Things to do in a tabletop rpg that are not combat related?

[Joe Sumfin]

So I'm still new to the whole table top RPG thing. I've been playing for under a year and we currently play Pathfinder. I've only played 1 home brew campaign that teetered off, part of Rappan Athuk before we got sick of the player killer DM and having to reroll a new PC every other session and now we are playing and enjoying Council of Thieves.

I am wondering if my group is just hack'n'slash. We have 6 players, could maybe be 7. 2 are power players, 1 likes sandbox, 1 doesn't really care to much and like 2-3 of us kind of prefer RP'ing rather than crunching numbers.

I am wondering a couple things though.

1. I read that in like D&D 2e and previous there was no perception/spot check and you had to actually say what your doing in the room?

2. What are some things you can do in a table top RPG that are not combat related? Like I've read you can have PC's goto a tournament. Do they compete? What can they compete in?

I was thinking the other day that a I *think* it would be easy to run a game of basketball. It'd be a lot of dice rolling potentially.

Why basketball? Well baketball was invented by the Incans I believe and that was semi medieval times, so why not? Its be a primitive version of todays version.

I figure movement speed would be halved and the court would be at least 60' long and 40' wide.

Rolls would consist of;
If PC has ball and is covered, roll d20. < 3 means a steal
If PC is covered and wants to move roll d20. Acrobatics to spin around defender acro > 12? allows move
To pass a ball roll d20. > 5? equals pass was recieved.
To make a basket roll d20. > 5? scores 1 point. - Percentile roll for being blocked if they are covered.

Theres other rules you could add in I'm sure but I think those would work.

Now my question is what else can be done in a game thats not combat related? I'm looking for things the group can partake in. There could be a non lethal boxing match but that'd be 1 on 1 mostly and make the other players bored. There could be a buffed combat where the PC's buff a fighter and two buffed fighters go in.

Could do a 'find a thing' contest and give clues to the object.

Anything else??

Thanks for the help.

 

[Morrus]

They can do anything. It's a roleplaying game. I mean, literally, anything.

I run campaigns that sometimes have no combat for a couple of weeks. Not deliberately so; my players just do other stuff sometimes.

Attend a party, sail a ship, investigate a crime, navigate a maze, arrange a treaty, play a card game, have a race or chase... OK, so I could continue, but I'm just trying to list everything that exists. Infiltration missions are fun; I had a session last year where my players infiltrated a starship by pretending to be Space Plumbers.

There's a book we published, Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns, which covers tournaments, fairs, and... well, taverns.

 

[amerigoV]

On that theme, anytime I have run a festival/games it has been very popular among a variety of groups/players. I set it up so different types of games will appeal to players - archery, test of strength, even a mage duel* if the setting is right. It opens up some great roleplaying between the PCs and people/contestants. I think the driving reason for this is that players get to show off their stuff to the People in a non-threatening event. If you think about most games, interacting with NPCs can be moderately stressful for some players as they are afraid they will say the wrong thing (trigger a fight, lose out on some opportunity, etc). Here, there is less stress as the players are just competing in some friendly local games.


* As an FYI, a player's action had some huge ramifications on the campaign, so do not view them as just a "throwaway event."

 

[Ketherian]

Hi Joe Sumfin.

I'm running a standard medieval fantasy game (HMIII).
In it the party (2 knights, a priest, a Sargent, and a cook) tend to solve mysteries (mostly murders, but they also solved a kidnapping, retrieved the bones of a saint, and solving a series of arsons). They even partook in a tourney. The next adventure they shall be travelling to winter court.

As others have posted, the benefit of a rpg is that you can do anything you set your mind to. A game like baseball (or my favorite - dog ball - think rugby but played with a dog's scull wrapped in leather straps) would be a great diversion and could be part of a local festival in the town the party visits. It would allow the party to play, or maybe just bet on the outcome, meet people of importance -- all sorts of possibilities.

The tournament I ran was based on the Tourney rules for HarnMaster. There are other RPG guides out there for other systems, like Tournaments, Fairs and Taverns from EnWorld.

The tournament I ran had jousting, running at the rings, tilting, wrestling, archery contests, liturgy contests, foot races, and a grand melee. Different members of the party performed in different events. In the middle of the tournament there was an adventure going on (a messenger was killed and the message gone missing; and someone was killing to find it).

 

[Joe Sumfin]

I tried to find the book but couldn't. Will have to look some more later.

My question now is HOW do you run the festivals?

Like a test of strength, do you narrate whats going on and they input some or do you have them roll things and compete against others?

Like a mage duel, would you have them just cast at each other and actually attack each other and not track the damage and just make it a show of sorts but count who got the final hit?

I'm picturing something like what was done in the Sandman comics when he went to Hell and had to battle that demon to get his mask back. The duel was just them imagining things. Like 1 imagines a snake coiling others neck 2. two imagines something that kills snakes or whatever and it just goes back and forth until the other can't think of anything.

I'm just wondering how you play out the things that go on that aren't combat? Do you apply rolls to them and they need to actually roll to win or just RP it all out?

 

[howandwhy99]

Combat is an aspect not something you do or don't do. D&D focuses on defining the classes in the world. Since there are fighters in the game, so is combat. Since there are wizards in the game, so is a magic system. And so on. D&D has never been solely about combat, but I bet some people have played it that way.

 

[Gamgee]

Take over a city with politics, intrigue, poison, assassinations, bribes, and a sword when needed. Or even a Kingdom eventually. I took over a planet as a Rogue Trader without firing more than four shots from my bolt pistol, ludicrous amounts of wealth, public relations, bribes, propaganda, saving a key military subordinate of my assassination target, and pinning it all on two warring factions. The four bolt pistol rounds were me tying up the knot. Then orks attacked the capital and killed off all the witnesses anyways.

Boy the GM was not happy. He really never seen it coming until I was firing. Never seen me coming. I'm now jumping up the rank of rogue trader houses. About to have a small fleet under my command as I purchase it. 3 or so Frigates, a light cruiser, and my personal heavy cruiser I'm going to buy. Plus the Frigate I already own.

It's all about using your imagination.

 

[Rechan]

Most of D&D's rules revolve around combat, and IMO it's hard to shoe-horn non-combat things because the skill system is not very robust and there exists very few skill subsystems to accomplish things. Compare combat to say, a game of intrigue with everyone being courtiers, where all you do is roll sense motive vs. bluff all day. There are systems that make social things much heavier (in a way turning it into social combat).

Anyways, whether a system can do non-combat WELL is a different argument than whether you can DO it, and what you can do with it.

First thing to consider is if your players want non-combat stuff. If your group is very hack-slashy, they may not Want to spend a session at a masquerade ball. Assuming your players do...

There are many things you can do. Some people really get into economics in D&D; running a business for instance (WARNING: D&D economies are extremely, do this at your own risk). Others are nation building - let's say your PCs are in charge of a colony in a new world. They plan the layout of the colony, they need to run the logistics of making sure everyone is fed, has medical supplies, build defenses, send out teams to explore, handle trade and diplomatic interactions with the natives, etc. There's lots of room for normal adventuring there. Increase the scale of this example and the PCs could be running a tiny country and trying to expand. One example I've seen of this is in Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path, where the PCs first explore a region, then become in charge of it. Nation building is one of my favorite things.

A similar example to the one above would be running the military during a war. Allocating troops, devising strategy, etc.

One product I think dealt with this to some degree was Powers of Faerun, that talked about having players in various high positions within (or even running): the military, the church, kingdom, merchants, thieving guild.

A thieving/criminal underworld setup is another example of something you can do, where all the PCs are low ranking and are given jobs like pickpocketing, burglaries, or extortion, and they slowly work their way up the ranks of the Guild. Any sort of "Theme" game works like this - you just make sure everyone in the group is a member, and then you give missions appropriate to the theme. I ran a short campaign where all the PCs were a group of traveling gypsies whose troupe disappeared, and the various (mostly non-combat) hijinx that ensued as they quested.

Another way, similar to the 'managing the [place]' style game, is merely to attach the campaign to a specific thing. For instance, the PCs have a ship. So the campaign can be ship-related, traveling, exploring, exporting, etc - the PCs have a reason to care about this ship.

Another way that you could offer non-combat elements to a combat-heavy game would be to give an open-ended objective that require the PCs to plan. Sort of like saying "Okay, your objective is to rob the bank"; they could case the joint, they could bluff their way in, they could go in guns blazing. As a DM I've done this by giving them a combat objective (breach this single tower, set up an ambush) but letting them handle it in any way they want. It could be used to say, "steal this ship" "get this guy out of prison" "get the commoners of this village to riot (without intentionally murdering people)" "get everyone out of this fort or city block (without just murdering everyone)". Players really respond positively when you hand them an objective but allow them to do whatever they want to achieve it.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Have a read of this thread - http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2gqe3?The-Demonskar-Ball

It is something that delvesdeep, one of the Paizo messageboard users wrote up. It is meant to be used as part of the Shackled City AP, but I think it could be adapted pretty easily for other campaigns.

I ran it for my group as part of the Shackled City AP and it was one of the highlights of the campaign. The players got to interact with a number of different power players in the city, they had some back and forth with a rival adventuring group (without any weapons being drawn) and I was able to use it to show some of the history of the campaign and include some plot information.

There are plenty of little “mini-games” during the Ball, so players that aren’t that much into roleplaying still get the opportunity to roll some dice.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I tried to find the book but couldn't. Will have to look some more later.

My question now is HOW do you run the festivals?

Like a test of strength, do you narrate whats going on and they input some or do you have them roll things and compete against others?

Like a mage duel, would you have them just cast at each other and actually attack each other and not track the damage and just make it a show of sorts but count who got the final hit?

I'm picturing something like what was done in the Sandman comics when he went to Hell and had to battle that demon to get his mask back. The duel was just them imagining things. Like 1 imagines a snake coiling others neck 2. two imagines something that kills snakes or whatever and it just goes back and forth until the other can't think of anything.

I'm just wondering how you play out the things that go on that aren't combat? Do you apply rolls to them and they need to actually roll to win or just RP it all out?

Well, first of all, don't over-think it. Often if you simply describe the problem to the player they will come up with an imaginative (and sometimes over-complicated) solution. All you have to do then is nod sagely, as if this is what you had envisioned all along, and tell them a DC to roll against.

Secondly, use 'fail forward'. Fail forward is an idea that works great for RP situations. In the event of a bad roll, the player doesn't fail. They succeed... but there are complications. This may seem too easy on the players at first, but if you think about it it makes sense. Take the classic situation where a PC is trying to pick a lock. The player rolls too low to pick the lock. What next?

Traditionally, you tell the player they failed to pick the lock, and they try again. Since they basically get as many tries as they want, the failure is meaningless. It simply stops the action while we wait for the player to succeed on their meaningless roll.

In the fail-forward version of this scenario, when the player rolls low they get the door open (that would have happened eventually).. but there's a complication. Maybe their best lock-pick broke off in the lock. Maybe they raised such a racket that they've alerted somebody nearby. Who knows. But you have kept the action moving forward and now they have to deal with this new issue.

If you really want some kind of structure for your non-combat roleplaying, take a look at Skill Challenges. Critical Hits has some great ideas for running them.

 

[Joe Sumfin]

The Skill Challenges are more along the lines of what I was looking for.

Something not combat related the the PC's can still do. A lot of you spoke about running mysteries and stuff but I asked more specifically about how to run something like a tournment that the PC's attend.

Say the tournament has a strength test, a boxing match, basketball? and ... jousting?

How would you run those specifically? Just make them into skills challenges? I really don't like the idea of roll a d20, anything above 10 and you win. Thats not fun or really interactive at all where they actually have a stake in the matter.

A boxing match could be just a fight non leathal using targeted hits vs their cmd or something. Thats still combat related but eh.

Anyways, thanks for all the feedback and the links and the info on skill challenges.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

The Demonscar Ball that I linked to in my post uses 3.5E rules, so they aren't skill challenges in the 4E sense, but you are making rolls vs various skills and/or opposed rolls.

I don't think it would be difficult to convert them to 4E skill challenges.

 

[GMMichael]

What are some things you can do in a table top RPG that are not combat related?

This makes me, as a GM, tremble. How has the roleplaying world so comprehensively failed this lost soul? Anyone who's been reading their Song of Ice and Fire knows that when things devolve to combat, people die. When PCs die, they become just Ps. No one wants to be a P.

Now I know, this isn't always the case. If you're playing a game like D&D, well over half of your rulebook is dedicated to combat, weapons, and hurtful magic spells. The authors are saying, "just go out and kill stuff, would you?" Well, Joe is asking the right question. "Can I do something else, please?"

Joe, the types of things you want to try, like basketball games, don't always translate well into tabletop games. But you have several tools at your disposal, like playing cards, paper-rock-scissors, polyhedral dice, counters, beer-pong, and a table surrounded by brains. Pick up an RPG that lets you make up your own rules (like the one I'm designing), and design any mini-games or sub-rule-systems you want!

 

[doghead]

Most of D&D's rules revolve around combat, and IMO it's hard to shoe-horn non-combat things because the skill system is not very robust and there exists very few skill subsystems to accomplish things. Compare combat to say, a game of intrigue with everyone being courtiers, where all you do is roll sense motive vs. bluff all day. There are systems that make social things much heavier (in a way turning it into social combat).

Anyways, whether a system can do non-combat WELL is a different argument than whether you can DO it, and what you can do with it.

This is very much my experience. I think the skill challenge system in 4E is a good idea, although I haven't had much of an opportunity to look at it.

I have recently made two attempts to create a more interactive non-combat encounters. In general, the idea was to allow the use of as broad a range of 'resources' as possible, and to incorporate a risk vs return mechanism.

The first was a chase. In each round there was an obstacle of some sort. Unlike in the Pathfinder chase rules, instead of specifying two skills that could be used, I specified the obstacle and let the players identify the skill they wanted to use to overcome it. The distance they gained or lost was based on the degree of success or failure vs the opponents skill check. I also allowed the players to 'burn' an attribute, each -1 to an attribute gained them an extra d6 to add to their skill roll. Initially they burnt mostly odd numbers, but eventually some were burning even numbers, resulting in reductions in their attribute bonuses. If I was to do it again, I would probably also incorporate a system where wounds inflicted become a penalty to the skill check, thus giving the players the option of sacrificing distance (making an ranged attack) for the chance to slow the opposition down.

As you can see, I have changed/modified the rules in a number of was in order to try and achieve what I wanted. Not everyone is going to be happy with that. I am just lucky that I have a group of players willing to give it a try.

thotd

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

1. I read that in like D&D 2e and previous there was no perception/spot check and you had to actually say what your doing in the room?

D&D has definitely evolved. If you read the original rules - the 1973 three booklets - you can see that it wasn't really even a roleplaying game yet. At least it wasn't what we think of as a roleplaying game TODAY. It was a game of TEAM dungeon exploration. The DM made the dungeon and the players explored it as a team. The fun was to be found in the DM trying to confuse the players with mazes, puzzles, tricks, traps, map elements that might confuse and frustrate the players attempts at accurate maps or whatever wild new stuff he dreamed up. This was all a NEW experience. Where today we would simply have a thief make a skill roll to find a trap the game did not yet HAVE a thief class. Players had to pry clues out of the DM with their questions, try to catch important elements in his descriptions that would suggest that a trap might be present. The DM might then describe HOW the trap worked and the players would have to puzzle out how to disarm it, to get around it, or destroy it. The thief class did arrive in one of the first rules supplements but this illustrates how the gameplay was notably different from D&D or other RPG's of more recent design. The timekeeping was based heavily on the TURN - a time period of about 10 minutes. The 1-minute round was just a sometimes-used subdivision of that. Movement, searching, mapping, spell durations... just about everything was being measured in Turns. All weapons did 1 die of damage - 1d6. Only with the first rules supplement (Greyhawk) were weapons given different damage dice and other mechanical differences.

Now as I said things DID evolve. 1st Edition ADVANCED D&D (1977+) had a gazillion rules by comparison that were really mostly house rules that had been written and used by Gygax or others for those original rules over the preceeding several years. But those rules definitely were having big changes on gameplay. You can probably also see how players who are big fans of the original game might not like how more recent takes on D&D rules approach gameplay with random skill rolls, mathematically efficient character "builds", and players knowing to choose the correct rule out of hundreds or thousands to apply to achieve victory, rather than the DM continually inventing things that DEFY rules and require player ideas and ingenuity that only sometimes rely on their character's abilities as defined by the game rules.

This is not so much a matter of disrespect of any edition of the rules. It is a matter of noting how the editions have ACTUALLY changed.

2. What are some things you can do in a table top RPG that are not combat related?

Anything that isn't combat pretty much fits the description of something not combat-related. There's good reasons why combat occupies so much of the rules for any RPG. Combat happens a LOT, and EVERYONE is involved in it, though perhaps to greater or lesser degrees. Combat has very drastic results - life or death - and that can happen in a very short time. But it isn't much fun to reduce combat to, "You run into a monster and fight it. The fighter and magic-user die." Combat is more fun and interesting when it's slowed down in comparison to the rest of the game - when you can take time to play it out in greater mechanical detail. I guess one of the big questions is how you want to split the time you spend playing - how much combat versus how much exploration, how much verbal interaction with NPC's, how much whatever else.

Combat gets a disproportionate amount of rules devoted to it - it shouldn't always be taken as an indication of how much of the gameplay should BE combat. It's more just an indication of how important combat is when it DOES take place.

 

[Argyle King]

There are plenty of things you can do which are not combat related. Some examples are political intrigue; attempting to stealthily pull off a heist; win the affections of a noble lady; give a rousing speech to compel the townsfolk to stand up to the brigands which have been terrorizing the area... those are just a few ideas.


Some of those activities might very well lead to combat or end up being combat related due to the story of the game or campaign, but they need not necessarily be. I've often been surprised by how much fun I've had in sessions where dice were barely rolled.

 

[steenan]

Playing a game that doesn't focus its mechanics on combat and uses similar resolution for combat and non-combat conflicts can be a very refreshing experience. Without the system funneling you into violent solutions, it's much easier to think of different types of interesting situations.

I suggest trying Fate Core, Smallville and Mouse Guard.



As for fun non-combat activities:

- Investigation. It's not only about finding a person guilty of a crime, but also determining who a person really is, mapping secret alliances and allegiances or finding out what is causing a trouble.

- Recovering a guarded item or information. Conning someone, stealing it, hacking into a system. Best when you really don't want to leave signs that anything happened.

- Researching how something really works. Collecting information, performing experiments, preparing hipoteses and verifying them. Especially fun if the results are both interesting in themselves and useful in practise, but in the research one needs to balance danger, cost and morally suspicious approaches.

- Untangling complicated personal relationships. Obligations and expectations, love, lust, jealousy, disappointment. Finding out what you really feel, who you are and how you want to guide your life.

- Getting somewhere. Finding your way, facing environmental hazards. Interacting with people in dangerous situations; helping them, abusing them to ensure your own survival, balancing between trust and suspicion.

- Passing judgement. Evaluating people's deeds and beliefs. Deciding how far you will go to stop what you see as evil and how much will you compromise to avoid making enemies.

- Politics. Forging alliances and breaking them when it's useful.

- Shaping what groups of people believe and how they behave. Creating or changing philosophies, religions, belief systems.

 

[Quickleaf]

The Skill Challenges are more along the lines of what I was looking for.

Something not combat related the the PC's can still do. A lot of you spoke about running mysteries and stuff but I asked more specifically about how to run something like a tournment that the PC's attend.

Say the tournament has a strength test, a boxing match, basketball? and ... jousting?

How would you run those specifically? Just make them into skills challenges? I really don't like the idea of roll a d20, anything above 10 and you win. Thats not fun or really interactive at all where they actually have a stake in the matter.

A boxing match could be just a fight non leathal using targeted hits vs their cmd or something. Thats still combat related but eh.

Anyways, thanks for all the feedback and the links and the info on skill challenges.

I'm answering your question about tournaments, but it also relates to skill checks/challenges more broadly.

Combat is interesting because D&D provides players with lots of agency (meaningful choices) about how to kill. Skill use in D&D is treated as more binary (10+ on a d20 as you put it) and involves very little agency for players. Thus, whenever you have a skill check / challenge, you want to be thinking about how to increase player agency.

Now, *how* you do this depends a lot on how much you and your players like mechanics to be transparent vs. how much you want to be speaking the language of the narrative without mechanical references.

So here's how I ran a series of Chivalric Hastiludes in 4e (though the ideas transcend system):

• I came up with several mini-challenges (e.g. battle of bards, archery contest, horse race, love poem, mead hall mystery) that players could interact with.
• I set up each mini-challenge so that it had presented a choice or dilemma of some kind, and tried to involve three things the player had to overcome or decide to win/resolve the challenge. For example, in the Archery Contest the dilemma became there was a notorious outlaw hidden among the other archers and the PC identified them as the two were clearly honing in on each other as the two best archers there. The final shot was going to be shoot an apple off the head of a nobleman who the outlaw had a grudge against. So the PC faced a dilemma about what to do. It could involve a test of skill, but to test of skill wasn't the main thing, despite it being billed as an "Archery Contest."
• I wrote up three brief possible outcomes for each mini-challenge and corresponding rewards/consequences. For the Archery Contest these were: (1) Turning in the outlaw: 1000 gp bounty, nobleman grateful, (2) sparing outlaw/tying with outlaw: outlaw promises later assistance, nicks nobleman as warning, (3) winning the contest: a magical arrow, nobleman mistakes PC for outlaw due to obvious archery mastery.

So that's an approach I took to increase player agrncy with skills and it worked like a charm.

 

[Derren]

The Skill Challenges are more along the lines of what I was looking for.

Except skill challenges are very bad at what they do.
Not only is their math broken beyond believe, they also devolve every problem in the game into "roll the highest skill you can get away with until it goes away". It is not required to have an actual plan how to handle a situation and no need to improvise when a part of the plan fails. Just roll a single skill over and over again till you succeed.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So I'm still new to the whole table top RPG thing. I've been playing for under a year and we currently play Pathfinder. I've only played 1 home brew campaign that teetered off, part of Rappan Athuk before we got sick of the player killer DM and having to reroll a new PC every other session and now we are playing and enjoying Council of Thieves.

I am wondering if my group is just hack'n'slash. We have 6 players, could maybe be 7. 2 are power players, 1 likes sandbox, 1 doesn't really care to much and like 2-3 of us kind of prefer RP'ing rather than crunching numbers.

I am wondering a couple things though.

1. I read that in like D&D 2e and previous there was no perception/spot check and you had to actually say what your doing in the room?

2. What are some things you can do in a table top RPG that are not combat related? Like I've read you can have PC's goto a tournament. Do they compete? What can they compete in?

I was thinking the other day that a I *think* it would be easy to run a game of basketball. It'd be a lot of dice rolling potentially.

Why basketball? Well baketball was invented by the Incans I believe and that was semi medieval times, so why not? Its be a primitive version of todays version.

I figure movement speed would be halved and the court would be at least 60' long and 40' wide.

Rolls would consist of;
If PC has ball and is covered, roll d20. < 3 means a steal
If PC is covered and wants to move roll d20. Acrobatics to spin around defender acro > 12? allows move
To pass a ball roll d20. > 5? equals pass was recieved.
To make a basket roll d20. > 5? scores 1 point. - Percentile roll for being blocked if they are covered.

Theres other rules you could add in I'm sure but I think those would work.

Now my question is what else can be done in a game thats not combat related? I'm looking for things the group can partake in. There could be a non lethal boxing match but that'd be 1 on 1 mostly and make the other players bored. There could be a buffed combat where the PC's buff a fighter and two buffed fighters go in.

Could do a 'find a thing' contest and give clues to the object.

Anything else??

Thanks for the help.

Every game group is different, but Morrus hit it on the head: it is an RPG, you can do anything you want. Most groups when first start out probably lean on combat and mass slaughter (i know that is how i did things when i first started playing). I would suggest you check out some other games and take a look at different adventue modules to get a sense of the scope of the hobby. It may be worth reading over some of the older editions released by WotC.

I have a few suggestions, that may help you out:

1) Check out Call of Cthulu by Chaosium. It has more of an investigative focus and may give you an idea of how less combat heavy games go (there is still combat in Call of Cthulu, but it is a riskier proposition than in D&D).

2) Check out the Ravenloft Realms of Terror boxed set and any if the original Van Richten Guide Books. Ravenloft was meant to be less focused on dungeon crawl and combat. The Van Richten Guides baically show you how to make monster hunts and investigations work through extended examples.

3) Experiment. If you a GM, try running adventures that are not so combat heavy (political intrigue for example). If you are a player try coming up with more non-combat solutions to challenges (try to make a deal with the troll rather than hack him and burn him).