World Sourcebook from Second World Simulations (it has a totally different look at politics from the first two).

Other ideas include exploring, trading, investing in a business, seeking knowledge (or disseminating it), religious quests, assisting the locals, Olympic style games and spying.

You can also look at it from a personal view- what do you want to do to better the world? How would you adapt it to the setting?

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

Basically, D&D is problem resolution. Most problems are of a combat nature, and can thusly be resolved by fighting, but you can throw many other types of problems at your players that do NOT require combat. Some have already been mentioned. The broad categories, IMO, other than combat, are:

- RP encounters, wherein the other players must deal in character with an NPC.
- "puzzle" encounters, wherein the characters must use their abilities to bypass a certain obstacle


AR

 

[ThirdWizard]

There are a few things to make intrigue interesting.

First, the PCs have to have a stake in something. This could be just about anything you can think of, a goal of the PCs. So, for this to work, the PCs have to have some kind of goals. They might want to work their way up in an organization, build a temple to their god, stake a claim to a territory, or something along those lines.

They need a conflict. The "goodly" prince can be plotting to assassinate his father, local priests may be linked to an evil cult, weapon smugglers may be infiltrating the town guard, etc. The crux being that direct combat is not a viable solution to the problem. You can't just go and kill the prince, for example, even if you are in the right. So, the PCs have to find alternate methods of dealing with these problems. There can be combat in the adventure, but it won't be the solution to the problem.

Some kind of reveal is always good. The plot twist in other words. The trick is to not get predictable with plot twists, not even to always have a plot twist, and to sometimes throw a few red herrings out. It doesn't have to be a complete altering of the plot. The prince doesn't have to turn out to be good. Perhaps the prince's fencing instructor has been planting the seed of this for years, masterfully manipulating his young pupil. For what purpose? Well, now you have a whole other adventure where the PCs can search out the answer, don't you?

Then the resolution. There are many methods to this. Diplomacy to gain allies, covert operations (stealing evidence for example), finding rats who will talk, making further operation of the group impossible (turning a weapon dealer's supplier against them for example), or anything the PCs can think of. It can be very open ended if the DM creates lots of details around the intrigue.

And, it can spiral. What are the consequences of the PCs actions? What about their inactions, those can have consequences as well! Did they uncover a bigger plot? A smalltime crook got away vowing revenge?

I've done lots of intrigue based adventures in my day. Once I did an undercover mission inside a thieves' guild with the PCs working for the town militia. I've done the PCs uncovering a Green Steel weapon smuggling ring for the Blood War. I did a Demon trying to move a large part of Ysgard into the Abyss (through some hillarity and PC actions, it went to Carceri instead heh).

One intersting aspect of intrigue is that living isn't success and death isn't losing. The goals of the PCs will determine if they fail or not. If they fail, you can have it come back to bite them later, without their mortality always being on the line. Failure can be just as bad, though, if you make sure consequences are followed through.

 

[Wombat]

This is kind of hard for me to answer. Even in my D20 games combat takes up only about 25% of our game time.

What else do we do? Well, there is a lot of social interaction, talking with other people/creatures in an attempt to gain information about various problems. This also leads into politics, directly or indirectly. And there are religious issues that are brought up. The characters don't simply move from one adventure to the next in our world, but rather live within it, have jobs, have families, have commitments, have expectations. Adventuring is not a full-time job in our currently world, so this changes matters from most D&D games.

And of course planning takes time -- it may not be direct action, but it is vital. What supplies to bring, who to talk to, what traps to lay, what spells to prepare, find out who are your allies and who are your enemies. This alone takes a huge chunk of time.

Many of my adventures revolve around moral issues, rarely black-and-white. The characters then need to determine, in character, what is the best resolution to a complex situation. The answers themselves have consequences, both good and bad, and the characters must deal with these outcomes. Again, this takes up a fair amount of time in the game.

Trade and study takes up a certain amount of time as well, especially when people are bartering for items. Travel is also important; while not every bit of travel is hazardous, there is always the potential for this.

Every character in our game, too, gets time simply to be them, to explore what it means to be the specific charcter. Sometimes this involves combat, sometime social interactions, sometimes just going through what a day is like.

So combat is the spice, not the main course, in our games. I think our games are very different from standard D&D games, but we really enjoy them like this.

 

[tetsujin28]

My question is what exactly do you DO besides combat? Like, specifically. After all, the rules for RPGs are almost entirely combat rules.

The rules for some rpgs are almost entirely combat rules.

As noted above, what is necessary to make an rpg enjoyable (for me, at least) is conflict.

 

[nato]

Thanks for so many good replies everyone. A lot of things to think about.

It sounds like talking to people is a big part of it. I have to wonder if having mechanics like charisma and diplomacy/bluff skills serves this very well. It seems tough to tell where the line is between those in-game numbers and real-life talking rp skills is drawn. I'm also not sure if my thespian skills (which = 0) are up to it.

Other than talking, it looks like planning, puzzles/obstacles, and building things (from mechs to empires - in game acheivement) are good avenues. Maybe intellectual challenges is the common thread (in that sense, I think combat COULD be on the list, if it was interesting tactical decisions and not just lots of "I attack" turns). One thing that also occurs to me is that the building things type takes a lot of ability to care about the game and take it seriously.

SOME rpgs are mostly combat rules? Which major ones aren't? I'd be interested to look into them. I think I heard that the Vampire ones just use rock/paper/scissors for combat, so I guess those. Ok I'll revise my statement to non-LARP rpgs. Seems to me the combat chapter (and its dependencies) is always the bulk of the book.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

SOME rpgs are mostly combat rules? Which major ones aren't? I'd be interested to look into them. I think I heard that the Vampire ones just use rock/paper/scissors for combat, so I guess those. Ok I'll revise my statement to non-LARP rpgs. Seems to me the combat chapter (and its dependencies) is always the bulk of the book.

It really does depend on the game. Take a look at Pendragon for a good example of a game that's relatively light on combat rules, but heavy on roleplaying elements. Ars Magica is pretty combat-light also.

As for what to do beyond combat...well, pretty much anything you want. If you want your character to explore the world, then have him set out on a journey, or explore his surroundings in detail. I've seen players have their characters set up businesses, using applicable skills (Craft and Profession skills fit the bill in D&D). Maybe the character is a collector, and goes around trying to add to his collection - say, a wizard tries to increase the size of his library with both mundane and magical books; he could scour booksellers, private owners, and the campaign world's equivalent to flea markets. Anything you can imagine the character wanting to do could be fodder for non-combat gaming.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Call of Cthulhu is another game relatively light on combat rules.