Combat-Free Campaigns

[Matt Gwinn]

I've been thinking.  Why is it that every roleplaying game I've ever player has involved combat at one point or another?  Is combat necessary to create a compelling story?  There are many people in the world that have lived complelling interesting lives that have never gotten into a fight, shot someone or otherwise resrted to violence.

Have any of you ever played an entire campaign that never involved combat of any kind?  
How did it go?  

,Matt G.

[Eugene Zee]

Matt,

Conflict is essential to a roleplaying game.  Whether it is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or etc.  When most roleplayers are getting into combat they are looking to resolve conflict to their advantage.  Because of its visceral and instinctive nature physical conflict is the most easily enjoyed.  It is also the easiest to be non-personally involved with and thus to distance yourself from.  Our media systems don't help.

However, I think with the right group in the right setting you can definitely create a game that is all conflict of a non-physical nature.

I almost succeed once for many months but then a player of mine got itchy.

[Kenway]

I've been lucky enough to have been in several successful (AD&D) thiefly campaigns.  As far as I can remember there were no fights in it.  Maybe a guard got garroted by that was it.  In retrospect, the game probably would have been even better if we  had planned entirely *not* to have any fights.  I mean, we still picked weapon proficiencies and stuff like that which were not necessary.
 I don't really remember the specifics, but I guess it was like Thief: The Dark Project (computer game) and the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Midnight Rogue (#29?).
 If you're looking for inspiration, you can try checking out some more PC graphical adventure games, or even better, those all-text games.

[Clay]

To quote from Tom Stoppard, "We're more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.  You can have them all, consecutively or sequentialy, you can have blood and love without the rhetoric, blood and rhetoric without the love, but you can't have love and rhetoric without the blood.  Blood is compulsory."

In short, no blood, no story.  More to the point, no blood, no good story.  You'll get some pale washed-out facsimilie of a story.  This doesn't mean that your characters have to be pulling poinards all the time; their involvement with violence might be more on the fleeing side of things. But without some blood people will be yawning.

Even if the story is about political intrigue, there's got to be some violence somehwere. Our little brains understand blood, sex and food the best. Everything else is somehow an abstraction of those two. This is true of every mammal that I've met, and I don't think it's a good idea to upset a winning formula.

[Ron Edwards]

Clay,

That's a bit much, don't you think? Plenty of stories don't include violence directly - although I admit, a number of those get eliminated if I consider violence in the past, or potential violence in the future, as important story elements.

Still ... the standard romantic comedy? A parenting drama like Losing Isaiah? A courtroom drama?

Damn it - wasn't there a whole thread on designing/playing an RPG based on exactly this concept? Social and interactive concerns, conflict all over the place, but no combat? I went hunting and couldn't find it.

Best,
Ron

[J B Bell]

I must disagree with Clay.  Violence as a tool in art of whatever medium is definitely effective, because of its universal intense reaction, but I have read many enjoyable books, seen many enjoyable movies, a few enjoyable plays (I just don't get to the playhouse that often), and played in a few games with no violence at all.

I second the recommendation of looking for "text games".  Nowadays they tend to call it "interactive fiction", and while there's lots of stinkers out there, there are many quite good ones, and best of all, they're mostly free nowadays.

Check out The Best of Interactive Fiction for a great starting point.

--JB

[Bankuei]

My last game of Octane, Blood & Steel was set in Warring States of China, although there was a couple of scuffles, no one was killed, and in fact, greater repercussions came from seriously injuring someone and trying to hide the fact.  Most of the conflict in the game came from differences in ideals and trying everything to PREVENT an escalation of hostilities.  When its a conflict of beliefs and ideals, more options than physical violence open, and oftentimes violence can cause more problems than not.

Chris

[Clay]

Still ... the standard romantic comedy? A parenting drama like Losing Isaiah? A courtroom drama?

A courtroom drama almost always implies that there was blood somewhere in the past. I must conceed the romantic comedy is at least possible, but will it make a decent RPG session?  Much like the missing thread on this topic, I know we've talked about the difficulty of comedy in roleplaying. I'm trying to think of any compelling story that I've read though that doesn't have violence in it somewhere, at least off stage.

I do think that it's perfectly reasonable ot have a game or a campaign where player characters aren't involved in violence. But I'm pretty sure that it's around somewhere.

[jburneko]

Actually, Matt I have a very difficult time interjecting action sequences into my game.  I agree with Ron that often violence in the past or the threat of violence in the future is a key element but getting actual 'on screen' action into my games without it being a random encounter I find very difficult.  Given that I have to WORK to put action sequences into my games, I would have to say yes, it is entirely possible to run a combat-less game, although I'm not entirely sure you can get around the violence in the past/future problem.

Jesse

[Le Joueur]

That's a bit much, don't you think? Plenty of stories don't include violence directly - although I admit, a number of those get eliminated if I consider violence in the past, or potential violence in the future, as important story elements.

Still ... the standard romantic comedy? A parenting drama like Losing Isaiah? A courtroom drama?

Not to mention straight Romance Novel (been playin' that alot around here).  I think what Clay is getting at (but it may not have occured) is that games play better when 'more is on the line.'  I have found that fantasy games seem to lack something when there is no looming threat, no war, no 'evil forces.'  It's what I call Dynamic Background.  Taking the converse, in a 'static background' there is no omnipresent 'threat.'  An idyllic world provides only drab color to conflicts faced by the characters.

Not every Dynamic Background contains the violence inherent in the genre.  For example, cyberpunk often has violence, but the Dynamic Background often arises out of a different kind of tension.  Sometimes it's class war in the subtle sense, others it is man's loss of identity to machinery.  (Only in splatterpunk and hyperpunk have I seen it being an overt bodily threat.)  These can result in violence, but violence is not required.

In some of Ron's examples, central to the core of romantic comedy is union versus aloneness.  A courtroom drama almost always carries the conflict between society and lawlessness.  (Law and Order always reeks of this palpable feeling that, but for the protagonists, society would slip into chaos; a heady conflict that.)

Regency romance novels (unless they delve into Napoleonic warfare) rarely use bodily harm as the amplifying factor from the background.  Many in fact have no violence at all.  What they gain from the background is the rarified atmosphere created by the social restrictions on interactions between the sexes.  (And since sexual interaction is the primary driver of the story....)

Moving ever towards 'lighter' backgrounds in my work on Scattershot (that's why I conceived of Dynamic Backgrounds, as a way of simplifying background delineation), I had my whole way of creating role-playing gaming Circumstances (where the game starts) rocked by, of all things, the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in the newspaper.

Long have I pointed out to people that the major difference between the classics of Warner Bros. and the modern equivalents was the foundational Circumstance.  Cat versus bird, hunter versus duck, Cat versus mouse, these are all based on ancient, socially-recognized conflicts.  (What about the more recent?  Well, for the successful, Dexter's Laboratory is about sibling rivalry, the Powerpuff Girls is superhero versus supervillain, and Invader Zim is about man versus conquering alien.  They all add - primarily for their target audiences - real life attachments: school experiences, home life, et cetera; it's all aimed at kids anyway.)

This extends, for the most part, right into newspaper comics, or does it?  I got to thinking about a humorous bit from a radio show where they pointed out that originally Garfield was about 'cat versus mouse,' and as such the syndicator didn't want it.  It's current form is 'cat versus owner' (more or less).  So I went through my list of favorites, until I got to Calvin and Hobbes.  Sure there was kid versus parents, little boys versus little girls, kid versus school, but none of these captured the essence of what it was.  What was in every episode?

Reality versus fantasy.

It's even in the title, Calvin (the reality character) and Hobbes (the fantasy character!).  The conflict the whole series was based on was borne by the single character and how his fantasy life conflicts with reality.

It had never occurred to me that you could take the whole Dynamic Background and pack it into the description of the central character.  What applications does this have?  I'm not sure, I only just discovered it this year.  And as a side note, I should point out that we're currently doing a lot of experimenting with single-player gaming, so in that venue, this idea rocks.

Sorry to take the subthread out so far, but I've been needing to say this.  Basically, my point is that 'blood' seems compulsory because background tension is.

Fang Langford

p. s. I love that play by Stoppard; don't get me started (Want to play a game of questions?).

[Clay]

I think that in supporting my position, Fang pointed out the very important ways in which my position falls down. In fact, he reminded me of what I originally wanted to do with Once Upon a Story with his Calbin and Hobbes reference.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Hey, there's supposed to be blood in Blood & Steel. BLOOD. It's right there in the title, man!

As for non-violent games, well...I have written some ideas. Clown Cops is non-violent (well, it has "violence" but only in a cartoony, pie in the face kinda way). idoru is non-violent (violence is rude). eight is non-violent (no death). The Harry Potter game is non-violent as far as "players causing violence" is concerned. That's just me...there are many other non-violent games out there. Definitely some where killing is not the focus (or even part) of the game. Pumpkin Town is a great setting for this...violence isn't a good way to solve problems because most people are already dead.

That said, I hate combat in games. Boring, dull, lifeless, monotonous.

Fight scenes? Love 'em.

Eugene has it right. It's about conflict. You can turn anything into a game provided there is conflict involved.

[hardcoremoose]

Hey there,

I have a screenwriting textbook - a fairly repuatable one I was led to believe - and the first rule it talks about is The Rule of Sex and Violence.  That is, a good screenplay - a good story for the screen - needs both.

Of course, it's not advocating the use of hard or soft-core porn or of graphic bloodletting - it's simply saying that there has to be something in the story to grab people's attention, and that sex and violence are emotionally loaded issues that we all understand.  Want to push people's buttons?  Incorporate some sex and/or violence.

And I believe the threat of violence, or the implication of past violence, would be a perfectly acceptable application of that rule.  

- Scott

[Le Joueur]

I have a screenwriting textbook - a fairly repuatable one I was lead to believe - and the first rule it talks about is The Rule of Sex and Violence.  That is, a good screenplay - a good story for the screen - needs both.

Of course, it's not advocating the use of hard or soft-core porn or of graphic bloodletting - it's simply saying that there has to be something in the story to grab people's attention, and that sex and violence are emotionally loaded issues that we all understand.  Want to push people's buttons?  Incorporate some sex and/or violence.

And I believe the threat of violence, or the implication of past violence, would be a perfectly acceptable application of that rule.

Is it just me or is this sounding more and more like Relationship Maps?  (Oh, no wait, that's sex and blood relatives.  Jeez, you'd think I had a violent family.)

Fang Langford

[Ron Edwards]

Found it! Found it found it found it ...

Jesse began the thread called An experiment in the ordinary which I think has a lot to add to this discussion.

Another connection might be found in Laurel's thread Romance, Happiness, and Expectation.

Best,
Ron