D&D is extremely centred on fighting and killing. Almost any other RPG - at least any without a Monster Manual equivalent as a core book - will be less so. Traveller, mentioned upthread, is a good example, but really there is not much outside D&D clones that are anything like so combat centric. Even playing Savage Worlds in a zombie apocalypse, we avoided combat where possible.
Moral Dilemma: Killing and Deaths in RPGs
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
There is always going to be some churn when you try out a new group. Stick to a series of one shots until you find a good player base of matching play styles. Jumping into a complex or in-depth campaign is not going to work out until you have some new reliables. Avoid your old reliables because D&D is their wheelhouse. Try looking for youtube videos on how to play whatever game you want to try. Being an expert will allow you to lead new gamers into it easier.
Good luck!
Victor Spieles
Explorer
Great suggestions payn. I have had rewarding memorable game moments with those fantasy RPG friends. But I'll study up an do a more thorough search for the right type of players for that next RPG I decide on. I'll also keep it to short adventures to gauge interest in running something long term.
One of the most obvious suggestions that hasn't even brought up: Level Up!
With the advertised added emphasis on the exploration pillar, maybe there is more to work with here as well that doesn't require a lot of deadly combat scenarios. Plus, since it's built on the foundation of 5E, everyone already knows the rules, essentially.
With the advertised added emphasis on the exploration pillar, maybe there is more to work with here as well that doesn't require a lot of deadly combat scenarios. Plus, since it's built on the foundation of 5E, everyone already knows the rules, essentially.
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Being build on 5E is exactly the problem as D&D is the least suitable system for nonviolent gameplay.
Tun Kai Poh
Hero
If I can suggest some light indie RPGs:
Stories of Love in Manila by Jammi Nedjadi is a Tarot-driven game about a soothsayer helping mythological spirits and creatures to navigate their love lives in modern-day Manila. It's not a long game and it uses playbooks to make it easy to guide new players. And it's free!
And, in a bit of self-promotion, I have written a short game about a group of children encountering a digital ghost of a mech pilot long after a great war - it deals with themes of war and mortality, but all the dying has already happened before the story begins.
ECH0 by Role Over Play Dead
Peace. Kids playing in mech wreckage. A ghost. One last journey to find a final resting place.
roleoverplaydead.itch.io
In fact, there are a lot of really good small indie games available on pdf on platforms like itch.io, many of them from creators like us from the Global South. And a good number of them go beyond the usual paradigms of kick-down-the-dungeon-door-and-slay-monsters. There's an article about them here. Designers want more visibility for non-Western games
Victor Spieles
Explorer
Thank you for the recommendations and links Tun Kai Poh.If I can suggest some light indie RPGs:
Stories of Love in Manila by Jammi Nedjadi is a Tarot-driven game about a soothsayer helping mythological spirits and creatures to navigate their love lives in modern-day Manila. It's not a long game and it uses playbooks to make it easy to guide new players. And it's free!
And, in a bit of self-promotion, I have written a short game about a group of children encountering a digital ghost of a mech pilot long after a great war - it deals with themes of war and mortality, but all the dying has already happened before the story begins.
ECH0 by Role Over Play Dead
Peace. Kids playing in mech wreckage. A ghost. One last journey to find a final resting place.
In fact, there are a lot of really good small indie games available on pdf on platforms like itch.io, many of them from creators like us from the Global South. And a good number of them go beyond the usual paradigms of kick-down-the-dungeon-door-and-slay-monsters. There's an article about them here. Designers want more visibility for non-Western games
Yora
Legend
I've been there since I was 30. And it certainly was a contributing factor for why I got fed up with Dungeons & Dragons. Last year I ended up running a 5th edition game for the first time, and while it was the best campaign I've ever run by far, the way that the rules wants you to hack people and creatures in endless numbers was the main reason why I decided to conclude the campaign after the first story arc, even though the players would absolutely have been up to continuing to another adventure.
Oddly enough, the solution to that problem, which I had been oggling at for a long time before that campaign, is the 1981 Basic/Expert edition of D&D, which is designed even more as a straightforward dungeon crawler than any other edition, except the very first version. They key about that game is that it is designed from top to bottom as an exploration and treasure stealing game, not as a combat system with a diplomacy skill tacked on.
It is a game in which characters die much more easily than in any editions from the last 30 years, but I don't see that as a problem, but as a key component of what makes the game work. With characters consisting only of the most basic stats (attributes, attack bonus, hit points, saves), they are inherently more replaceable, and as such the game does not become about individuals and their personal stories. Instead it naturally tends much more towards a focus on cool and tense things happening in this one scene, and the overall memorable exploits of the players, with the specific characters in the party coming and going. It encourages to make characters who live fast and expect to die young. If you don't have the expectation that you go into the game to see your character becoming a character with a long and deep personal story that develops over 30 adventures, then the death of characters becomes much less of a disruption of the campaign an instead a part of how the game is played.
But the real charm lies in that the game is full of structures and interwoven systems that keep producing obstacles for the characters in which the question is not which of your characters' special abilities will kill the monsters the fastest. Fighting monsters offers very little gain for the PCs, while it poses very considerable risk, even if it looks like an easy fight. Where you get your XP and wealth from is the treasures that are hidden somewhere in the monster's lair. So many things about this game are incentives for the players to avoid getting into fights. As you head to the dungeon with all the supplies you'll be needing, you want to make it quick and avoid losing any people or potions before you even reach the destination. At the dungeon, your concern is how to separate the monsters from their treasures. Killing the monster is always an option but also always risky. Any way to get the treasure without monsters making attack rolls is preferable. And then you have to get back to a town while being slowed down with all the treasure, and you really want to get there as fast as possible to avoid running into anything on the way that could still kill you, or steal your treasures before you get XP for them. You could calculate how much food and water you need for the return trip and which tools you will need for the obstacles along the way, and then ditch all the supplies you can buy new for cheap and would only slow you down. But it could be that one unfortunate random encounter overthrows the whole plan and you could really use the tools you decided to leave behind.
Trying to avoid fighting monsters and people is fun, if the rules reward you for pulling it off.
Another thing I started a few years ago is to no longer have humanoid monsters. There are still various different peoples, but they are not good races and evil races. And it made me realize how common it is in adventures to have a bunch of generic evil people just because the game structure demands that you have a lot of fights. Imagine you replace all orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogers, and so on with human tribesmen in a typical adventure. Suddenly it all looks incredibly messed up. Sure, there certainly are some really bad people among the barbarians living in the hills. But when the adventures assume that you will kill every single person you'll encounter, generally on sight, that just isn't right.
In all encounters with humanoids, I always do the test "Would this encounter work with humans"? You can always make them bandits, but it often very quickly turns into completely ridiculous amounts of bandits if you assume they are all human bandits.
Oddly enough, the solution to that problem, which I had been oggling at for a long time before that campaign, is the 1981 Basic/Expert edition of D&D, which is designed even more as a straightforward dungeon crawler than any other edition, except the very first version. They key about that game is that it is designed from top to bottom as an exploration and treasure stealing game, not as a combat system with a diplomacy skill tacked on.
It is a game in which characters die much more easily than in any editions from the last 30 years, but I don't see that as a problem, but as a key component of what makes the game work. With characters consisting only of the most basic stats (attributes, attack bonus, hit points, saves), they are inherently more replaceable, and as such the game does not become about individuals and their personal stories. Instead it naturally tends much more towards a focus on cool and tense things happening in this one scene, and the overall memorable exploits of the players, with the specific characters in the party coming and going. It encourages to make characters who live fast and expect to die young. If you don't have the expectation that you go into the game to see your character becoming a character with a long and deep personal story that develops over 30 adventures, then the death of characters becomes much less of a disruption of the campaign an instead a part of how the game is played.
But the real charm lies in that the game is full of structures and interwoven systems that keep producing obstacles for the characters in which the question is not which of your characters' special abilities will kill the monsters the fastest. Fighting monsters offers very little gain for the PCs, while it poses very considerable risk, even if it looks like an easy fight. Where you get your XP and wealth from is the treasures that are hidden somewhere in the monster's lair. So many things about this game are incentives for the players to avoid getting into fights. As you head to the dungeon with all the supplies you'll be needing, you want to make it quick and avoid losing any people or potions before you even reach the destination. At the dungeon, your concern is how to separate the monsters from their treasures. Killing the monster is always an option but also always risky. Any way to get the treasure without monsters making attack rolls is preferable. And then you have to get back to a town while being slowed down with all the treasure, and you really want to get there as fast as possible to avoid running into anything on the way that could still kill you, or steal your treasures before you get XP for them. You could calculate how much food and water you need for the return trip and which tools you will need for the obstacles along the way, and then ditch all the supplies you can buy new for cheap and would only slow you down. But it could be that one unfortunate random encounter overthrows the whole plan and you could really use the tools you decided to leave behind.
Trying to avoid fighting monsters and people is fun, if the rules reward you for pulling it off.
Another thing I started a few years ago is to no longer have humanoid monsters. There are still various different peoples, but they are not good races and evil races. And it made me realize how common it is in adventures to have a bunch of generic evil people just because the game structure demands that you have a lot of fights. Imagine you replace all orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogers, and so on with human tribesmen in a typical adventure. Suddenly it all looks incredibly messed up. Sure, there certainly are some really bad people among the barbarians living in the hills. But when the adventures assume that you will kill every single person you'll encounter, generally on sight, that just isn't right.
In all encounters with humanoids, I always do the test "Would this encounter work with humans"? You can always make them bandits, but it often very quickly turns into completely ridiculous amounts of bandits if you assume they are all human bandits.
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Victor Spieles
Explorer
Yora that is a great approach to looking at adventures and humanoids. If you take the XP and advancement away from slaying everything the players focus shifts to where the cumulative rewards are earned to advance their characters. Thanks for that insight and the reminder of what the focus was of D&D in 1981 with the Basic/Expert edition.
Personally I don't remember slaying so many creatures in those editions as I have experienced with 3.5 and 5. I remember we seemed to do a lot more group huddles of how to out smart the villain and get their treasure. Treasure seemed to be the goal then versus how slick of a fighter or spellcaster can I create to maximize carnage.
