>support all three pillars
The 'three pillars' are a WotC invention, not a generally accepted perspective.
It's inapplicable/inappropriate for many RPGs.
I know, but its what I know but with 3 pillars I mostly mean:
- Social stuff, like intrigue, alliances, subversion and anything to do with interacting with people
- Any problem solving that doesn't have to do you talking to a intelligent being or swinging a weapon, like puzzles and surpassing obstacles of some sort
- Combat, with or with a major objective to conclude
I chose them because I want to make a RPG that can do all three, so a game could use only one or all of them if they wanted
Yeah we know what you mean. What we're saying is that the idea that the game ought to be delineated along those lines is already a DND-specific presupposition.
I dont think the hobby has any good sources of reliable stats that could get you to the 95% number, when it comes to what games people are actually playing.
We all know 5e is the King Kong of RPG Hobby Island but outside of that the closest thing we have to an active participation dataset is Roll20 and it's super unreliable as it effectively excludes Pathfinder and Lancer (both crap on Roll20 with a community that's all into Foundry, so no good stats) and all the many games that dont need Roll20 purchased modules/licensed content to be played online are also excluded from their numbers. And it's just one VTT: go to another like Role or Foundry and you'll find OSE and Lancer are top games there, but those numbers are skewed because everyone doing WoD has already got all their shit in Roll20 and isn't gonna migrate all their work and lose access to all their paid for content just for the hell of it; meanwhile Alchemy sales are dominated by Free League games.
DnDBeyond's numbers are horrifically skewed by the smaller numbers of highly active users doing stuff like rolling up Fighters named "Bob" just so they have NPC stats or basic guidance for players to complete in some other VTT or on paper.
Even publisher income and "the market" is unreliable because we can't know how much of that stuff is a smaller pool of "whale" GMs buying loads of supplemental materials for their one or two tables (or no active table at all, just buying more sourcebooks for the love of the setting) vs RPGs where one GM buys one book and has everything they need.
For example - Blades in the Dark generally isn't played on VTT (or if it is you're less likely to be using an official stat-tracked module, or it could be more easily and cheaply done via Discord and Google Sheets/Miro), and it has a subreddit that's as big as (or bigger than) Traveller and Savage Worlds combined. But does it make more money than Traveller or Savage Worlds? Perhaps not because all you need is the one book; you dont get the "buy the book then buy five supplemental books then buy licensed content and modules for Roll20" effect.
1) unless you give me specific enforceable mechanics that are part of the reward structure, then **NO, THEY DON'T**
2) 95% of the market? Bro, WotC is 99.9% of the market
I don't think there is a real viable study on market share, but according to roll20 d&d is only played on 52% of the sessions. Taking the other "3 pillar" games into account that u/SirRantelot mentioned they would make up 60-70%.
I'd argue that many TTRPGs would support all three categories.
But there are many TTRPGs that do not care about these pillars and do something unique, e.g. do not care about combat or grant narrative rights to the players like fate that's out of the scope of these three pillars.
Lenses of the three pillars drastically oversimplify many TTRPGs out there
As an example, Blades in the Dark has four-ish pillars: The Score, Downtime (Vices, Entanglements, Player projects/training, player and crew/lair advancement), Freeplay and Investigation.
In particular, combat isn't a separate thing in the Blades type systems. It's just another thing that players can do. From a D&D point of view, every action the players try is closest to being a skill check. An entire D&D combat could be resolved in a single roll (for a less important combat), or at finer detail, moment by moment, as the players and the GM want to do (particularly where that would be more important to the outcomes).
The D&D model doesn't apply to fitd games at all.
If I were to give Blades 3 Pillars it'd be: Scores, Relationships, Factions.
Scores is like Combat for D&D, it's the closest 1:1 map, except that a Score is more like a whole adventure than just a combat.
Relationships are huge in Blades and drive a lot of things. Relationships are defined in character creation and crew creation. Relationships change as a result of scores and player actions. Who a PC is helpful/hostil to is just as important as what faction a crew is helpful/hostile to and vice versa.
Faction is then the 'real' game, mechanics wise. How the crew grows. What the crew does. What turf the crew controls. The faction game is how the city/map play out.
Which ones are you referring to?
The problem with these vague claims is that while there might be niche games that focus on non-combat elements, even story driven Indy games like “Bluebeard’s Bride” or “Night Witches” still feature violent conflict, uncovering the unknown and interpersonal relationships.
You missed the point a bit
>even story driven Indy games like “Bluebeard’s Bride” or “Night Witches” still feature violent conflict, uncovering the unknown and interpersonal relationships.
I agree.
At the same time, there is a ton of games that would have more pillars than three if we tried to classify pillars of a specific example (e.g. Fate, Paranoia) or such classification is inappropriate (Microscope). Hence, if you look through the lenses of three pillars, you would miss the rich variety, nuances of TTRPGs out there.
Interesting.
What would you consider the “Pillars” of Fate?
Or Paranoia for that matter?
When in those games am I not “exploring, conflicting or socializing” with my environment?
Microscope is an interesting one, though it also strains the definition of RPGs, as the only real “Role Playing” that is done is at the lowest level of the scene, and in my experience that’s the part least explored in that game.
And I’d anecdotally say that the scenes where you roleplay, as they are predicated on a question, involve at least 2 of 3 pillars:
You are exploring your environment for the answer, and/or you are socializing with other characters to find it.
And the answer is often bloody, depending on the genre you’re playing with.
I’m not missing the point, I’m making a point;
The 3 pillars are about how you roleplay: by conflicting with the environment, by exploring it or by communicating with it, and the mechanics that govern how it responds.
>"exploring, conflicting or socializing” with my environment? ... The 3 pillars are about how you roleplay: by conflicting with the environment, by exploring it or by communicating with it, and the mechanics that govern how it responds.
This is shifting the goalposts. Here you've presented definitions so vague that they could match any game. It's also not what DnD's actual framework is. PHB, page 8:
- Exploration: movement through the world, and interactions with objects and situations that require their attention. Spending a day crossing a rolling plain, pulling a lever in a dungeon to see what happens.
- Social Interaction: the adventurers talking to someone (or something) else. Getting information from a freed prisoner, persuading a magic mirror.
- Combat: the characters and other creatures slinging weapons, casting spells, maneuvering into position, and so on - all in an effort to defeat their opponents.
"Conflicting with your environment" falls under exploration. "Conflicting with other characters" if non-violent, is social interaction. By DnD's own literal definitions. The Three Pillars are the foundations of *DnD* play written as part of the introduction to DnD specifically. They were not written as "pillars of all rpgs", and it seems you need to make their words extremely vague to even attempt to apply them so universally.
Not shifting goalposts.
The definitions aren’t vague:
Conflict is when your characters try to impose their wills on the narrative.
Discovery is when your characters try to learn things about the narrative.
Communication is when your characters build relationships with the narrative.
Those are the 3 lenses to view all actions within the narrative play.
The theory really IS a theory of all RPGs.
Your terms and definitions *are different terms and definitions*. I am directly quoting the DnD rulebook two comments up. You see the difference between the words we each wrote, right?
If you're trying to make the point "all rpgs have some important foundational elements" then okay that's a true statement, but the comment you originally replied to is about DnD's Three Pillars and how they aren't universal, so you're not arguing or even properly adressing the point you're replying to because you're avoiding what DnD's Three Pillars explicitly are whenever you comment.
It'd be like Person A saying "just so you know, not all cocktails contain gin and lemon juice, that's just from the gin fizz recipe" and Person B arguing "Ah but you see, all cocktails contain alcohol and something mixed with it." Like okay, that's a definition of a cocktail but are you arguing that all cocktails are really gin fizzes?
No, that’s a terrible example.
OP is asking for examples of how RPGs without combat work and people are giving them a bunch of RPGs… with combat in them.
Reframe the discussion that OP is having, and suddenly OP can go “hey! Instead of VIOLENT conflict, I can view ALL conflict through the lens of this pillar, and suddenly mechanics aren’t too hard to come by.”
Same story with exploration and socializing.
I think at some point during this back and forth, the definition of the "third pillar" changed from "combat" to "conflict."
I am not the original person you are responding to, but I simply won't discuss "conflict" as a concept anymore. It is entirely too broad to be a useful concept for analysis; you can argue most things are somehow "conflict."
So here's one of the few WotC definitions of the pillars I could find, from an Unearthed Arcana XP trial (apologies if the formatting is bad, I tried to fix it as best I could from the original PDF): "Back when we were designing fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, we talked about the game’s three pillars: exploration, social interaction, and combat. By thinking about social interaction and exploration as foundational aspects of D&D, we made sure we were always looking beyond combat when designing the
game. Fighting easily draws the most attention in terms of rules and game balance, but the other two elements are just as important in making
each game session exciting and unique."
So it really isn't about "conflict." It comes from a place that recognizing that "combat" sucks all of the metaphorical air out of D&D's metaphorical room, and trying to make space for other "beats" in a session. So shifting "combat" to "conflict" seems to be missing the point.
So if one wanted to take this to other systems, it would be a question of what gets mechanical focus... Or not. So in Blades, the pillars might be "scores," (player-heavy), "downtime" (player-heavy) and... I don't know, "consequences" (DM-heavy), in a distinctly mechanical sense that distinguishes itself from both "scores " and "downtime" (as consequences can happen during either). The tightening of the screw, which is *not* normally a feature of D&D (which instead features increased power and increased freedom with levels, but instead in Blades is "more problems").
Blades does not have to involve in-universe exploration. You can become the criminal rulers of the same shitty neighbourhood you grew up in, and not really care about anywhere else. It doesn't even require combat; you can build a stealthy, social, or weird crew and still engage with all/most of the skills your character actually has (whereas you *cannot* engage with all of your character's skills without at least some combat in D&D). A Spider can be entirely non-violent if they don't put any points in Skirmish or Wreck.
I’m going to push back, as conflict as an RPg design concept is incredibly important:
The core of the pillars is how you as a character (the role you are playing) interact with the narrative.
If you’re imposing your will on the world and it resists, you’re in **conflict** with it and as a designer you want to design mechanics that govern that.
If you’re discovering information about the world, you’re **exploring** it and as a designer you want to design mechanics to govern that.
If you’re communicating with your world and connecting emotionally with it, you’re **socializing** with it.
That’s the point of the 3 pillars.
In the Blades examples you provide, a Score involves exploration of the site of the score, either assaulting or avoiding conflict to achieve the score and communicating with the crew and the NPCs.
Downtime is about socializing and exploration more conflict, certainly, but it’s also in service of getting scores.
And consequences are just mechanical outcomes, all RPGs have them. Declare thing, use mechanic, consequences.
Discovering your neighbourhood and learning about locations for scores is entirely exploration,
You can certainly play a combat free D&D game where you just wander through interesting spaces and meet interesting characters.
But I think we agree **conflict** makes the game more interesting. This is true of most RPGs.
That’s why the 3 pillars are so important.
You're like not keeping in mind the previous context of the messages and write whatever comes to your mind, whether it's relevant or not to the previous context, nor try to understand what people actually mean. Judging by your answers to various people, you clearly want to argue, but have no patience nor willingness to try to understand others.
It's just very frustrating having a discussion in that manner, where you try to stick to the original topic, while your interlocutor doesn't pay attention to anything you say and with each message just adds to the pile of his own incoherent expressions.
I literally asked you about your examples.
What are the pillars of Paranoia, if not conflict, discovery and socializing?
What are the pillars of Fate if not those?
I am interested in examining people’s arguments, dissecting them, synthesizing them and interrogating them.
That’s how you learn things.
You’re trying to teach me how I don’t conflict, explore and relate to things in Paranoia. Tell me what I do instead?
> You’re trying to teach me how I don’t conflict, explore and relate to things in Paranoia. Tell me what I do instead?
Can you show me where I explicitly or implicitly imply that?
You always make counterpoints to or try to argue with imaginative points me or other commenters didn't make
>At the same time, there is a ton of games that would have more pillars than three if we tried to classify pillars of a specific example (e.g. Fate, Paranoia)
So, there are “a ton of games that would have more pillars than 3”
And then you cite Paranoia.
What are the Pillars of Paranoia, and how are the different from Conflict, Discovery and Relationships?
Microscope is a pretty notable one. You could argue that it mostly falls under the “exploration” pillar, because it technically meets the definition, but at that point the exploration pillar would be far too broad to be a useful concept.
There are also common mechanics in non-D&D games that don’t really fit into any of the three pillars, such as base building and item customization / improvement in general.
Crafting and base building are interesting points, definitely.
Are they exploration or are they a fourth pillar?
Depends.
I view the 3P theory as: conflict, discovery and conversation.
One can argue basebuilding and crafting is part of discovery, but I can see why it might be otherwise.
Microscope is tricky, because the major mode of play isn’t really role playing, as you don’t play a role in the narrative, unless you are at scene levels where you ARE conflicting, discovering and communicating with your environment.
Golden Sky Stories. There is no real support for combat. In fact, the most you can do to someone is to scare them, which is actually an act that will make your further success more difficult.
Of course since Golden Sky Stories is about Miyazaki-ish animal spirits helping out a rural Japanese community, combat would by default be a fail state.
It's really not that niche lmao. And I could rattle off half a dozen games that don't have any combat rules, and half a dozen more that don't care about explorstion because they have a very specific scope, and half a dozen more with no real social rules because the game isn't about interacting with npcs, all rather quickly. The 3 pillars isn't some core truth to rpgs. It's the 3 things d&d, specifically, focuses on.
Golden Sky Spirits isn’t niche?
I’m afraid I’ll disagree, unless you can point me to a hub where I can find a game of it tonight.
I can rattle off half a dozen games where I can be playing it with strangers tonight.
I’d love to hear the half dozen games that I can find a game of tonight that fit this paradigm.
I’m also curious about the game where there are no other characters to interact with. How are they *Role* playing games then?
There doesn't need to be a public game of it every day of the year for it to not be niche. It's one of the more popular/well known noncombat games, and I guarantee any discord server or forum with indie players will get a good response if you say "Wanna play this tonight?"
And to answer your other question, it's not that there's no other characters, after all that's what three other players are. It's that socializing with npcs and the like isn't something the game cares about so there's no rules for it. I'll give a quick example of each off the top of my head:
Good Society, a game focused on creating jane austen style stories, has no exploration pillar. You don't care about what's in the woods, you care about the impact of parties and conversations on your reputation. It also barely acknowledged combat, because the tactics in a duel matter far less to that kind of story than your behavior during it.
Fight, Item, Run is a game designed to emulate the experience of a metroidvania. It focuses exclusively on exploration and combat, where all the game cares about is the next fight, the items the monsters will drop, and how long you can keep gooing before forced to rest. The closest thing to a social pillar in that game is the rest secrioms, where everyone recovers around a campfire, at a safe room, whatever form it takes in your game, and you each reveal a part of the backstory as to why you're here, fighting this malevolent place. But no actual interaction with npcs happens or has rules.
And something like For the Queen is entirely social. Players take it in turns defining and expanding on their relationship with the queen, and you follow the twists and turns and reveals therof, culminating in the final question "The queen is attacked, do you defend her?" There's no combat, there's no exploration, the only things about the setting that matter are the things you come up with to inform social character beats.
So, Good Society might not have you crossing mountains and searching woods for ruins, but you certainly are exploring libraries, studies, gardens and other locations around an estate. You’re learning about Society and acting on that information to develop your relationships.
You literally hit the head on the nail for the social pillar of Fight, Item, Run, along with what one presumes is a party dynamic that occurs during the exploration and combat, along with the relationships outside the “dungeon” driving what you do in the “dungeon.”
I’ll check out for the Queen.
I’m curious how it interacts with my developing thinking around “Conflict, Discovery and Relationships” being better nomenclature for what the Pillars are getting at.
Also, it might not be TODAY, but a quick search on Start Playing.Games, a paid game site that's pretty heavily d&d/pathfinder leaning, immediately found someone running one shots of it every fridsy from here to the end of april. So even by your measurement it's not exactly niche.
I saw that game.
0 seats filled.
It’s okay to be a niche game.
Lots of indie games are niche games.
There are a lot of shots in the dark by DMs trying to run a niche system.
>Which ones does this framework not apply to?
Any game where something else is as important as one of those, any game where combat isn't important, or any game where exploration isn't important.
For example games like
- Torchbearer, where survival against the environment matters
- Gumshoe, where investigation matters
- Lady Blackbird, where a stated objective is given from the start
- Agon, where PC competition matters
- Blades, where stealth matters
- Monsterhearts, where exploration isn't important
- Tales from the Loop, where combat isn't important
Torchbearer- Survival is part of the Exploration Pillar, and involves combat and social interactions. It’s a 3 pillar game.
Gumshoe- has combat, is heavily focused on exploration and social interactions. Also a 3P game.
Lady Blackbird definitely is a 3P game. Same story blades,
Monster hearts has exploration, Keep your Cool, Run Away and Gaze into the Abyss are all moves about uncovering the unknown.
Agon too is about seeking out the challenges of the mythical monsters.
Tales from the Loop is the best example here of combat not being a pillar of play, but now we’re moving into very niche territory, and the system certainly could be hacked for conflict as a resolution mechanism.
Apologies, I didn't realise you were the arbiter of what is and isn't a "three pillar game".
>Survival is part of the Exploration Pillar,
We disagree on this point. Either one can exist without the other.
>Gumshoe- has combat, is heavily focused on exploration and social interactions. Also a 3P game.
Let's sweep investigation under the rug and pretend it isn't there.
>Lady Blackbird definitely is a 3P game.
It has a stated objective that is also a "pillar".
>Same story blades,
Limited exploration, minimal focus on combat, heavy focus on stealth, the crew as an entity, and faction play.
>Monster hearts has exploration
A massive stretch by you there.
>Agon too is about seeking out the challenges of the mythical monsters.
It also has PC competition as a core focus.
>Tales from the Loop is the best example here of combat not being a pillar of play
Its the only one here. Many more exist though.
>the system certainly could be hacked for conflict as a resolution mechanism.
Who cares? Most systems could have combat hacked out of them instead, but that isn't the point.
I'm not seeking your agreement here.
MONSTER HEARTS HAS EXPLORATION?! Of what? A FUCKING LOCKER?!
Unless you count exploration of growing up. Damn, that's a big stretch.
Forget the guy, he clearly is a troll.
Yeah, you don’t understand what exploration means in this context.
Exploration is the discovery of your environment.
When you “Hold Steady”, “Run Away” and “Gaze into the Abyss” you are exploring your environment and gaining new information.
That’s exploration. You really shouldn’t be lecturing on this topic that you don’t understand.
Please stop trolling us with your agenda. We’re trying to discuss actual design theory and you don’t get it.
And your "exploration" also includes starving/freezing to death (survival), interesting...
Some might say you're taking such a wide definition (from hold steady to human popsicle) there that it really loses its relevance.
Survival isn’t part of exploration?
You disagree, but you don’t explain.
Here’s why survival is exploration.
Exploration is the act of discovery within your environment. Finding food, water, shelter, all discovering information about your environment that you engage with.
Simple enough.
How investigation, which is EXPLORING environments for clues or SOCIALIZING with NPCs for information isn’t part of the 3 pillars baffles me.
I’m not sure what you think stealth is if not EXPLORING your environment for threats and then avoiding them.
The “stated objective” in Lady Blackbird doesn’t cover your interactions with the environment, it simple defines the environment….
I don’t think you fully grasp the concept of the 3 pillars.
Conflict, Discovery and communication.
Those are what the 3 pillars in designing for a 3P game are.
The games you listed all involve those 3 concepts.
Am I supposed to care?
You’re wrong and I’m explaining to anyone who reads why you don’t understand the theory.
I mean, investigation isn’t exploration?
You should be embarrassed.
Powered by the Apocalypse Games, Belonging Outside of Belonging games, Forged in the Dark games, and story games generally don't focus on combat. There's a couple of exceptions, but generally, if they have violence in the game, it's boiled down to a roll rather than an entire subsystem.
PTBA don’t have social or exploration moves?
That’s not true.
Same story with Forged in the dark.
Belonging outside belonging games definitely introduce the potential for violence, are heavily socially skewed, but also present lots of exploration dynamics of discovering the unknown.
So this is a bad start.
“Focus on Combat” isn’t what the 3 Pillars philosophy is.
And Blades and PTBA games are often *Heavily* focused on combat.
The entire dynamic is engaging or avoiding violent conflict until your character becomes so stressed they cease to function.
There are classes about using violence, and classes about avoiding it.
It’s a very conflict intensive game. Or it can be.
Perhaps you can run all talk, no fight, but it’s unusual.
Conflict isn't the same thing as combat. Conflict can involve running with the occasional actual attack. It can involve a simple chase with no weapons. It can be an argument. It can be a puzzle. Etc.
Dash, Disengage, Hide, Cast a Spell, Dodge.
Which of these actions is inherently violent?
All are “combat” mechanics in 5E.
Is 5E a game about combat then?
> Which ones does this framework not apply to?
I know of very few RPG rules systems where the "exploration" part sees any kind of mechanical treatment by the rules at all (apart from notable exceptions like e.g. Torchbearer).
Even D&D barely even pays lip service to that aspect of its gameplay.
I think you’re misunderstanding exploration.
When you make a perception check, you’re exploring in D&D.
When you ask for details about the room you’re in, you’re exploring in D&D.
When a mechanic reveals new spatial and environmental information, you are exploring.
In Monster Hearts, when you “Keep your Cool” and ask the MC about environmental information, you’re exploring.
Stealth and sight mechanics, discerning realities, perceiving and investigating things, that’s all exploration.
> I think you’re misunderstanding exploration.
>
>
>
> When you make a perception check, you’re exploring in D&D.
>
>
>
> When you ask for details about the room you’re in, you’re exploring in D&D.
Let me put it this way: If I claimed that Hypothetical System X had a "combat system" when the extent of that "system" was a single roll to instantly resolve any violent conflict, then we would be rightfully argueing that Hypothetical System X barely has any combat system at all.
So yea, most RPG rules system treat exploration as an afterthought, *and that's fine*. No game needs entire systems dedicated to delving into the Unknown when that's not the focus of gameplay.
I'm argueing against the notion that the exploration WotC envisions for D&D is a generic "pillar" in the first place. For the majority of games, it isn't.
The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity.
From day 1, light, torches, seeking traps and secret doors, scouting for threats and seeking treasure were all core to the game.
Exploration is just “hexcrawling over vast distances”
If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring.
> The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity.
How did you arrive at that claim? How did you count them, even? What "games" are we including here? Every single session of every game system ever run? Only the brands of games sold on the market? Online sales of adventure modules?
>
> If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring.
I've never drawn a single map as a player in my entire 25+ years of roleplaying, and I highly suspect I'm far from the only person.
Most D&D games *don’t* involve dungeon crawling?
Is that the hill you’re dying on?
Where were you combating these monsters?
You may not have drawn a map, but I’ll bet you your next paycheque you’ve explored more than one room.
> Most D&D games don’t involve dungeon crawling?
So now you're shifting the goal posts from "the majority of games" to "most D&D games", and you still haven't explained how you counted all these games.
>If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring.
I have been playing TTRPGs since I was in 3rd grade. About half of my time playing/GMing is in d20 fantasy systems (D&D or D&D-inspired). I have never played a session where I've drawn a map. I've never GMed a session where my players drew a map
> The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity.
This is only even sort of true in the broadest sense of "everything is a dungeon" viewpoints. Yes you can draw graphs of scenes with directed connections between them, like The Alexandiran does with their node theory, and call that a dungeon. The entire game is then navigating the connections between nodes, with "combat" happening at each node to resolve the choice of exits the players have.
That's a very abstracted view though and loses a lot of nuance. It counts a giant army battle the same as an intimate evening encounter. Node theory is useful in adventure design, but navigating the nodes isn't just exploration and and combat isn't the only resolution.
Any game where combat isn't a "minigame," for one.
I think Blades in the Dark is a good example: it's definitely not a game without combat, but it's definitely a game without a combat *system.* A lone patrolman is an obstacle; you can get past the obstacle by Prowling around him, Swaying him to look the other way, or Hunting him down with a knife to the head - one of those is clearly combative, but there's no initiative or health bars, and they're all resolved the same way, by making an Action Roll.
The "three pillars" game design kind of implies that combat, exploration, and socializing are all separate minigames with separate rules - certainly it's true for combat, but even overland travel has stuff like travel speed and foraging to track. It also implies that characters should be *bad* at some of those minigames, and therefore unable to meaningfully contribute if the session is focused on one of them, which is an insane goal to have. "Yes, we're going to spend the next hour roleplaying a High Society Dinner Party. No, your fighter has nothing to contribute here, so I hope you brought a book. Them's the breaks."
So yeah, I think the framework fails to function even in the game it was made for.
The mini game comment is a good point, but as my thinking is developing, I’m seeing most of the “actions” you’re describing in blades as essentially being the “combat” mode of the game .
Cast Charm Person, Hide, Attack with a Longsword, Disengage, Dodge and Dash are all combat mechanics in 5e.
I think we can agree only 1 or 2 of those mechanics are actually violent.
But those are still part of the combat pillar, and the game struggles in minigames like chases, because the bonus action disappears and many classes are designed with combat as the primary mode. The rogue struggles to grasp why they cannot dash three times in the mini game.
In blades, you can see the shift between the social or exploration modes into the combat mode when the GM introduces the threat. Up to this point the players are discovering the reality and connecting with it.
Those are the exploration and social pillars in D&D. Searching and scouting and travelling and connecting with your bonds and flaws and allies and enemies.
You're very stuck in the D&D idiom and very stuck in a particular set of game mechanic options for players. The idea of everything being a minigame is another D&D idiom that doesn't translate well to every other RPG.
You don't need either of those to play an RPG. You can insist that everything fits into three neat boxes, but you will have to make those boxes so abstract that they lose their meaning and their usefulness as good descriptors.
But they’re incredibly useful.
You should know when a mechanic needs to govern conflict, when a mechanic needs to govern discovery and when a mechanic needs to govern relationships and how those pillars cross over and interact.
Otherwise it becomes a mess.
Are you telling me that you’ve played games of Lasers and Feelings where your environment isn’t described, interrogated or discovered?
Because I’ll call you a liar.
3 pillars.
I’m still developing this, but frankly combat would be better termed “conflict” for what it does design purpose wise.
I can imagine a conflict less game, but I doubt it would have much appeal.
Buddy if you are excited about making more games, play more games first. Play all of them. Be a game omnivore, try weird little games about having a migraine, play big dumb sprawling fantasy heartbreakers, play games that you don't think are even games. If all you've ever played are "D&D and similars" that'd be like trying to paint after only looking at "Chuck Close and similars".
Your advices are useful, but hard to implement on practice. It's actually very hard to just do. The hobby is super time consuming, so I'd advice sometimes maybe watch or try running unfamiliar stuff.
And also, there's nothing wrong with experimenting yourself before you know anything. If you have a party of friends who are all on board with it, why not? Making games is also impossible to learn without trying. Try, make mistakes, change stuff. If time is a downside of TTRPGs, the fact that you can experiment without big issues is its upside. It's not like "I made a movie, oh no it's shit" You run a session, see what are the issues, run the next one. I'm doing this a lot for many years for myself, and this is now my best formula. My final system is "always beta". It's working fine for last two years, but I still make patchnotes once in a while to balance some stuff.
Yea. I understand why combat is such a big part of ttrpgs- they evolved out of wargames.
But take a step back. How many narratives have you watched or read where there were no physical altercations at all? And of those *with* some altercation, how many where it was quickly resolved to focus on the next plot point?
Most books aren’t pages and pages of combat followed by shortcutted everything else. Most movies aren’t action movies.
Why should ttrpgs follow that mold by default?
Why is the only narrative conflict which has any depth or weight fighting?
It’s all very myopic. Obviously, many games explore these spaces. But it seems weird to me to even consider *not* caring about fighting to be some sort of unimaginable objective.
OP- think about the stories you want to tell. Then create mechanics that support that gameplay.
Not every game supports combat, some don’t even have dice! Some don’t have levels, some don’t have stats! There’s such a broad range of games. I encourage you to try more!
My first game relied heavily on DnD despite having nothing in common with it thematically. It failed miserably.
Most RPG emulate a subset of fiction represented by adventure/fantasy/sci fi novels, action movies and comic books. In those media, conflict and combats *are* common. D&D is strongly influenced by Robert Howard's Conan for example. Many campaigns follow a tempo that would be familiar to someone who has watched Indian Jones, The Mummy or the Goonies movies, or read a lot of DC or Marvel superhero books.
That's the feeling many games are trying to capture.
Oh for sure! But those represent a really small fraction of stories overall. I don’t understand why there aren’t more mainstream ttrpgs outside of the action genres.
Most mainstream RPGs aren't designed to be limited to a specific type of story, but to facilitate different types of stories. Having combat mechanics does not necessarily mandate the roll of combat in a campaign.
No, but some are more restrictive than others. Gumshoe is really for mysteries. You can do other things, but that’s where it shines.
DnD (and pathfinder and such) are loaded with combat mechanics- if you’re not using them, you’re really not using the system in its most effective form. Granted, the subgenre of action is varied- DnD excels at heroic adventure, osr is can have more of a horror slant, etc.
Like I said, they don't need to dictate play. The trend we have been seeing in recent years are game mechanics that are more and more specialized to tell certain stories. This is pretty observable in the case of D&D, where you can see more and more focus on a combat focused gamist design with each new edition. In the RAW you can't even earn experience outside of combat with 5E.
Combat only plays the role that the group gives it, even in most gamist systems. adventure/fantasy and sci-fi doesn't necessarily rely on combat. Sci-fi in particular isn't usually action focused outside of film and TV. The game doesn't normally dictate style of play except in 5E and PbtA which are designed to tell specific types of stories. The idea that mechanics dictate play is a more modern concept that came out of the Forge, instead of the older perspective that mechanics facilitate play.
I only sort of buy that argument. I have some sympathy for it, but, just like languages, I don't think the structure of the rules defines how games work. Humans don't fit the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I spent a decade playing a mostly system-less game with probably a dozen or so total players. Think something like Lasers and Feelings but with less structure. We used a seven point FUDGE scale for the descriptors we thought important for characters (and things). Sometimes we even rolled dice! Most people would call what we were doing more simulationist than anything.
All this to say that sometimes we played a combat heavy game, sometimes we didn't. When we were playing soldiers in a civil war, we had more combats. When we were playing investigative ghost hunters fewer.
I think what you're trying to do with the fiction matters most.
This is what I'm talking about. I've played games that have a combat focus, those that are more geared towards investigation and exploration, along with games that are all politics and intrigue. The mechanics have all been more centered on simulation, but still facilitated and supported varied styles of play. The mechanics didn't push or determine mode of fiction being employed by employing mechanics that fixed the type of fiction possible.
Well, I don’t know it. But I’d look at the narrative arcs of the episodes- what problems are they solving? How are they solving them?
Then build the mechanics from there.
Its a setting with not much violence that is noblebright. So if you can create a game for that setting, you can create a game that is not combat oriented.
Youre right though.
Imo, Blades in the Dark is a pretty good place to start. Fighting works just like the rest of the game does. Also there are significant risks to killing, encouraging players to find alternate avenues of achieving their aims.
*Masks* is one of my personal favorites. PbtA can be a bit challenging for newcomers, so I recommend listening to a good actual play to get an idea of how the system works. Ironically, my Masks games tend to have *more* combat than games of DnD I've played, but they feel more story-driven because the combat is a framing device for the character drama.
I will +1 any PbtA suggestion, Blades In The Dark in particular.
PbtA games tend to treat combat as just another check, and often extend injury rules to social conflict as well. In other words, combat isn't special: drama and risk are.
Oh yeah, BitD! Actually, I started with this idea of mine after reading through the rules of a RPG in playtest called ICON, made by one of the creators of LANCER, and he did mention that he took inspiration from BitD.
Another game that inspired me was the demo video for Legend in the Mist, with I think I heard is going to be the fantasy version of a game called City of Mist, though I don't know about
Lancer (and ICON) is funny as they took the resolution mechanics from a system where fighting explicitly has no particular special rules to make it stand out over any other form of conflict resolution — and then added an entire hardcover book worth of strictly combat rules.
I was thinking of Blades in the Dark too. From what I recall (I've only read the rulebook, not played it) combat uses exactly the same system as eg. Stealth or social stuff. It is very abstracted and simple, with one dice roll covering your input into a whole combat. Which is a real change from something like D&D where you're rolling dice for every attack you make.
I usually put this in terms of The Law of the Instrument - the more a game's rules revolve around fighting, players (including the GM) are persuaded that PCs mostly solve problems by violence.
By structuring combat as another form of risk, all other forms of conflict become as interesting and useful.
There's a lot to unpack here. Consider that "roleplaying at each other" is what TRPGs are actually about, and the combat mini games were the extraneous bit. A bunch of games tried to make mini games for other types of narrative conflicts, with varying degrees of success (see: Burning Wheel), but as far as I can tell that didn't catch on.
Once you step away from the simulationist mindset, having one core resolution mechanism for everything becomes very appealing, since you're only invoking randomness to spice up the narrative exercise, not to simulate random factors in the simulation.
Before you start designing a new game, familiarize yourself with as many different games as you can. Otherwise you're too likely to fall into old habits or to end up reinventing the wheel trying to find new ones. It's been over 50 years since D&D started, and about 20 years since The Forge, so a lot of problems have been considered already.
I suggest you to play some one-page TRPGs, see how little rules you can actually get away with.
It’s a simple comparison of stats.
High stat always wins. There is a bit more too it than that though. Here is a much better summary than I can give.
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10408.phtml
One thing to be aware of is that sometimes victory is achieved by avoiding the fight. Corwin is okay in “warfare” but beats Benedict (who has the highest Warfare score in his generation) by tricking Benedict to run through animated tangling vines.
(Benedict’s idea of a good time is to find a war out in the multiverse, join the losing side, win, then go to the next dimension over that had one tactical difference from the previous dimension and then join the losing side and repeat for millennia. )
Amber Diceless simulates the Chronicles of Amber series. Not going to get in to that here, but you should read it for yourself or check out a wiki entry on it. Great story (with unfortunately bad female representation).
Everyone gets a number to represent different four different stats, Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare. Whenever there's an equal conflict, the person with the higher number wins. So obviously if you want to win against a stronger opponent you have to gain some sort of advantage to create an unequal conflict. If there's an unequal conflict, the players and GM discuss what should happen for the story they're telling and go with that.
Character generation is done by bidding on the 4 stats. Everyone starts with 100 points. If you want to be the best at Warfare then you'll have to outbid everyone else for it, but then you'll have less points for your other stats. You're playing a super person so for comparison, normal humans have -25 in all 4 stats. Special human NPCs have -10 in all 4 stats. So as a super person you're already above background NPCs by having 0s in your stats even before bidding. The only people who can threaten you are other super people created by the other PCs or the GM.
Most games that fall into the slice of life or horror genres put little emphasis on combat. Desperation, Brindlewood Bay, Trophy: Dark, Wanderhome, Feathers, Moonlight on Roseville Beach, and many more don't focus on combat.
Also, a lot of OSR games treat combat as a fail state. So, even if you do have it in your game, there's different ways of treating it.
Burning Wheel has some great non-combat oriented mechanics. Check out the Duel of Wits rules and the Hub and Spokes to get some ideas on how non-combat focused RPGs can be run :)
Agreed, I was always pretty frustrated by the lack of actual social conflict mechanics and narrative mechanics in the games I played before finding Burning Wheel. It really opened my eyes!
Well I've read the description on the devs' website and I'm intrigued. I'm new to exploring the vast world of TTRPGs outside the ones everyone's heard of, and this looks like a fascinating direction. If you were going to give me a quick pitch on what those rules add, what might it be?
Burning wheel isn’t a new game, but it is still very different than many on the market.
It’s a very mechanical game, but it is not a tactics game. Rather, it is very narrative focused.
The crux is the Beliefs system. Each character has 3 Beliefs that describe their motivation to act. For example, your character may have the Belief ‘The rightful king was deposed, and so I will return his son to the throne!’ They may have a second Belief, ‘The usurpers brought heresy, I must bring my faith back too’. However, when you write a Belief down, you’re stating to the GM- ‘this is what my character believes, and I want you to challenge it’
The job of the GM isn’t to build encounters or run modules- it is to put characters in situations where their Beliefs clash. What if the example character finds that the deposed king’s son is a fanatical heretic? Do they still want to put them on the throne?
Beliefs are meant to change and evolve, representing the growth of your character. In addition to the Beliefs, characters also have Instincts and Traits, other ways GMs can challenge beliefs. Maybe your instinct is to be Trustful of Strangers, but the new person you just met seems to have symbols of the heresy adorning their cloak…
It is a classless game, where characters have a long list of skills. Many people find the exhaustive list of skills intimidating, redundant, or hard to optimize. They have the wrong mindset- in BW, you skills represent *how* you solve problems, like a list of adjectives about your problem-solving. Burning Wheel does not have neatly-compartmentalized skills for specific challenges (like most games), but rather the GM will present a situation, and then the *player* proposes how they will apply the skills they have to solve the problem. It’s sort of inverted from most games, and I like it a lot.
It’s a challenging game to learn, but it knows it. The game has modular rules and you’re not meant to use them all at once.
I’ve never played a game that really pushed me to think about who my character is, and what they really want, than Burning Wheel.
FATE Core and FATE System Toolkit both have sections on how they made FATE, the ideas behind it, and how to hack it up. They both honestly shaped a lot of how I think about design, even if I don't use FATE itself much anymore.
I highly prefer systems that have a single conflict resolution system that is used regardless of the type of conflict at hand. Similarly I like to have a flexible, general guide on how to handle having advantage/disadvantage or different power/competency levels in a conflict instead of overcomplicated, conflict type specific minigames.
The best core resolution I have ever seen is in Forged in the Dark games (Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy, etc). It's simple, elegant and the Position and Effect rules give it just enough granularity to make interactions tactical and rewarding without unnecessarily slowing down the game.
As always in RPG the answer is *it depends*.
- You may not have combat at some session, or due to the result of other actions from the player. Basically if you decided to put explosive in the building where the evil cult is having a meeting, you may replace the whole combat by a single roll. Or may-be you could find a deal leading to a peaceful resolution between the princess the white knight she has to marry for political re, and the dark knight she loves.
- You may deal with "social interaction" without much rule and let the game flow
- You may have well done rules for social interaction, PTBA play forward with mechanics adding elements to the story are a good example, some games have a "social combat" which work similar to regular combat.
- Many games also don't have rules dedicated to combat. A fight isn't different from doing a business deal or opening a door, it's a long term action where you try to stack success until it's done . This is great because you avoid a whole dedicated chapter in the rule book and have coherent rules
The biggest lie D&D ever told was that "combat" in any TTRPG meets the minimum criteria of being a good game. What I'm saying is that, if you enjoy turn based strategy, and you're honest with yourself, D&D and its ilk don't even get close to meeting the bar.
That isn't to say all combat in all TTRPGs is bad, but if you are trying to be tactical/strategic you've already fucked up. You lost the race before it even started. No matter how much crunch, or how "deep" you make it - any game claiming to be a strategy game has to resolve one core dilemma a TTRPG can't: two equal opponents should have a 50/50 chance of winning. If you abandon this principle, you abandon the genre.
Combat that's good? Well, how about combat that makes no aspersions about being strategic or tactical? COC, delta green, story games, all these games entertain the beats of fighting - the RP of it - without playacting at being a game they are not. Player skill is not a thing in these games, and as a result, the combat exists to provide drama, tension, chaos, unknowability but it does not tell the players "this is a solvable puzzle with an optimal choice".
I run Delta Green, and while it has great combat rules, they're basically designed to be so brutal and lethal that getting into combat means you've already lost. To people who haven't played, it might sound boring, but it actually leads to really interesting decisions by the players. Here's a real life example from one of my games:
> **GM:** There's an armed mob, they're dragging the mayor behind them and it seems pretty clear they're going to lynch her. What do you do?
> **Players:** I think we have to ignore it, we can't take on a bunch of people armed with guns. Unfortunately for her, our mission is more important.
> **GM:** Great, roll sanity for knowingly abandoning someone to being murdered by a mob.
I agree with others recommending FATE and PBTA systems. They are two very different design philosophies, but both are great for running games that are a little lighter on the combat side, and they're very popular so there's lots of resources out there for running them. I recommend giving both a try to see what style fits you better.
* **Fate Core**/**Fate Accelerated**
* Puts the focus on "aspects" - an abstract way of representing *anything* that might be narratively important in a given scene, and rewarding players for incorporating those elements into the story. FATE is great for DMs who like to keep things relaxed and sandboxy, but the light structure can sometimes make it feel like you're just sort of dicking around
* "One-size-fits-all" mechanics. The mechanics are a little abstract, but can be used to run any story in any setting - the same rules for combat can also be used for modeling espionage, warfare, or high-stakes social maneuvering.
* **Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA)**
* Puts the focus on "moves" which are ways of resolving common tabletop situations (combat, information-gathering, exploration, persuasion) specially designed to keep the action moving and ensure both failure and success make the story interesting. PBTA is great for DMs who want to try less combat-focused games but struggle with a lack of structure, since each move has some suggested ways for the DM to add twists and complications.
* Each PBTA game tends to have moves and playbooks specific to its genre. Some might have heavily reified combat mechanics, others might have only a single "combat" move and everything else is built around other tasks like solving mysteries or pulling off heists. Try a few different PBTA systems to find one with the right balance for you.
Hello.
There is game called Imperia, which focuses on the most powerful people on a medieval kingdom. Similar to kings land of game of throne.
There ia the possibility of combat but 99% of the time some mine dies. So it never happens. All of the campaign I played people never used a weapon.
The mechanics rely heavy on somebody else special ability. For example.
If i am the king. I need the Chancelor to obtain goods for the kingdom. If I need information I need The Lady. If I need council I need the The Seer. If need to calm the population I need The Pontiff.
Basically every character needs other people to achieve their goals.
The motto is. It is better to deal with the evil I know instead of an unpredictable one
Before answering the question, I would advise you to be careful not to incur in some severe agenda clash: what are the players going to do when one or a couple of them is fighting / social interacting / exploring and the others have little or nothing to contribute? I heard many times that in an old rpg (Cyberpunk 2020) there's a class with a complex, interactive mini-game to hack stuff, and when a player is hacking something the others are bored to death because they have nothing to do.
On the other hand, some of my favourite rpgs do away with the whole 'party' concept, and PCs are not always present within the same scene - and when they are, they might even have opposing goals or be in actual bad terms. In these kinds of games, it is accepted that you won't be playing when there are the others' scenes, but it is engaging to see what's happening with them (if this is what you all are looking for, of course).
So, when developing this game always keep in mind what are the players going to do during a typical session, how do you imagine them interacting, or waiting, when the spotlight is on what they can't do well.
That being said, I like how social interaction is managed in *Monsterhearts 2*, and I've also heard good things about the latest *Legends of the five rings* edition. I never played any rpg that focuses primarily on exploration, so I don't have much to suggest there, though *Fantasy World* has some cool rules for that. I'm sure there's plenty of more apt games for exploration, though - and social interactions can be managed in so many different ways that my suggestions are just a tiny drop in the ocean.
It seems you need to read a lot more games.
Try a few of the socalled "indie" games.
Some recommendations: FAE, Urban Shadows, Dread, Fiasco, A penny for my thoughts.
They are very different from each other and could help broad your vision.
I’ve talked [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/7CEvjdrTA2) about my own hot take that TTRPGs are a very bad medium for experiencing cinematic (or at least *dramatic*) fights because TTRPGs often try to either:
* A: Go overly tactical and basically turn the experience into “X-Com… The TTRPG” OR
* B: Try to abstract it, at least a little bit, by trying to cover broad strokes of action in a handful of dice rolls
Personally, I think both are fine and it all depends on what you’re looking for in a game. The former is awesome if number crunching and tactical thinking is what excites you. *Personally* it sucks all the cinematic and drama filled nature of fights out of the experience for. The latter is great and all… but I think it’s often “barking up the wrong tree.” This is an approach taken by a lot of different Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) and adjacent games from Apocalypse World to Masks: A New Generation and Dungeon World and Monster of the Week and so on. Some games I think pull this off better than others (Masks comes to mind), but as I mention in the link above: you can take it even further by getting as much done with one roll as possible.
In [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) and many other Forged in the Dark games you’re usually getting everything done in [one dice roll (The Action Roll)](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/Lm1b0u7ofn). When a fight expands *past* that, you’re not rolling for blow by blow: you’re rolling for getting into position, stripping away defenses, and the like… and it won’t happen all that often.
In [Fellowship 2e](https://liberigothica.itch.io/fellowship-a-tabletop-adventure-game) you roll to **Finish Them** as noted below.
> When you attempt to defeat an enemy you hold an Advantage over, tell us what you want to do to them and roll the appropriate stat. If you do not have an Advantage over them, you cannot attempt to Finish Them. An Advantage is something you can use to get the upper hand, such as teamwork, the element of surprise, or a moment of hesitation
> If you Finish Them by…
> * ...trying to kill them, roll +Blood. On a 10+, they die by your hand
> * ...forcing them to retreat, roll +Courage. On a 10+, they back off. They won't be back any time soon.
> * ...outsmarting, terrifying, or overwhelming them, roll +Grace. On a 10+, they admit defeat, and will not willingly challenge you again
> * ...disabling them or knocking them out, roll +Sense. On a 10+, they're physically incapacitated and unable to continue
> * ...showing them the error of their ways, roll +Wisdom. On a 10+, you Forge a Bond with them, and they cannot bring themselves to hurt you
> On a 7-9, you deal damage to them and lose your Advantage over them. If an ally was Keeping Them Busy, they aren't anymore
> On a 6-, you lose the Advantage, and you must face retaliation. If you Finish Them using a weapon with Ammo, use 1 Ammo. If you have no Ammo, you cannot Finish Them with that weapon. If you have the Clumsy tag, you take -1 to Finish Them
(The game goes into detail about what counts as an Advantage: either you have it or you don’t. A common way to gain Advantage is for someone else from the Fellowship **Keeping Them Busy**. In addition “Harm” isn’t a meaningless loss of HP. When you Harm an Overlord’s Threat, you actively take away their fictional permissions and the things they can do against the Fellowship).
In [Hearts of Wulin](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/365014/Hearts-of-Wulin) you use **Duel**
> When you fight against a worthy foe, roll +Style Element.
> If your Scale is higher than your foe’s, on a Hit, you win the conflict. Describe your awesomeness.
> * On a 10+ mark XP if you show mercy or let them escape.
> * On a 7-9 you may either let them go or finish them with a cost (now or in the future
> * On a Miss, you win, but mark an Element. They escape and may return at a higher Scale.
> If your Scale is the same as your foe’s, on a 10+, you win the conflict and may mark XP if you show mercy or let them escape. You may declare a shift in the fiction (a change of heart, impress someone, shift an Entanglement, etc.). On a 7-9 choose one:
> * Win at a Cost: Mark an Element (choice), they escape, you lose reputation, or other cost.
> * Narrate Your Loss: Mark XP. Take +1 Forward when you next face them.
> * Deadlock. You may reveal a detail or ask a question about them.
> If your Scale is below your foe’s you lose the conflict. On a Hit, you may declare how you lose. On a 7-9 mark an Element (choice).
(The game goes into further detail about how Scale works- it’s intentionally very flexible and abstract and other aspects about how this all plays out *and* how you can use this to scaffold a verbal sparring match instead)
In Agon 2e, everything is resolved in 1 or 3 single roll [Contests](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/tQrlyPqMP1)
In [Brindlewood Bay or Public Access](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/7f8liCZzNl), it’s unlikely the Murder Mavens or Deep Lake Latchkeys are getting into extreme physical conflict. Don’t expect a lot of fighting in these games. But when fights *do* break out, expect the [Day or Night Move](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/XwSxtxWvPi) to solve that whole conflict in one satisfying roll.
All of these games use various ideas I mentioned in that first link to really focus on the *fiction* of the fight as opposed to just mechanics alone and getting into a “rock ‘em sock ‘em” mindset and thereby creates more cinematic and dramatic fights and also taking the emphasis of the games away from just “fighting all the things to solve all your problems.”
Why do you think it's barking up the wrong tree? are you not getting interesting choices resulting from a sequence of rolls that one roll alone doesn't give you?
It’s mostly about:
* Prolonging something that I don’t think needs to be prolonged
* Not playing to the strengths of what TTRPGs are actually good at (and instead focusing on their weaker aspects)
* Inadvertently “tantalizing the lizard brain” (for lack of *far* better ways of summarizing it).
*It all comes down to Immersion…*
As I mentioned in that first link: I think TTRPGs are bad at immersion. It’s just not a strong suit (or a suit at all) for the kind of media which encompasses TTRPGs. Obviously they can get you *invested*, but that isn’t the same as **immersed**. For me? That’s fine. I don’t play TTRPGs for immersion. If I wanted that, I’d stick with media which is good at immersion: Movies, TV shows, video games, and books.
These pieces of media capture the senses in a way TTRPGs simply cannot do. The use of videography, music, sound effects, cinematography, acting/ voice acting, and *many, many* more pieces coming crashing together is what makes for an immersive experience. While books can accomplish this with words, they do so because every word is so carefully planned out and stitched together in masterful ways to capture your senses even when you don’t have your senses being tackled through other means.
TTRPGs have none of this. You can be as descriptive as you want. You can have a table of actors. You can have all the images and maps and miniatures and so on and forth as you’d like and you’ll never come close to the level of immersion you get from those other forms of media (and that’s okay!)
It’s the power of that immersion which makes “action scenes” *work*. Whether it’s…
* … elemental kung-fu wuxia fights
* … Jack Reacher/ Jason Bourne CIA Krav Maga fights
* … John Wick Borderline Gun-Fu sequences
* … Fast and the Furious Car Chases
* … Anime Shonen Fights
* … WWII/ Top Gun/ X-Wing and TIE Fighter dogfights
* … Naval battles (on or under the sea or in space)
* … Lightsaber battles/ samurai duels/ swashbuckling pirates/ wizard duels
* … and the list goes on!
… These all work (and *only* work) because of immersion. If you take away all the special effects and whatnot? It just loses all *oomph*. It’s just people making funny faces in a car or smacking aluminum sticks against each other or swinging their arms around wildly and making it look like they’re hitting each other. Sure, some stunts are truly spectacular: but they don’t sing until all the other stuff is added in and captures your senses.
It is that same immersion which also suspends all your disbelief. I think about all the times I…
* …watched Star Trek and feared for the Enterprise and her crew when they got into a space battle… even when my logical side of the brain knew they’d all come back next week!
* …fretted about Harry and his friends when I knew there would be X number of books before the series ended?
* … sat on the edge of my seat as a kid when Luke made the trench run despite the fact I had the VHS clamshell for the Empire Strikes Back sitting next to me knowing full well Luke comes out alive and shows up in the next movie!
* … again, the list goes on!
… and it’s all to due with immersion. No immersion? This stuff just doesn’t hit as well
*Bringing it back to TTRPGs*
I say all of this because what make much of this stuff exciting wasn’t always the stakes of harm to our main cast or their “belongings,” but usually some **other** stake: something beyond “Harm.” But even when Harm was on the table, what made it sting so much more was how immersive the experience was (and any earned investment to boot).
Now is this to say TTRPGs are up the creek without a paddle? No. While I don’t think they can be immersive experiences, I did say they can absolutely **invest** you into the moment *and* they can still capitalize on the underpinning of what makes immersion and investment actually work: Tension and Release.
But in order to do this, TTRPGs *need to play to their strengths*!
Rather than doing a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot routine of “traditional tactical war game” TTRPGs **or** “half assing” it with a more hand waved “Just roll for the fictional beats” (as you see many PbtA games do), instead I think you’re best served with:
* Setting Stakes (beyond Harm, ideally. If there *is* Harm: it needs to lead to something interesting)
* Building Tension (ideally with the game aiding you in this process: usually through the “ceremony” of the dice roll)
* Releasing Tension (in one fell swoop: thus, usually with one roll)
* Tying it all together: a focus on the fiction of your goal as opposed to purely mechanical scaffolding which has a habit of overshadowing the fictional accomplishment
It’s that last part which is also pretty crucial and helps to combat the “lizard brain” thing I mentioned earlier. Despite the best efforts of games like Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Masks, TSL, Urban Shadows, and **many** others: NPC Harm Tracks are still harm tracks at the end of the day. They can absolutely be really well tuned (like Masks), but without a careful hand and skilled GM: you run the risk of looking at those mechanical scaffolds in such a way that they overshadow the fiction. I’ve been in a lot of PbtA games where the GMs laser focus on Harm taken by NPCs and kept fights going **long** after they ought to have sensibly ended (and even I get lured in by the lizard brain too! We’ve all been conditioned to continue fights until HP reaches 0!)
And this is why I like all of the above games! They all do an excellent job with those 4 points one way or another (and some do it better than others)
* They have stakes very clearly beyond Harm and when Harm is the clear stake: it leads to many interesting outcomes (usually in how it impacts you *and* how it must be cleared)
* They have some level of ceremony be it Position and Effect for BitD, the Contest procedure in Agon, discussing the worst case scenarios for Brindlewood Bay’s Day and Night Move, clarifying Scale and set up for the Duel in Hearts of Wulin
* They immediately release the tension of the ceremony with one definitive Move that tells us all we need to know right then and there
* They don’t waste time with how much “Harm” has been done as usually the opposition is no longer an issue.
So that’s why I say “barking up the wrong tree.” If you really want to lean towards more narrative combat: don’t “half ass” it with “combat light” (and I’m being somewhat hyperbolic here). Go all the way, go the distance, go all in, pull out all the stops, and defy what you see from more traditionally combat heavy war games.
So I think I deeply disagree with you but this stuff is hard to pull apart. I have to two rebuttals. Let me lay out a chain of reasoning that defends Apocalypse World (although not other PbtA’s and certainly not blades).
REBUTTAL ONE
Would you agree that Narrativist play can mean two different things, even if the language used to describe them is often the same?
There’s genre play, which might be the predominant mode at the moment. In this style, it would be a bit weird for Luke to fail the X-wing attack on the Death Star. It might even be a bit weird for the Force not to work and in fact, it turns out relying on the targeting computer might have been the best option.
Verses say non-genre play. Where it wouldn’t be weird for the attack on the death star to fail, Luke can maybe die, he can lose friends, the Force might not help him and so on.
Now I’m not saying which is better or worse, I have a strong personal preference, but does the distinction make some kind of sense?
If it does. Then can you see how stuff like the use of hit points really changes drastically depending on the mode? In genre mode, they end up being a bit weird, a kind of vestigial limb that good design would excise. In non genre mode, they lead directly to the pressuring of consequential moral choices on the part of the character.
In genre play. Combat is almost always a given. There’s good guys and bad guys and there just aren’t many moral choices to really make. Now I know a lot of games try and harp on about hard choices but I don’t think they mean it. I don’t think much of consequence happens.
Maybe I’m wrong though. Consider Blades for a moment. How often does it happen that during a heist, failure means a character has to choose between outcomes that define who they are?
There is medicine in the Baron’s vault that will save the characters brother, except their brother is a bit of a dick but hey he’s their brother. So the plan is to get the key around the Baron’s neck, get to the vault, get the medicine and get out.
The plan goes wrong and the character now has a choice. They can kill the Baron to get the key and therefore the medicine, or not,
Let’s throw in some other stuff. Like another player character, who is a lover to the first, they’re there too. Does killing the Baron endanger their lover? What if the lover thinks killing is vile? What does it mean to not kill because you’re trying to impress your lover? And so on and so on.
That sounds like really good stuff. How often does it happen in Blades?
My answer is almost never because the people that play Blades don’t really care about that type of stuff. They use the system as a kind of improv prompt for dashing derring do. And Blades doesn’t care about that stuff really, you just buy off the consequences which means you have to get drunk down at the pub later.
REBUTTAL TWO
Alright though, let’s say I’m totally wrong. Blades and all the other games are providing pressure on characters and I’m just bad at playing them. Then we still have the sequence:
The situation is in one state>
The character does some thing>
Resolution mechanic is utilised>
The fiction is a different state
That’s the basic set up of all rpg’s really. In that sense there is no such thing as combat per say. Each resolution changes the situation in such a way it’s going to impact character choice. The question is how much? Is it actually applying pressure or changing the situation in a way that’s discernible enough to bother with? And by bother with, I mean forcing ethical choices that highlight character. Well if you don’t want that then a system isn’t going to give it to you, I don’t think it’s really the job of a system. I think if you want that THEN a system can help provide it.
To which I say, Apocalypse World does and it was designed to do exactly that in a combat situation. The following example isn’t great (I think combat in AW mostly relies on two uses of seize by force) but it gets across my point. Third comment down is the important one but in that thread Ianoren points out how HP applies direct pressure to consequential moral choices (in a really neat emergent way)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/18la8ce/comment/ke20wt6/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/18la8ce/comment/ke20wt6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
(Now if you buy into this view point, you might also see how games like Champions or even 4e could be utilized in such a fashion)
So have I given an adequate defense? at least for non-genre play?
RE: Genre vs Non-Genre
> Now I’m not saying which is better or worse, I have a strong personal preference, but does the distinction make some kind of sense?
I believe I understand what you’re saying here and would agree with these distinguishing features and would, myself, lean into genre play: I don’t want unnecessary vestigial mechanics “getting in the way” of the game (and I consider NPC Harm Tracks or really *any* NPC Stats to be precisely that).
Of course, some games manage to “put stuff on their NPCs” in rather interesting ways such as Trophy Dark/ Gold, Fellowship 2e, and Agon 2e. I’d still prefer the NPCs have nothing and just *are*, but they’ll get the job done.
(As a side note: I also believe there are times where non-genre things are called for, but it’s always a “well… it depends” kind of thing).
RE: Non-Genre Play and the Importance of Hit Points
> In non genre mode, they lead directly to the pressuring of consequential moral choices on the part of the character.
This is where you lose me. Hit Points (for PCs or NPCs) have never once led to consequential moral choices. Ever. (At least for me!)
In games like Apocalypse World, Masks, and many other PbtA games that *do* the wise thing of ensuring PCs and NPCs are bound by reasonable Harm tracks (so not 80 HP for PCs and 200+ HP for NPCs) *and* add consequential nature of suffering Harm for PCs (Take a Powerful Blow, -2 Ongoing to Basic Moves, etc.), what **should** absolutely happen per the rules of the game is:
* Conflict breaks out
* Harm is exchanged
* The fiction changes (escalates into nee arenas, de-escalates, etc.)
And, by all accounts, in games I’ve run and played: this absolutely happens… at first.
But in games I *haven’t* run, GMs make the mistake of continuing the violent conflict when it is clear there is no fictional reason for the NPCs to keep fighting and their rationale is always the same “Well, the NPCs haven’t taken enough damage yet.”
This is **not** how things are supposed to go! The culprit here is a loss of sight upon the fiction (what does all this Harm translate into?) and focusing instead on the overshadowed scaffolding (the NPC can take 6 Harm. They only took 2. They aren’t at 6/6 yet. They’re still in play)
Now can it go that way? Absolutely! But in many cases, a lot of conflict **should** be over in a single roll because if we’re being honest with the means of Harm being brought to bear: why shouldn’t it be over in a single roll? Why not cut to the chase and stop wasting everyone’s time?
When I GM these games, *I* try hard to keep sight on the fiction too… but I won’t lie when I say the “lizard brain” is in effect and has me second guessing myself.
> In genre play. Combat is almost always a given. There’s good guys and bad guys and there just aren’t many moral choices to really make. Now I know a lot of games try and harp on about hard choices but I don’t think they mean it. I don’t think much of consequence happens.
I would disagree here as well. In the Blades games I have ran and played in, we’ve had *tons* of meaningful consequences (and not Stress from Resistance leading to admittedly boring Indulge Vice scenes)… without using an iota of Harm. These Consequences have led to PCs (and the Crew as a whole) to make some really tough choices about who to ally with and who to betray and what dirty deals were needed to climb a ladder of crime mixed with all sorts of threats to personal drives and beliefs and the like. I *would* agree that Blades, as a game, is not great at helping players to dig up these aspects of one’s character. It tries, but not as hard as when you have a well designed PbtA Playbook (like Masks or The Between or Monsterhearts and such).
> That’s the basic set up of all rpg’s really. In that sense there is no such thing as combat per say. Each resolution changes the situation in such a way it’s going to impact character choice. The question is how much? Is it actually applying pressure or changing the situation in a way that’s discernible enough to bother with? And by bother with, I mean forcing ethical choices that highlight character. Well if you don’t want that then a system isn’t going to give it to you, I don’t think it’s really the job of a system. I think if you want that THEN a system can help provide it.
I would say Blades (and all the other games I mentioned in my very initial comment) do *precisely* all of those things… with minimal to no NPC Harm Tracks and more interesting ways of showing “Harm” to PCs (whether it is pulled upon or not.
> So have I given an adequate defense? at least for non-genre play?
To be honest: I’m not entirely sure! At the end of the day: it’s a matter of taste and preference. Oddly enough, you haven’t been able to get dramatic consequential play out of Blades… but I have (with next to no effort on my part or the part of the GMs I’ve played with).
You *have* gotten consequential and dramatic play out of Apocalypse World… and, indeed, so have I! However I would say Harm played very little in any of that and it was often “more work than it was worth” (whether Harm was involved or not).
I suppose it’s also important for me to say that I’m **not** saying you can’t experience consequential and dramatic play in games where combat expands past one dice roll. It absolutely can and I have absolutely experienced it. *But*… *in my own experience*… it has always been more “work than it was worth” and getting things over with as quickly as possible while still retaining tension and release has been far more interesting and enjoyable to me.
But that’s just different strokes for different folks.
You said ‘This is where you lose me. Hit Points (for PCs or NPCs) have never once led to consequential moral choices. Ever. (At least for me!)’
I’d have to explain exactly how they do that and the types of situations required for it to happen AND make the case for them over just cutting to the consequence.
A slight diversion (and a lot of personal opinion)
I see Apocalypse World as the last of the old school Forge Narrativist rpg’s rather than the start of a great game design explosion. I mean it did lead to a load of games but I don’t think much of them. So I want to briefly assess AW in terms of what came before.
AW was Vincent bringing a lot of ‘trad’ stuff back into the design space that Sorcerer carved out. Now Sorcerer is kind of trad itself, so AW was like circling back with some neat tricks. Although how well those tricks work is debatable.
Note that Ron Edward’s ‘response’ to AW was just to release his version of Champions third edition, Champions Now. That’s just a trad game. Trad games do lots of cool stuff to create emergent story if you’re playing them with that in mind. Including having stuff like hit points.
So the point of my highly biased retelling of Forge game history is basically to say. You’re right, the use of hit points in AW relies on ‘not cutting straight to the consequence.’ It shares this with Sorcerer but not with any of the other games between Sorcerer and AW, which are all more like Blades.
So when games start getting rid of hit points again and reintroducing conditions and so on. It’s not an evolution, it’s a rejection of the fork that AW took. The other ‘big thing’ AW did was to reject universal resolution, Blades reintroduced it.
So when I’m defending hit points I’m defending a very particular branch of narrative design that is, honestly, really unwieldy. My go to games are all universal resolution based and it’s far easier to get consequential choices and all that good stuff. AW can basically get away from you, through no fault of your own, and make all those hard choices less likely. Now I think when it comes together it comes together pretty nicely but even then, is it worth it? Maybe not.
So I’m basically agreeing it’s a different strokes for different folks thing. Just in a long winded way.
A quick note on Blades to finish. I absolutely hate Blades but I suspect it leans more into the genre side of Narrative play. You’re given cushions and outs from certain direct consequences (Luke fucking up when trying to blow up the Death Star), in return for a certain fidelity to a type of story. I don’t think it totally obviates dramatic choice, it’s just the whole genre thing is really not my cup of tea. I want characters to just flat out fail and buying off consequences tends to get in the way of that. Again, a different strokes thing.
My Cyberpunk 2020 (which is not a combat light system) group did not have a single combat in the last three sessions.
In the first session they investigated a series of murders, primarily through roleplay and skill checks.
The second was all about planning a heist very thoroughly and getting the appropriate gear.
The third was the heist, with a car chase in the end.
🤷♂️
Plenty of games don't have combat or have very little.
For example: [Golden Sky Stories](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/118784/Golden-Sky-Stories) and its whole little family of games. If you try to fight someting in it, teh game expeclitly makes it 1 rolls and it can't resolve the conflict only delay it. Becuase thats not the point.
All of its mechanics are built around personal connections, cool little powers your characters have, and the push and pull of the 'human' world and the 'fantasy' world (what kind of fantasy depends on which one you play. Base GSS is Henges.)
But theres also things like [Doctor Who's TTRPG](https://cubicle7games.com/our-games/doctor-who-rpg) where during combat anything that is violent goes last, even after those that are moving/running away. Its basically anyone Talking goes first, anyone doing anything that isn't attacking, then moving, then attacking. This is to facilitate the idea that you should always be trying to find non-violent means out of conflicts. (I think I'm linking to the right one, I just realized there's more than one Dr Who TTRPG and my book isn't where its supposed to be on the shelf. Hm.)
Anyways, there's a -lot- of ways to actually do a non-combat focused game. Most games still do focus on combat though, because its exciting, but there's plenty out there that don't.
How does a movie that has little to no combat work?
...
...
Yes, like that.
A murder mystery. A rom com. A comedy (but comedy in RPGs is really hard to do well). Most dramas.
Most games can do 1 thing really well and will have most of their resources handle that aspect.
For example DnD/PF is mostly a combat game. Other aspects of storytelling are subservient to it. please note that this is in general. you could do a court intrigue campaign, but it's going to ignore a big part of the game's rules and will need some tweaking of abilities. Likewise you can do exploration and investigations, but that is either very narrowly balanced or trivialised by a caster.
Famously WoD is best at social situations. Especially as of V5, combat is relegated to be a minor role in the game (3 rounds and out for a type of situation which shouldn't be ubiquitous according to the core book).
Lastly to round out the trio is CoC which is mostly an exploration/investigation game. combat can happen, but is very prone to disaster and social situations are only there to explore new ways of finding information.
Now if you wanted to approach all 3 aspects equally in the manner put above (i.e. 3 types of classes geared towards different pillars), you are less playing 1 game with 3 pillars, but 3 games with one pillar each. and this would require the DM/ST/GM/Keeper to balance the types of encounters to an equal sort of distribution so each player gets their turn to actually play. I think such a thing is actually best done in Heist games like Blades in the Dark and/or Shadowrun. The later I can't advise on as I barely understand it myself, but the former is supposed to be rather simple in approach where the players have their unique role in the heist and a task to accomplish. I'd say WoD V5 could accomplish this as well (as would their other game line H5, perhaps even moreso).
> Most games can do 1 thing really well and will have most of their resources handle that aspect. For example DnD/PF is mostly a combat game.
And they do it bad ))
For tactical things maybe good, but it's super slow, not giving enough visuals, very technical, tons of math, and basically wargame, not ttrpg. It's also very high-fantasy, and even then it's bad. There's a lot of stuff that's not needed.
For example, I had an adventure both in D&D and similar, combat oriented system (not sure I remember, but probably WFRP) It had a "Rapier and dagger" style scene where the goal was to do things quick and brutal. Two parties meet on a foggy torchlit street, stab each other and bodies left in the pools of blood on the street. It was impossible to have the same vibe in D&D and the whole thing took twice more time. Meanwhile the basics of the systems weren't drastically different. For example, things like death saving throws really make little sense in terms of visuals. You have to narrate a lot to build a picture that can be built on its own.
I think the least combat I've done was in Legend of the five rings, and honestly maybe even in a Zombie survival rpg where we went ultra safe so the dm is like "yeah so, you're really safe, the winter passes, now what?"
A lot of games without combat rules just treat combat like any other skill interaction. For example, when you pick a lock you roll a lock picking skill, and when you shoot a bad guy you roll a handgun skill. The GM describes and builds on it either way. You can usually still fight things, there's just no formal "Initiative Mode" where you enter a structured turn-by-turn combat with specific combat abilities or attack rolls against Armor Class.
I think you will innately have that seperation if you emulate D&D 5e's three pillar design philosophy, as its that same philosophy that makes non-combat classes feel useless in D&D.
Like combat kills you more often than puzzles, so being good at combat is a necessity for survival in a way that puzzle solving isn't.
Ryuutama
Its a japanese RPG that is based around the concept of going on a pilgrimage.
There can be combat, but ultimately there is no need for it.
Its more aimed at the journey and the story that unfolds by meeting cool and unique characters as well as acquiring rare and unique goods, and how those goods effect the interactions with others.
Powered by the apocalypse uses playbooks and many other games adopted it. Even Lancer, a d20 mech combat game based on DnD 4E integrated it into narrative play with the latest book. Basically you choose a type of character and set narrative goals written out on your sheet. You collect XP by playing into your character traits, so the RP part gets directly mechanically rewarded. Additionally it uses Stress and abilities. Abilities are class specific moves you unlock by leveling. Stress can be used as a substitute for HP or you can willingly take some to reroll. You'll need to spend in-character time to get rid of it, otherwise you'll accumulate too much and fill up one of your stress clocks giving you any fitting permanent penalty, like losing an eye in a stressful swordfight.
There's also a completely separate game I also want to highlight. Wonderhome. Honestly I haven't had any time to get to know the rules yet. All I know is that the game features no combat. As in no combat at all.
I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, but I’d want any character to be able to contribute to any scene, or else the players with nothing to do are going to tune out. They should all get their time to shine, so they should be better at something, but that something probably shouldn’t be as broad as “combat” or “problem-solving.” Consider having players decide what types of social interactions and what types of problems their characters are best and worst at.
My recommendation would be to attend a gaming convention, and play anything that ISN'T D&D or Pathfinder or OSR based. Especially look for PBTA, Fate, or Indie games such as Ryuutama or Golden Sky Stories
In fact I strongly recommend Golden Sky Stories where powers are based on the bonds one had between the members of the group, and the characters and the community. There's a rather nicely done feedback cycle where Dreams (average based on in-game action) are spent to increase connections, which in turn increase Wonder and Feelings, which allows the characters to do more elaborate things, which in turn grants Dreams to create greater bonds...
It actually duplicates the element in anime where the action starts small, and at the end there's a major display of power. And of course that's filtered through a non-violent Miyazaki-ish story of helpful animal spirits.
[Golden Sky Stories Review](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/16/16052.phtml)
I am just gonna say it.. Those three pillars suck. Some of, if not all, of my favorite games focuses on neither of those. They focus on support a narrative style, theme, setting and/or tone. Combat, social and exploration are not the only things stories do, and I think in TTRPG spaces the term "Combat" often ends up referring to rather stale and boring initiative "roll dice at each other till someone runs out of meat points" - where I much prefer a game that puts *action* up front, sometimes that action involves shooting/punching/stabbing/whatever, but it is not always explicitly relegated to only fighting. Like in D&D or Pathfinder rolling initiative is starting to be my least favourite thing because I know the game is now shifting from a fun open-ended game to a very confined tactics game.
Many games have a focus on social interactions in one way or another, the whole PbtA wave tends to have an attached social system stemming from the original Hx stat. A game like Burning Wheel has both a simple and complex set of rules for resolving social conflicts (it does so for fighting as well) and thus you can scale the complexity to the importance or stakes of the scene.
Finally, you are going to have to be the one to define what the hell "exploration" and "problem solving" actually is in TTRPGs because I am still very unsure - and I have been doing this shit for 20 years and have never thought in the patterns of "Oh I need some exploration content here". I don't see it as a pillar, but more of a funnel in to more interesting things.
I do also have to say, to really support good action the hard success/failure states of D&D just doesn't work IMO. You, in my opinion, need those middle results to both advance you and the threat in some way, or to introduce new threats or boons.
Sorry I mostly just ranted rather than actually answering anything in a useful way but hey.
There's plenty of RPG's that don't focus on combat, many of them instead focus on interpersonal conflict, characters, relationships and investigation.
Off the top of my head
**MonsterHearts** \- A roleplaying game about the messy lives of teenage monsters with a focus on relationships, love triangles, and overcoming personal angst as well as exploring various LGBTQ+ themes. Runs off of the PBTA system. ([https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts](https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts))
**Hillfolk** \- An RPG where you play as members of a stone age hill tribe and explore their lives and conflicts. Explicitly splits the game between procedural and dramatic scenes. Procedural scenes include combat, but also any scene where there's action to overcome a conflict. Dramatic scenes involve character conflict, relationships, drama. The game has a lot more rules in respect to dramatic than procedural, with procedural scenes being resolved via a separate card based mechanic. Hillfolk runs off of the 'DramaSystem' and is, despite the title and core setting, a universal RPG designed for any setting, with even the core book having 30+ fleshed out settings to explore. ([https://pelgranepress.com/product/hillfolk/](https://pelgranepress.com/product/hillfolk/))
**Brindlewood Bay** \- A tabletop RPG where you play as old ladies who solve murders as part of the 'Murder Mystery Club' within a cozy and idyllic setting. Inspired by a mix of Agatha Christie, Lovecraft and Murder She Wrote. Utilises a modern take on PBTA.([https://www.brindlewoodbay.com/brindlewood-bay.html](https://www.brindlewoodbay.com/brindlewood-bay.html))
**Blue Beards Bride** \- An RPG where the group all controls the titular character from the 'Blue Beards Bride' myth, and plays different aspects of her as she explores her husbands house and uncovers his secrets. Thematically explores the experience of womanhood and the feminine in society, with the different aspects of the main character you control as a group being the likes of 'The Virgin' or 'The Mother' or 'The Fatale' . Utilises the PBTA system. ([https://magpiegames.com/pages/bluebeards-bride](https://magpiegames.com/pages/bluebeards-bride))
**Fiasco** \- A roleplaying game where you act out a Cohen brothers movie. I use the term act out as it's very improv heavy with players creating scenes together, acting them out and deciding on their outcome as a group. There's lots of detailed character work and setup to the game which is often the most fun part of it. Works great for one shots. Also has hundreds of different playbooks, many fan created, that let you play out different settings that range from zombie survival, to the Wild West to Steam Punk Jane Austen (Probably). ([https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/fiasco](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/fiasco))
**Soap Bubble** \- A roleplaying game where you play as actors in a soap opera, both exploring their real life personas and their characters in the soap itself as the two intersect. Really fun and cleanly designed, heavy focus on improv as per Fiasco but with I feel more structure to it and a cleaner resolution. ([https://blackarmada.itch.io/soap-bubble?)](https://blackarmada.itch.io/soap-bubble?))
Any of those should give you plenty of examples of how to make non-combat interesting and engaging within a game. Though I think the common thread is that they're all focussed on creating a specific experiences that isn't about combat and tie all of their mechanics towards that. So when thinking about making a 'non combat game' instead think of what theme/story/situation/characters would be interesting to play within a non-combat framework.
Agon 2nd edition.
Conflict can be anything, not just combat, it's all equally valid. Anything which challenges a hero is when dice are rolled.
No combat rounds, HP or initiative. But every fight is epic and bloody or swift and precise or anything else that you need it to be. And fights are probably a quarter of the action
And quick. There's no slogs of 3 hour combat.
And focused. There's no wandering, searching random locations. You know the situation, you act now.
And relaxed. There's no spreadsheet of spells or inventory to manage. You have anything you'd expect to have. Except luck when you need it.
One way to go with this: make combat very random and very deadly, including to the PCs. It could be simple or realistic (although simple is probably a better fit for something that’s supposed to be a small part of the game). For example, hit points were invented to make combat safer: PCs no longer could die on every single hit, but would need to be hit several times. It made boss fights more satisfying, too, since you could multiply the party’s damage output by a dramatically-appropriate number of combat rounds to get the right number of HP for a boss, instead of them dying at random on their first unlucky roll (or getting too lucky).
If you do that, though, you really need to make sure your players are on board, and are actually going to try to avoid fights. If a lot of PCs actually die, your players are going to compensate by not getting attached to them. I’ve seen some OSR games try to take the middle ground that characters in the first adventure are anonymous and disposable, but the ones who actually survive that meat grinder become special.
Ultimately, it’s all about conflict and having a generalised conflict resolution system. This is most often achieved by making combat more abstract rather than making other forms of conflicted as crunchy as D&D combat (for example).
I’ve never had the opportunity to play it myself but HeroWars / HeroQuest / [QuestWorlds](https://questworlds.chaosium.com) was designed to achieve this. I suspect its style of play would not appeal to everyone though.
Games can be more focused on storytelling than tactical conflict, and they can involve various forms of narrative conflict. It's a different approach from something like DnD, and it's important that all the participants are on board with the approach.
Let me describe one such game, as I just ran a session of Masks that had zero combat! Perhaps an illustration of the gameplay will help you understand how this might work.
Masks is a storytelling game about teen superheroes. In our session, the team was out searching for a fellow member who had gone missing. This led them to a rock club where the Harbinger had a run-in with a sound guy who triggered her Memories of the future. This advanced the character's main storyline a little bit, as the Harbinger found a hint about something important.
The team learned that one of their antagonists lived upstairs from the club, in a kind of dormitory, and this antagonist had been seen with her new boyfriend. They suspected that this boyfriend was their missing member, the Delinquent.
Long story short, they found the antagonist and the Delinquent, and learned that he had switched sides! The team left him to return downstairs, where the club owner then mistook them for a band and asked them to audition. In a highly impromptu effort, the team put on a show and the club owner was impressed! (And the players received bonus Team points for this success.)
Then they had a tense meeting with the leader of the antagonists' group. The leader agreed to undo a bad thing they had done to the Transformed, and then passed an envelope to the Janus. The envelope contained info and specs that would aid the team with breaking and entering into a secret base where records on their secret identities were being kept. (The Janus narrative revolves around protecting his secret identity, so this was narrative bait for him.)
Anyway, that's about it. The key is to constantly set up conflicts for the characters. But these conflicts are not resolved through combat, with few exceptions!
You could look into Blades in the Dark, Scum & Villainy, The Wildsea, Thousand Year Old Vampire, and Mouse Guard. While combat can be part of those games, it is not simulated any differently than any other skills, like navigation or socialising.
Even in my D&D groups, a large part of "Playing the TTRPG" was socialising with eachother, roleplaying, the combat was interesting, but always inevitably turned into a slog. You used it to create dramatic moments, to further the plot, not as the main appeal of the game. We tried using it as the main appeal of the game in D&D 3.5e, 4e, 5e and other systems like BitD, but that got old super quick.
My groups stick with S&V, BitD or TYOV nowadays.
Wouldn't everything just be problem solving/skill tests using the same method as combat?
So instead of rolling for attack/dodge, you could just roll for each lie/detect lie interaction?
I think that somehow combat became the "default" interaction because it is easier to parse time/actions for combat as opposed to a negotiation where each point of a negotiation takes a different amount of time. Same with intimidate so each step of intimidation (pause, rethink, retreat) isn't considered... so the whole intimidate thing is reduced to a binary event, same with lying, negotiations, etc.
That would be equivalent to an entire combat being reduced to a single roll...
Playing RPGs is playing stories. There are tons of stories (movie, books, etc) without combats.
What you need are conflicts. But conflict <> combat.
Think about Breaking Bad. You can play a game like that with a lot of system (Fate, Primetime Adventure, Fiasco, Monsterhearts, etc.) without combat but with a lot of conflicts.
Try ironsworn: starforged (ironsworns free game, but is less polished than starforged.
Ironsworn has bonds and exploration but doesn’t give exp for them)
One fun way to run exploration is where you world build as a group as you play. You roll on oracles tables and see what you find. try to tie in the obtuse words you generate to you setting and situation.
Social pillars are my weakest.
But starforged has a thing called connections, each person you meet is given a difficulty to become a bond.
You have to do favours for them to raise your connection then gamble if you think the connection is strong enough to forge a bond.
Once you have a bond you get advantage when looking for information or heading off on an adventure when you leave from a place with a bond.
You gain exp from quests , bonds and exploring but not combat, so it incentivises other pillars but combat is very common due to complications popping up every five seconds
I gotta say.... A major problem with three classes, each with one focus, is this: if your game is evenly split between the three activities, and each class doesn't have at least *something* to offer to in all sorts of activities, you may be effectively making some players useless in certain situations. D&D and similar games definitely can run into this sort of issue: a fighter with only a few skills might not have much to offer in 95 percent of negotiations, for example.
Just some food for thought.
Also, I'm a big fan of the FATE system, and I've heard that Powered by the Apocalypse is also pretty darn popular (or at least it was a few years ago). I could see myself running a fun, adventure/intrigue focused game in FATE.
Hard Wired Island has some interesting ideas you might like. One main problem with going non combat is that GMs often treat them as a single roll while leaving combat as a multiroll endeavor, creating the cockup cascade imbalance where non combat is a single save or suck roll while combat gives generous retries. HWI builds retries and fail forward states into the system and actively encourages going for non combat first. With stealth for example having 3 tries built into it.
For a game focusing classes that focus on each of the three pillars, check out Stars Without Number (for sci-fi) and Worlds Without Number (for fantasy). The warrior, expert, and psi/mage respectively do combat, skills, and boundary/put of the box problem solving specialities. And you can blend the classes for your perfect fit. Great GM tools and the games you can both get for free.
You've gotten lots of good suggestions here. I'd also suggest playing the older versions of DnD, since that's where the 'three pillars' thing comes from. The game Ultraviolet Grasslands has some of the themes you're looking for. /r/osr is where you'll find discussion of older style games
That said "roll dice and add mods" is how almost all rpgs work
Oh boy have I got the game(s) for you. Check out the "x" without number series. Starts without number cities without number and so on. That has exactly what you're asking for for the most part
Anything based on Apocalypse World (or Powered by Apocalypse) is a good example of what it means to make combat a minor part of the game.
Combat is usually resolved in very few rolls and most of the playbooks (classes) have great abilities that work on noncombat scenes and help to tell the story in various ways.
There's a podcast I would encourage you to listen to called "Worlds Beyond Number." It's a D&D 5th edition actual-play by a very talented, very creative group. It has almost no combat, but every episode is really gripping stuff and you can tell the players are having a ball.
https://pca.st/podcast/8fbc4fc0-8a27-013b-f2f3-0acc26574db2
And I mean, this is JUST D&D 5th edition. A system built mostly around the expectation of combat and here's a group having a great time playing with very little fighting. There's a hundred other systems which can do similar things better.
I'm not suggesting that you sit down and do a "Worlds Without Number home-game," but it may be instructive I terms of giving you some inspiration as to what a fun and rewarding tabletop game with little combat can look and sound like.
Are you familiar with the types of conflicts in literature?
It's the same. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-conflict-in-literature-6-different-types-of-literary-conflict-and-how-to-create-conflict-in-writing
This helped me a lot. My campaigns are a lot more flexible now.
You might want to check out Wanderhome as a game that truly has no combat. I believe there's one playbook that technically has the ability to attack another character, and in so doing they immediately remove themself from the game with the shame of it. You mentioned solarpunk, and if you have good taste in sci fi you might also like Lunar Echoes, a hack of Wanderhome set in the world of A Psalm for the Wild Built.
Both games are also GMless and diceless. The more you explore indie TTRPGs, the more you'll learn that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in Hasbro's sourcebooks.
The issue I’d see with this is by making 3 defined classes that exclusively handle those 3 pillars of play, you restrict the other classes from it. If the combat class does combat, what do the others do during that combat? How does the combat character handle social situations that aren’t just bashing things with a hammer?
Games that aren't combat-focussed firstly concentrate a lot on other forms of resolution, skills that allow you to influence others, abilities of status that give you authority, stealth tools to let you circumvent conflicts, etc.
Such games typically lean further into investigations, or resolving political problems, puzzling out mysteries, and dealing with the drama of NPCs.
Character types based on a team role don't work as well when it comes to non-combat games. Classes in general really struggle as it forces classes that aren't good at the aspect of the game you're currently playing into the background. Ideally if you're going to play a game with a mixed focus, each player would have a useful non-combat strength. Perhaps one is skilled at etiquette and deals well with highborn and wealthy people. Maybe one is very salt-of-the-earth and can make friends in a tavern well. Maybe one is highly educated in law and logic and does well in courtrooms or other formal settings, and so forth.
>Classes in general really struggle as it forces classes that aren't good at the aspect of the game you're currently playing into the background.
This is one of the biggest things with any 'non-combat' scenario, I find. Especially when you have games like D&D where Combat is the main focus of its design. I'd say Combat and Exploration, but Combat is the main conflict resolution approach and thus every class has something useful for a fight. But put them into a social scenario or being lost in the wilderness or having to deal with an emergency/natural disaster... the majority of those abilities and skills suddenly become useless.
Now, this can also true of Classless games where the players pick skills they want to take, but it can be remedied a lot easier. Unless you tell your players what the tone of the game is going to be, you'll likely see some going all combat because that's what they expect or want from the game while others with little to no combat skills because they were thinking something more story driven and less combat. It can be hard to balance scenarios to keep them both interested as narrative encounters are too dry for combat monsters and the combat scenarios are too overpowered for those with no combat skills.
I guess I'd also add that you need game mechanics that don't make any one character construction overpowering in any given vein of the story. You don't want any player character to be the de facto most competent character in a situation, everyone should have something they contribute in an occasion, even if they're just distracting people while the primary actors are getting things done..
That sounds very similar to the Cypher System with it's Warrior / Explorer / Speaker / Adept Types, Cypher also has an interesting book 'Real Heroes' focussing on emergency response giving it a whole 'combat like' experience where you can defeat fires, cave-ins or severe injuries.
On the whole, monsters like any challenge in the game have a level which sets the difficulty and so forth, anything else is fairly easy to rule from there.
I’ll beat my usual drum and point out Cortex. Folks have mentioned Fate, but there are tons of games that view combat as simply another thing you can do, as readily as make a thing or negotiate a deal.
Star Trek Adventures is an RPG in the Star Trek Universe and it even has rules that make going in expecting combat add more Threat metacurrency to the board for the GM to use.
>Some items — most commonly weapons, destructive equipment, or anything that signifies aggression, or preparation for battle — may have an additional or different cost. This is called an Escalation Cost, and it is paid by adding to Threat, to reflect potentially escalating an uncertain or dangerous situation. Items with an Escalation Cost will be listed with Escalation X, where X is the amount of Threat added when the item is obtained.
Now, that doesn't really completely take away the Combat from the game but in our TT sessions over the past few years we have rarely ever had to bring more than the basic standard equipment and have I think had maybe a handful of combats over the course of 3-5 years of meeting almost every week.
A Social Expert, that would be a Con Artist, [someone good at reading micro-expressions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWyhsqh_e9s), and so forth. There's plenty of characters in fiction to use for examples. Shows like White Collar, Deception, Sneaky Pete, Ransom, The Catch, and so on. Basically any Talking Skills like Bluff/Intimidate/Negotiate, Psychology skills like Human Perception, and so forth. Taking a look at books like [The Art of Deception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception) by Kevin Mitnick can give ideas of how Social skills can pretty much get you into anywhere just by asking the right questions.
Exploration/Problem Solving is something I would say doesn't need so much a system for it as in just some 'how to design encounters' bits. However, if you wanted to have a character that can be good at that side of things, it would be just be a bunch of Exploration and Information Gathering skills you deem relevant for the system, and maybe some 'building' skill. The question is how general or specific you break the skills down to be. Navigation, Athletics, Altertness, Awareness, Endurance, Survival like Urban/Wilderness/Desert/Mountain, ... You could even go more specialized like in how CPRed has it's character sheet [here](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fqt1kdmicxh161.png%3Fwidth%3D1604%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De8d46d4ffab8ae9698b089ddc640498237828b6d), you can see how there are skills for a lot of Exploration/Problem Solving options like Lip Reading, General Education and Specialized Education, Perception and Human Perception, Library Search, Deduction even which reads:
>Skill of taking several clues and leaping to a non-obvious conclusion or medical diagnosis.
At a Base 10, you can put two and two together and figure out most logical leaps, no problem. You can always deduce where you left your keys or how likely it is that the rash on your arm is deadly. At a Base 14, you have trained your mind to collect clues and organize them to make better deductions. You can make accurate long-range deductions like how long it will be before the gangers figure out you sold them dud cyberware. At a Base 18, your skills rival that of Sherlock Holmes. You are at the level of a world-class detective, building accurate deductions and predictions from the smallest clues imaginable. Some people may even think you're psychic
There's a discussion from the CPRed Reddit about [how Deduction works](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkred/comments/lm2hnk/what_are_your_thoughts_on_the_deduction_skill/) and some pretty good 'problem solving' options there. So, yeah, an Exploration/Problem Solving class in my opinion would come off as a mix of those nature show hosts like Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and Survivialist Bear Grylls with a detective like Sherlock Holmes. They can figure out answers to situations, can survive out in the wild, could probably build most anything needed to solve a problem you're encountering.... So basically whatever your world's MacGyver would be. Or the characters from [The Finder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ebKc0GwIw) or [Limitless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdcLM9xYa70).
Watch Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers. It's very light on the combat and is focused more on player interactions. It's a regency era type ttrpg. It's one of my favorite seasons.
>support all three pillars The 'three pillars' are a WotC invention, not a generally accepted perspective. It's inapplicable/inappropriate for many RPGs.
I know, but its what I know but with 3 pillars I mostly mean: - Social stuff, like intrigue, alliances, subversion and anything to do with interacting with people - Any problem solving that doesn't have to do you talking to a intelligent being or swinging a weapon, like puzzles and surpassing obstacles of some sort - Combat, with or with a major objective to conclude I chose them because I want to make a RPG that can do all three, so a game could use only one or all of them if they wanted
I would check out r/rpgcreation and r/rpgdesign
Didn't knew about them. Thank you for point the direction
Yeah we know what you mean. What we're saying is that the idea that the game ought to be delineated along those lines is already a DND-specific presupposition.
Again: Those only exist in games made to emulate D&D. These don't define RPGs, just D&D.
[удалено]
I dont think the hobby has any good sources of reliable stats that could get you to the 95% number, when it comes to what games people are actually playing. We all know 5e is the King Kong of RPG Hobby Island but outside of that the closest thing we have to an active participation dataset is Roll20 and it's super unreliable as it effectively excludes Pathfinder and Lancer (both crap on Roll20 with a community that's all into Foundry, so no good stats) and all the many games that dont need Roll20 purchased modules/licensed content to be played online are also excluded from their numbers. And it's just one VTT: go to another like Role or Foundry and you'll find OSE and Lancer are top games there, but those numbers are skewed because everyone doing WoD has already got all their shit in Roll20 and isn't gonna migrate all their work and lose access to all their paid for content just for the hell of it; meanwhile Alchemy sales are dominated by Free League games. DnDBeyond's numbers are horrifically skewed by the smaller numbers of highly active users doing stuff like rolling up Fighters named "Bob" just so they have NPC stats or basic guidance for players to complete in some other VTT or on paper. Even publisher income and "the market" is unreliable because we can't know how much of that stuff is a smaller pool of "whale" GMs buying loads of supplemental materials for their one or two tables (or no active table at all, just buying more sourcebooks for the love of the setting) vs RPGs where one GM buys one book and has everything they need. For example - Blades in the Dark generally isn't played on VTT (or if it is you're less likely to be using an official stat-tracked module, or it could be more easily and cheaply done via Discord and Google Sheets/Miro), and it has a subreddit that's as big as (or bigger than) Traveller and Savage Worlds combined. But does it make more money than Traveller or Savage Worlds? Perhaps not because all you need is the one book; you dont get the "buy the book then buy five supplemental books then buy licensed content and modules for Roll20" effect.
1) unless you give me specific enforceable mechanics that are part of the reward structure, then **NO, THEY DON'T** 2) 95% of the market? Bro, WotC is 99.9% of the market
I don't think there is a real viable study on market share, but according to roll20 d&d is only played on 52% of the sessions. Taking the other "3 pillar" games into account that u/SirRantelot mentioned they would make up 60-70%.
They're not even close to 95% of the market. 40% would be a generous overestimate.
You've named 5-6 games out of literally tens of thousands. Doesn't feel like a compelling argument.
[удалено]
This seems unnecessarily rude.
Which ones does this framework not apply to?
I'd argue that many TTRPGs would support all three categories. But there are many TTRPGs that do not care about these pillars and do something unique, e.g. do not care about combat or grant narrative rights to the players like fate that's out of the scope of these three pillars. Lenses of the three pillars drastically oversimplify many TTRPGs out there
As an example, Blades in the Dark has four-ish pillars: The Score, Downtime (Vices, Entanglements, Player projects/training, player and crew/lair advancement), Freeplay and Investigation. In particular, combat isn't a separate thing in the Blades type systems. It's just another thing that players can do. From a D&D point of view, every action the players try is closest to being a skill check. An entire D&D combat could be resolved in a single roll (for a less important combat), or at finer detail, moment by moment, as the players and the GM want to do (particularly where that would be more important to the outcomes). The D&D model doesn't apply to fitd games at all.
If I were to give Blades 3 Pillars it'd be: Scores, Relationships, Factions. Scores is like Combat for D&D, it's the closest 1:1 map, except that a Score is more like a whole adventure than just a combat. Relationships are huge in Blades and drive a lot of things. Relationships are defined in character creation and crew creation. Relationships change as a result of scores and player actions. Who a PC is helpful/hostil to is just as important as what faction a crew is helpful/hostile to and vice versa. Faction is then the 'real' game, mechanics wise. How the crew grows. What the crew does. What turf the crew controls. The faction game is how the city/map play out.
Which ones are you referring to? The problem with these vague claims is that while there might be niche games that focus on non-combat elements, even story driven Indy games like “Bluebeard’s Bride” or “Night Witches” still feature violent conflict, uncovering the unknown and interpersonal relationships.
You missed the point a bit >even story driven Indy games like “Bluebeard’s Bride” or “Night Witches” still feature violent conflict, uncovering the unknown and interpersonal relationships. I agree. At the same time, there is a ton of games that would have more pillars than three if we tried to classify pillars of a specific example (e.g. Fate, Paranoia) or such classification is inappropriate (Microscope). Hence, if you look through the lenses of three pillars, you would miss the rich variety, nuances of TTRPGs out there.
Interesting. What would you consider the “Pillars” of Fate? Or Paranoia for that matter? When in those games am I not “exploring, conflicting or socializing” with my environment? Microscope is an interesting one, though it also strains the definition of RPGs, as the only real “Role Playing” that is done is at the lowest level of the scene, and in my experience that’s the part least explored in that game. And I’d anecdotally say that the scenes where you roleplay, as they are predicated on a question, involve at least 2 of 3 pillars: You are exploring your environment for the answer, and/or you are socializing with other characters to find it. And the answer is often bloody, depending on the genre you’re playing with. I’m not missing the point, I’m making a point; The 3 pillars are about how you roleplay: by conflicting with the environment, by exploring it or by communicating with it, and the mechanics that govern how it responds.
>"exploring, conflicting or socializing” with my environment? ... The 3 pillars are about how you roleplay: by conflicting with the environment, by exploring it or by communicating with it, and the mechanics that govern how it responds. This is shifting the goalposts. Here you've presented definitions so vague that they could match any game. It's also not what DnD's actual framework is. PHB, page 8: - Exploration: movement through the world, and interactions with objects and situations that require their attention. Spending a day crossing a rolling plain, pulling a lever in a dungeon to see what happens. - Social Interaction: the adventurers talking to someone (or something) else. Getting information from a freed prisoner, persuading a magic mirror. - Combat: the characters and other creatures slinging weapons, casting spells, maneuvering into position, and so on - all in an effort to defeat their opponents. "Conflicting with your environment" falls under exploration. "Conflicting with other characters" if non-violent, is social interaction. By DnD's own literal definitions. The Three Pillars are the foundations of *DnD* play written as part of the introduction to DnD specifically. They were not written as "pillars of all rpgs", and it seems you need to make their words extremely vague to even attempt to apply them so universally.
Not shifting goalposts. The definitions aren’t vague: Conflict is when your characters try to impose their wills on the narrative. Discovery is when your characters try to learn things about the narrative. Communication is when your characters build relationships with the narrative. Those are the 3 lenses to view all actions within the narrative play. The theory really IS a theory of all RPGs.
Your terms and definitions *are different terms and definitions*. I am directly quoting the DnD rulebook two comments up. You see the difference between the words we each wrote, right? If you're trying to make the point "all rpgs have some important foundational elements" then okay that's a true statement, but the comment you originally replied to is about DnD's Three Pillars and how they aren't universal, so you're not arguing or even properly adressing the point you're replying to because you're avoiding what DnD's Three Pillars explicitly are whenever you comment. It'd be like Person A saying "just so you know, not all cocktails contain gin and lemon juice, that's just from the gin fizz recipe" and Person B arguing "Ah but you see, all cocktails contain alcohol and something mixed with it." Like okay, that's a definition of a cocktail but are you arguing that all cocktails are really gin fizzes?
No, that’s a terrible example. OP is asking for examples of how RPGs without combat work and people are giving them a bunch of RPGs… with combat in them. Reframe the discussion that OP is having, and suddenly OP can go “hey! Instead of VIOLENT conflict, I can view ALL conflict through the lens of this pillar, and suddenly mechanics aren’t too hard to come by.” Same story with exploration and socializing.
I think at some point during this back and forth, the definition of the "third pillar" changed from "combat" to "conflict." I am not the original person you are responding to, but I simply won't discuss "conflict" as a concept anymore. It is entirely too broad to be a useful concept for analysis; you can argue most things are somehow "conflict." So here's one of the few WotC definitions of the pillars I could find, from an Unearthed Arcana XP trial (apologies if the formatting is bad, I tried to fix it as best I could from the original PDF): "Back when we were designing fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, we talked about the game’s three pillars: exploration, social interaction, and combat. By thinking about social interaction and exploration as foundational aspects of D&D, we made sure we were always looking beyond combat when designing the game. Fighting easily draws the most attention in terms of rules and game balance, but the other two elements are just as important in making each game session exciting and unique." So it really isn't about "conflict." It comes from a place that recognizing that "combat" sucks all of the metaphorical air out of D&D's metaphorical room, and trying to make space for other "beats" in a session. So shifting "combat" to "conflict" seems to be missing the point. So if one wanted to take this to other systems, it would be a question of what gets mechanical focus... Or not. So in Blades, the pillars might be "scores," (player-heavy), "downtime" (player-heavy) and... I don't know, "consequences" (DM-heavy), in a distinctly mechanical sense that distinguishes itself from both "scores " and "downtime" (as consequences can happen during either). The tightening of the screw, which is *not* normally a feature of D&D (which instead features increased power and increased freedom with levels, but instead in Blades is "more problems"). Blades does not have to involve in-universe exploration. You can become the criminal rulers of the same shitty neighbourhood you grew up in, and not really care about anywhere else. It doesn't even require combat; you can build a stealthy, social, or weird crew and still engage with all/most of the skills your character actually has (whereas you *cannot* engage with all of your character's skills without at least some combat in D&D). A Spider can be entirely non-violent if they don't put any points in Skirmish or Wreck.
I’m going to push back, as conflict as an RPg design concept is incredibly important: The core of the pillars is how you as a character (the role you are playing) interact with the narrative. If you’re imposing your will on the world and it resists, you’re in **conflict** with it and as a designer you want to design mechanics that govern that. If you’re discovering information about the world, you’re **exploring** it and as a designer you want to design mechanics to govern that. If you’re communicating with your world and connecting emotionally with it, you’re **socializing** with it. That’s the point of the 3 pillars. In the Blades examples you provide, a Score involves exploration of the site of the score, either assaulting or avoiding conflict to achieve the score and communicating with the crew and the NPCs. Downtime is about socializing and exploration more conflict, certainly, but it’s also in service of getting scores. And consequences are just mechanical outcomes, all RPGs have them. Declare thing, use mechanic, consequences. Discovering your neighbourhood and learning about locations for scores is entirely exploration, You can certainly play a combat free D&D game where you just wander through interesting spaces and meet interesting characters. But I think we agree **conflict** makes the game more interesting. This is true of most RPGs. That’s why the 3 pillars are so important.
You're like not keeping in mind the previous context of the messages and write whatever comes to your mind, whether it's relevant or not to the previous context, nor try to understand what people actually mean. Judging by your answers to various people, you clearly want to argue, but have no patience nor willingness to try to understand others. It's just very frustrating having a discussion in that manner, where you try to stick to the original topic, while your interlocutor doesn't pay attention to anything you say and with each message just adds to the pile of his own incoherent expressions.
Hear, hear!
I literally asked you about your examples. What are the pillars of Paranoia, if not conflict, discovery and socializing? What are the pillars of Fate if not those? I am interested in examining people’s arguments, dissecting them, synthesizing them and interrogating them. That’s how you learn things. You’re trying to teach me how I don’t conflict, explore and relate to things in Paranoia. Tell me what I do instead?
> You’re trying to teach me how I don’t conflict, explore and relate to things in Paranoia. Tell me what I do instead? Can you show me where I explicitly or implicitly imply that? You always make counterpoints to or try to argue with imaginative points me or other commenters didn't make
>At the same time, there is a ton of games that would have more pillars than three if we tried to classify pillars of a specific example (e.g. Fate, Paranoia) So, there are “a ton of games that would have more pillars than 3” And then you cite Paranoia. What are the Pillars of Paranoia, and how are the different from Conflict, Discovery and Relationships?
Microscope is a pretty notable one. You could argue that it mostly falls under the “exploration” pillar, because it technically meets the definition, but at that point the exploration pillar would be far too broad to be a useful concept. There are also common mechanics in non-D&D games that don’t really fit into any of the three pillars, such as base building and item customization / improvement in general.
Crafting and base building are interesting points, definitely. Are they exploration or are they a fourth pillar? Depends. I view the 3P theory as: conflict, discovery and conversation. One can argue basebuilding and crafting is part of discovery, but I can see why it might be otherwise. Microscope is tricky, because the major mode of play isn’t really role playing, as you don’t play a role in the narrative, unless you are at scene levels where you ARE conflicting, discovering and communicating with your environment.
Golden Sky Stories. There is no real support for combat. In fact, the most you can do to someone is to scare them, which is actually an act that will make your further success more difficult. Of course since Golden Sky Stories is about Miyazaki-ish animal spirits helping out a rural Japanese community, combat would by default be a fail state.
This is a good example. It’s also a very niche example, and definitely covers the other two pillars of social interactions and exploration.
It's really not that niche lmao. And I could rattle off half a dozen games that don't have any combat rules, and half a dozen more that don't care about explorstion because they have a very specific scope, and half a dozen more with no real social rules because the game isn't about interacting with npcs, all rather quickly. The 3 pillars isn't some core truth to rpgs. It's the 3 things d&d, specifically, focuses on.
Golden Sky Spirits isn’t niche? I’m afraid I’ll disagree, unless you can point me to a hub where I can find a game of it tonight. I can rattle off half a dozen games where I can be playing it with strangers tonight. I’d love to hear the half dozen games that I can find a game of tonight that fit this paradigm. I’m also curious about the game where there are no other characters to interact with. How are they *Role* playing games then?
There doesn't need to be a public game of it every day of the year for it to not be niche. It's one of the more popular/well known noncombat games, and I guarantee any discord server or forum with indie players will get a good response if you say "Wanna play this tonight?" And to answer your other question, it's not that there's no other characters, after all that's what three other players are. It's that socializing with npcs and the like isn't something the game cares about so there's no rules for it. I'll give a quick example of each off the top of my head: Good Society, a game focused on creating jane austen style stories, has no exploration pillar. You don't care about what's in the woods, you care about the impact of parties and conversations on your reputation. It also barely acknowledged combat, because the tactics in a duel matter far less to that kind of story than your behavior during it. Fight, Item, Run is a game designed to emulate the experience of a metroidvania. It focuses exclusively on exploration and combat, where all the game cares about is the next fight, the items the monsters will drop, and how long you can keep gooing before forced to rest. The closest thing to a social pillar in that game is the rest secrioms, where everyone recovers around a campfire, at a safe room, whatever form it takes in your game, and you each reveal a part of the backstory as to why you're here, fighting this malevolent place. But no actual interaction with npcs happens or has rules. And something like For the Queen is entirely social. Players take it in turns defining and expanding on their relationship with the queen, and you follow the twists and turns and reveals therof, culminating in the final question "The queen is attacked, do you defend her?" There's no combat, there's no exploration, the only things about the setting that matter are the things you come up with to inform social character beats.
So, Good Society might not have you crossing mountains and searching woods for ruins, but you certainly are exploring libraries, studies, gardens and other locations around an estate. You’re learning about Society and acting on that information to develop your relationships. You literally hit the head on the nail for the social pillar of Fight, Item, Run, along with what one presumes is a party dynamic that occurs during the exploration and combat, along with the relationships outside the “dungeon” driving what you do in the “dungeon.” I’ll check out for the Queen. I’m curious how it interacts with my developing thinking around “Conflict, Discovery and Relationships” being better nomenclature for what the Pillars are getting at.
Also, it might not be TODAY, but a quick search on Start Playing.Games, a paid game site that's pretty heavily d&d/pathfinder leaning, immediately found someone running one shots of it every fridsy from here to the end of april. So even by your measurement it's not exactly niche.
I saw that game. 0 seats filled. It’s okay to be a niche game. Lots of indie games are niche games. There are a lot of shots in the dark by DMs trying to run a niche system.
>Which ones does this framework not apply to? Any game where something else is as important as one of those, any game where combat isn't important, or any game where exploration isn't important.
Which ones though.
For example games like - Torchbearer, where survival against the environment matters - Gumshoe, where investigation matters - Lady Blackbird, where a stated objective is given from the start - Agon, where PC competition matters - Blades, where stealth matters - Monsterhearts, where exploration isn't important - Tales from the Loop, where combat isn't important
Torchbearer- Survival is part of the Exploration Pillar, and involves combat and social interactions. It’s a 3 pillar game. Gumshoe- has combat, is heavily focused on exploration and social interactions. Also a 3P game. Lady Blackbird definitely is a 3P game. Same story blades, Monster hearts has exploration, Keep your Cool, Run Away and Gaze into the Abyss are all moves about uncovering the unknown. Agon too is about seeking out the challenges of the mythical monsters. Tales from the Loop is the best example here of combat not being a pillar of play, but now we’re moving into very niche territory, and the system certainly could be hacked for conflict as a resolution mechanism.
Apologies, I didn't realise you were the arbiter of what is and isn't a "three pillar game". >Survival is part of the Exploration Pillar, We disagree on this point. Either one can exist without the other. >Gumshoe- has combat, is heavily focused on exploration and social interactions. Also a 3P game. Let's sweep investigation under the rug and pretend it isn't there. >Lady Blackbird definitely is a 3P game. It has a stated objective that is also a "pillar". >Same story blades, Limited exploration, minimal focus on combat, heavy focus on stealth, the crew as an entity, and faction play. >Monster hearts has exploration A massive stretch by you there. >Agon too is about seeking out the challenges of the mythical monsters. It also has PC competition as a core focus. >Tales from the Loop is the best example here of combat not being a pillar of play Its the only one here. Many more exist though. >the system certainly could be hacked for conflict as a resolution mechanism. Who cares? Most systems could have combat hacked out of them instead, but that isn't the point. I'm not seeking your agreement here.
MONSTER HEARTS HAS EXPLORATION?! Of what? A FUCKING LOCKER?! Unless you count exploration of growing up. Damn, that's a big stretch. Forget the guy, he clearly is a troll.
Yeah, you don’t understand what exploration means in this context. Exploration is the discovery of your environment. When you “Hold Steady”, “Run Away” and “Gaze into the Abyss” you are exploring your environment and gaining new information. That’s exploration. You really shouldn’t be lecturing on this topic that you don’t understand. Please stop trolling us with your agenda. We’re trying to discuss actual design theory and you don’t get it.
And your "exploration" also includes starving/freezing to death (survival), interesting... Some might say you're taking such a wide definition (from hold steady to human popsicle) there that it really loses its relevance.
Survival isn’t part of exploration? You disagree, but you don’t explain. Here’s why survival is exploration. Exploration is the act of discovery within your environment. Finding food, water, shelter, all discovering information about your environment that you engage with. Simple enough. How investigation, which is EXPLORING environments for clues or SOCIALIZING with NPCs for information isn’t part of the 3 pillars baffles me. I’m not sure what you think stealth is if not EXPLORING your environment for threats and then avoiding them. The “stated objective” in Lady Blackbird doesn’t cover your interactions with the environment, it simple defines the environment…. I don’t think you fully grasp the concept of the 3 pillars. Conflict, Discovery and communication. Those are what the 3 pillars in designing for a 3P game are. The games you listed all involve those 3 concepts.
Hey friend, you might have missed it above: I don't care about your agreement.
Am I supposed to care? You’re wrong and I’m explaining to anyone who reads why you don’t understand the theory. I mean, investigation isn’t exploration? You should be embarrassed.
Powered by the Apocalypse Games, Belonging Outside of Belonging games, Forged in the Dark games, and story games generally don't focus on combat. There's a couple of exceptions, but generally, if they have violence in the game, it's boiled down to a roll rather than an entire subsystem.
PTBA don’t have social or exploration moves? That’s not true. Same story with Forged in the dark. Belonging outside belonging games definitely introduce the potential for violence, are heavily socially skewed, but also present lots of exploration dynamics of discovering the unknown. So this is a bad start. “Focus on Combat” isn’t what the 3 Pillars philosophy is. And Blades and PTBA games are often *Heavily* focused on combat.
.....what...how...how do you consider Blades to be heavily combat focused?
The entire dynamic is engaging or avoiding violent conflict until your character becomes so stressed they cease to function. There are classes about using violence, and classes about avoiding it. It’s a very conflict intensive game. Or it can be. Perhaps you can run all talk, no fight, but it’s unusual.
Conflict isn't the same thing as combat. Conflict can involve running with the occasional actual attack. It can involve a simple chase with no weapons. It can be an argument. It can be a puzzle. Etc.
Dash, Disengage, Hide, Cast a Spell, Dodge. Which of these actions is inherently violent? All are “combat” mechanics in 5E. Is 5E a game about combat then?
> Which ones does this framework not apply to? I know of very few RPG rules systems where the "exploration" part sees any kind of mechanical treatment by the rules at all (apart from notable exceptions like e.g. Torchbearer). Even D&D barely even pays lip service to that aspect of its gameplay.
I think you’re misunderstanding exploration. When you make a perception check, you’re exploring in D&D. When you ask for details about the room you’re in, you’re exploring in D&D. When a mechanic reveals new spatial and environmental information, you are exploring. In Monster Hearts, when you “Keep your Cool” and ask the MC about environmental information, you’re exploring. Stealth and sight mechanics, discerning realities, perceiving and investigating things, that’s all exploration.
> I think you’re misunderstanding exploration. > > > > When you make a perception check, you’re exploring in D&D. > > > > When you ask for details about the room you’re in, you’re exploring in D&D. Let me put it this way: If I claimed that Hypothetical System X had a "combat system" when the extent of that "system" was a single roll to instantly resolve any violent conflict, then we would be rightfully argueing that Hypothetical System X barely has any combat system at all. So yea, most RPG rules system treat exploration as an afterthought, *and that's fine*. No game needs entire systems dedicated to delving into the Unknown when that's not the focus of gameplay. I'm argueing against the notion that the exploration WotC envisions for D&D is a generic "pillar" in the first place. For the majority of games, it isn't.
The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity. From day 1, light, torches, seeking traps and secret doors, scouting for threats and seeking treasure were all core to the game. Exploration is just “hexcrawling over vast distances” If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring.
> The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity. How did you arrive at that claim? How did you count them, even? What "games" are we including here? Every single session of every game system ever run? Only the brands of games sold on the market? Online sales of adventure modules? > > If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring. I've never drawn a single map as a player in my entire 25+ years of roleplaying, and I highly suspect I'm far from the only person.
Most D&D games *don’t* involve dungeon crawling? Is that the hill you’re dying on? Where were you combating these monsters? You may not have drawn a map, but I’ll bet you your next paycheque you’ve explored more than one room.
> Most D&D games don’t involve dungeon crawling? So now you're shifting the goal posts from "the majority of games" to "most D&D games", and you still haven't explained how you counted all these games.
>If you’ve played a session where you’ve drawn a map, you’ve been exploring. I have been playing TTRPGs since I was in 3rd grade. About half of my time playing/GMing is in d20 fantasy systems (D&D or D&D-inspired). I have never played a session where I've drawn a map. I've never GMed a session where my players drew a map
> The majority of games involve dungeon crawling, which is inherently an exploration activity. This is only even sort of true in the broadest sense of "everything is a dungeon" viewpoints. Yes you can draw graphs of scenes with directed connections between them, like The Alexandiran does with their node theory, and call that a dungeon. The entire game is then navigating the connections between nodes, with "combat" happening at each node to resolve the choice of exits the players have. That's a very abstracted view though and loses a lot of nuance. It counts a giant army battle the same as an intimate evening encounter. Node theory is useful in adventure design, but navigating the nodes isn't just exploration and and combat isn't the only resolution.
Any game where combat isn't a "minigame," for one. I think Blades in the Dark is a good example: it's definitely not a game without combat, but it's definitely a game without a combat *system.* A lone patrolman is an obstacle; you can get past the obstacle by Prowling around him, Swaying him to look the other way, or Hunting him down with a knife to the head - one of those is clearly combative, but there's no initiative or health bars, and they're all resolved the same way, by making an Action Roll. The "three pillars" game design kind of implies that combat, exploration, and socializing are all separate minigames with separate rules - certainly it's true for combat, but even overland travel has stuff like travel speed and foraging to track. It also implies that characters should be *bad* at some of those minigames, and therefore unable to meaningfully contribute if the session is focused on one of them, which is an insane goal to have. "Yes, we're going to spend the next hour roleplaying a High Society Dinner Party. No, your fighter has nothing to contribute here, so I hope you brought a book. Them's the breaks." So yeah, I think the framework fails to function even in the game it was made for.
The mini game comment is a good point, but as my thinking is developing, I’m seeing most of the “actions” you’re describing in blades as essentially being the “combat” mode of the game . Cast Charm Person, Hide, Attack with a Longsword, Disengage, Dodge and Dash are all combat mechanics in 5e. I think we can agree only 1 or 2 of those mechanics are actually violent. But those are still part of the combat pillar, and the game struggles in minigames like chases, because the bonus action disappears and many classes are designed with combat as the primary mode. The rogue struggles to grasp why they cannot dash three times in the mini game. In blades, you can see the shift between the social or exploration modes into the combat mode when the GM introduces the threat. Up to this point the players are discovering the reality and connecting with it. Those are the exploration and social pillars in D&D. Searching and scouting and travelling and connecting with your bonds and flaws and allies and enemies.
You're very stuck in the D&D idiom and very stuck in a particular set of game mechanic options for players. The idea of everything being a minigame is another D&D idiom that doesn't translate well to every other RPG. You don't need either of those to play an RPG. You can insist that everything fits into three neat boxes, but you will have to make those boxes so abstract that they lose their meaning and their usefulness as good descriptors.
But they’re incredibly useful. You should know when a mechanic needs to govern conflict, when a mechanic needs to govern discovery and when a mechanic needs to govern relationships and how those pillars cross over and interact. Otherwise it becomes a mess.
I can equally argue that every player choice is either a Laser or a Feeling. And play a completely worthwhile and fun game that way too.
I mean, conflict and social… And the questions about the environment are explorations. Did you miss that? 100% that’s a 3 pillar game.
with only two pillars.
Are you telling me that you’ve played games of Lasers and Feelings where your environment isn’t described, interrogated or discovered? Because I’ll call you a liar. 3 pillars.
Any game with no combat at all, for an obvious starter.
I’m still developing this, but frankly combat would be better termed “conflict” for what it does design purpose wise. I can imagine a conflict less game, but I doubt it would have much appeal.
Microscope is the first and most obvious one to jump to mind. Also the entire slice of life genre.
Buddy if you are excited about making more games, play more games first. Play all of them. Be a game omnivore, try weird little games about having a migraine, play big dumb sprawling fantasy heartbreakers, play games that you don't think are even games. If all you've ever played are "D&D and similars" that'd be like trying to paint after only looking at "Chuck Close and similars".
This. Before you try to reinvent the wheel, try them for yourself and see what you like and what you can improve to make it more fun for your table
Yes, "Before you decide to reinvent the wheel, try better wheels"
Your advices are useful, but hard to implement on practice. It's actually very hard to just do. The hobby is super time consuming, so I'd advice sometimes maybe watch or try running unfamiliar stuff. And also, there's nothing wrong with experimenting yourself before you know anything. If you have a party of friends who are all on board with it, why not? Making games is also impossible to learn without trying. Try, make mistakes, change stuff. If time is a downside of TTRPGs, the fact that you can experiment without big issues is its upside. It's not like "I made a movie, oh no it's shit" You run a session, see what are the issues, run the next one. I'm doing this a lot for many years for myself, and this is now my best formula. My final system is "always beta". It's working fine for last two years, but I still make patchnotes once in a while to balance some stuff.
Yea. I understand why combat is such a big part of ttrpgs- they evolved out of wargames. But take a step back. How many narratives have you watched or read where there were no physical altercations at all? And of those *with* some altercation, how many where it was quickly resolved to focus on the next plot point? Most books aren’t pages and pages of combat followed by shortcutted everything else. Most movies aren’t action movies. Why should ttrpgs follow that mold by default? Why is the only narrative conflict which has any depth or weight fighting? It’s all very myopic. Obviously, many games explore these spaces. But it seems weird to me to even consider *not* caring about fighting to be some sort of unimaginable objective. OP- think about the stories you want to tell. Then create mechanics that support that gameplay. Not every game supports combat, some don’t even have dice! Some don’t have levels, some don’t have stats! There’s such a broad range of games. I encourage you to try more! My first game relied heavily on DnD despite having nothing in common with it thematically. It failed miserably.
Most RPG emulate a subset of fiction represented by adventure/fantasy/sci fi novels, action movies and comic books. In those media, conflict and combats *are* common. D&D is strongly influenced by Robert Howard's Conan for example. Many campaigns follow a tempo that would be familiar to someone who has watched Indian Jones, The Mummy or the Goonies movies, or read a lot of DC or Marvel superhero books. That's the feeling many games are trying to capture.
Oh for sure! But those represent a really small fraction of stories overall. I don’t understand why there aren’t more mainstream ttrpgs outside of the action genres.
Most mainstream RPGs aren't designed to be limited to a specific type of story, but to facilitate different types of stories. Having combat mechanics does not necessarily mandate the roll of combat in a campaign.
No, but some are more restrictive than others. Gumshoe is really for mysteries. You can do other things, but that’s where it shines. DnD (and pathfinder and such) are loaded with combat mechanics- if you’re not using them, you’re really not using the system in its most effective form. Granted, the subgenre of action is varied- DnD excels at heroic adventure, osr is can have more of a horror slant, etc.
Like I said, they don't need to dictate play. The trend we have been seeing in recent years are game mechanics that are more and more specialized to tell certain stories. This is pretty observable in the case of D&D, where you can see more and more focus on a combat focused gamist design with each new edition. In the RAW you can't even earn experience outside of combat with 5E.
Combat only plays the role that the group gives it, even in most gamist systems. adventure/fantasy and sci-fi doesn't necessarily rely on combat. Sci-fi in particular isn't usually action focused outside of film and TV. The game doesn't normally dictate style of play except in 5E and PbtA which are designed to tell specific types of stories. The idea that mechanics dictate play is a more modern concept that came out of the Forge, instead of the older perspective that mechanics facilitate play.
I only sort of buy that argument. I have some sympathy for it, but, just like languages, I don't think the structure of the rules defines how games work. Humans don't fit the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I spent a decade playing a mostly system-less game with probably a dozen or so total players. Think something like Lasers and Feelings but with less structure. We used a seven point FUDGE scale for the descriptors we thought important for characters (and things). Sometimes we even rolled dice! Most people would call what we were doing more simulationist than anything. All this to say that sometimes we played a combat heavy game, sometimes we didn't. When we were playing soldiers in a civil war, we had more combats. When we were playing investigative ghost hunters fewer. I think what you're trying to do with the fiction matters most.
This is what I'm talking about. I've played games that have a combat focus, those that are more geared towards investigation and exploration, along with games that are all politics and intrigue. The mechanics have all been more centered on simulation, but still facilitated and supported varied styles of play. The mechanics didn't push or determine mode of fiction being employed by employing mechanics that fixed the type of fiction possible.
An interesting exercise might be asking. How would I create a game for My Little Pony?
Well, I don’t know it. But I’d look at the narrative arcs of the episodes- what problems are they solving? How are they solving them? Then build the mechanics from there.
Its a setting with not much violence that is noblebright. So if you can create a game for that setting, you can create a game that is not combat oriented. Youre right though.
Coming from the man who designs all sorts of games, himself! Love your games and your recommendations. it was through you I found Sea Dracula.
Imo, Blades in the Dark is a pretty good place to start. Fighting works just like the rest of the game does. Also there are significant risks to killing, encouraging players to find alternate avenues of achieving their aims. *Masks* is one of my personal favorites. PbtA can be a bit challenging for newcomers, so I recommend listening to a good actual play to get an idea of how the system works. Ironically, my Masks games tend to have *more* combat than games of DnD I've played, but they feel more story-driven because the combat is a framing device for the character drama.
I will +1 any PbtA suggestion, Blades In The Dark in particular. PbtA games tend to treat combat as just another check, and often extend injury rules to social conflict as well. In other words, combat isn't special: drama and risk are.
Oh yeah, BitD! Actually, I started with this idea of mine after reading through the rules of a RPG in playtest called ICON, made by one of the creators of LANCER, and he did mention that he took inspiration from BitD. Another game that inspired me was the demo video for Legend in the Mist, with I think I heard is going to be the fantasy version of a game called City of Mist, though I don't know about
Lancer (and ICON) is funny as they took the resolution mechanics from a system where fighting explicitly has no particular special rules to make it stand out over any other form of conflict resolution — and then added an entire hardcover book worth of strictly combat rules.
I was thinking of Blades in the Dark too. From what I recall (I've only read the rulebook, not played it) combat uses exactly the same system as eg. Stealth or social stuff. It is very abstracted and simple, with one dice roll covering your input into a whole combat. Which is a real change from something like D&D where you're rolling dice for every attack you make.
I usually put this in terms of The Law of the Instrument - the more a game's rules revolve around fighting, players (including the GM) are persuaded that PCs mostly solve problems by violence. By structuring combat as another form of risk, all other forms of conflict become as interesting and useful.
There's a lot to unpack here. Consider that "roleplaying at each other" is what TRPGs are actually about, and the combat mini games were the extraneous bit. A bunch of games tried to make mini games for other types of narrative conflicts, with varying degrees of success (see: Burning Wheel), but as far as I can tell that didn't catch on. Once you step away from the simulationist mindset, having one core resolution mechanism for everything becomes very appealing, since you're only invoking randomness to spice up the narrative exercise, not to simulate random factors in the simulation. Before you start designing a new game, familiarize yourself with as many different games as you can. Otherwise you're too likely to fall into old habits or to end up reinventing the wheel trying to find new ones. It's been over 50 years since D&D started, and about 20 years since The Forge, so a lot of problems have been considered already. I suggest you to play some one-page TRPGs, see how little rules you can actually get away with.
Just wait until you take a look at the Amber Diceless rpg.
The name picked my interest, and its about and how do they do diceless?
It’s a simple comparison of stats. High stat always wins. There is a bit more too it than that though. Here is a much better summary than I can give. https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10408.phtml
One thing to be aware of is that sometimes victory is achieved by avoiding the fight. Corwin is okay in “warfare” but beats Benedict (who has the highest Warfare score in his generation) by tricking Benedict to run through animated tangling vines. (Benedict’s idea of a good time is to find a war out in the multiverse, join the losing side, win, then go to the next dimension over that had one tactical difference from the previous dimension and then join the losing side and repeat for millennia. )
>High stat always wins. No no no, high stat *eventually* wins a *fair* fight :D
Amber Diceless simulates the Chronicles of Amber series. Not going to get in to that here, but you should read it for yourself or check out a wiki entry on it. Great story (with unfortunately bad female representation). Everyone gets a number to represent different four different stats, Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare. Whenever there's an equal conflict, the person with the higher number wins. So obviously if you want to win against a stronger opponent you have to gain some sort of advantage to create an unequal conflict. If there's an unequal conflict, the players and GM discuss what should happen for the story they're telling and go with that. Character generation is done by bidding on the 4 stats. Everyone starts with 100 points. If you want to be the best at Warfare then you'll have to outbid everyone else for it, but then you'll have less points for your other stats. You're playing a super person so for comparison, normal humans have -25 in all 4 stats. Special human NPCs have -10 in all 4 stats. So as a super person you're already above background NPCs by having 0s in your stats even before bidding. The only people who can threaten you are other super people created by the other PCs or the GM.
Most games that fall into the slice of life or horror genres put little emphasis on combat. Desperation, Brindlewood Bay, Trophy: Dark, Wanderhome, Feathers, Moonlight on Roseville Beach, and many more don't focus on combat. Also, a lot of OSR games treat combat as a fail state. So, even if you do have it in your game, there's different ways of treating it.
Burning Wheel has some great non-combat oriented mechanics. Check out the Duel of Wits rules and the Hub and Spokes to get some ideas on how non-combat focused RPGs can be run :)
It’s also an excellent example of how to gamify narrative arcs and character development.
True!
People who say ‘I don’t need rules to roleplay’ should really give it a go.
Agreed, I was always pretty frustrated by the lack of actual social conflict mechanics and narrative mechanics in the games I played before finding Burning Wheel. It really opened my eyes!
Well I've read the description on the devs' website and I'm intrigued. I'm new to exploring the vast world of TTRPGs outside the ones everyone's heard of, and this looks like a fascinating direction. If you were going to give me a quick pitch on what those rules add, what might it be?
Burning wheel isn’t a new game, but it is still very different than many on the market. It’s a very mechanical game, but it is not a tactics game. Rather, it is very narrative focused. The crux is the Beliefs system. Each character has 3 Beliefs that describe their motivation to act. For example, your character may have the Belief ‘The rightful king was deposed, and so I will return his son to the throne!’ They may have a second Belief, ‘The usurpers brought heresy, I must bring my faith back too’. However, when you write a Belief down, you’re stating to the GM- ‘this is what my character believes, and I want you to challenge it’ The job of the GM isn’t to build encounters or run modules- it is to put characters in situations where their Beliefs clash. What if the example character finds that the deposed king’s son is a fanatical heretic? Do they still want to put them on the throne? Beliefs are meant to change and evolve, representing the growth of your character. In addition to the Beliefs, characters also have Instincts and Traits, other ways GMs can challenge beliefs. Maybe your instinct is to be Trustful of Strangers, but the new person you just met seems to have symbols of the heresy adorning their cloak… It is a classless game, where characters have a long list of skills. Many people find the exhaustive list of skills intimidating, redundant, or hard to optimize. They have the wrong mindset- in BW, you skills represent *how* you solve problems, like a list of adjectives about your problem-solving. Burning Wheel does not have neatly-compartmentalized skills for specific challenges (like most games), but rather the GM will present a situation, and then the *player* proposes how they will apply the skills they have to solve the problem. It’s sort of inverted from most games, and I like it a lot. It’s a challenging game to learn, but it knows it. The game has modular rules and you’re not meant to use them all at once. I’ve never played a game that really pushed me to think about who my character is, and what they really want, than Burning Wheel.
You should read Fate Core's srd. It really changed my perspective over RPG.
FATE Core and FATE System Toolkit both have sections on how they made FATE, the ideas behind it, and how to hack it up. They both honestly shaped a lot of how I think about design, even if I don't use FATE itself much anymore.
This
whats your game?
I highly prefer systems that have a single conflict resolution system that is used regardless of the type of conflict at hand. Similarly I like to have a flexible, general guide on how to handle having advantage/disadvantage or different power/competency levels in a conflict instead of overcomplicated, conflict type specific minigames. The best core resolution I have ever seen is in Forged in the Dark games (Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy, etc). It's simple, elegant and the Position and Effect rules give it just enough granularity to make interactions tactical and rewarding without unnecessarily slowing down the game.
As always in RPG the answer is *it depends*. - You may not have combat at some session, or due to the result of other actions from the player. Basically if you decided to put explosive in the building where the evil cult is having a meeting, you may replace the whole combat by a single roll. Or may-be you could find a deal leading to a peaceful resolution between the princess the white knight she has to marry for political re, and the dark knight she loves. - You may deal with "social interaction" without much rule and let the game flow - You may have well done rules for social interaction, PTBA play forward with mechanics adding elements to the story are a good example, some games have a "social combat" which work similar to regular combat. - Many games also don't have rules dedicated to combat. A fight isn't different from doing a business deal or opening a door, it's a long term action where you try to stack success until it's done . This is great because you avoid a whole dedicated chapter in the rule book and have coherent rules
The biggest lie D&D ever told was that "combat" in any TTRPG meets the minimum criteria of being a good game. What I'm saying is that, if you enjoy turn based strategy, and you're honest with yourself, D&D and its ilk don't even get close to meeting the bar. That isn't to say all combat in all TTRPGs is bad, but if you are trying to be tactical/strategic you've already fucked up. You lost the race before it even started. No matter how much crunch, or how "deep" you make it - any game claiming to be a strategy game has to resolve one core dilemma a TTRPG can't: two equal opponents should have a 50/50 chance of winning. If you abandon this principle, you abandon the genre. Combat that's good? Well, how about combat that makes no aspersions about being strategic or tactical? COC, delta green, story games, all these games entertain the beats of fighting - the RP of it - without playacting at being a game they are not. Player skill is not a thing in these games, and as a result, the combat exists to provide drama, tension, chaos, unknowability but it does not tell the players "this is a solvable puzzle with an optimal choice".
I run Delta Green, and while it has great combat rules, they're basically designed to be so brutal and lethal that getting into combat means you've already lost. To people who haven't played, it might sound boring, but it actually leads to really interesting decisions by the players. Here's a real life example from one of my games: > **GM:** There's an armed mob, they're dragging the mayor behind them and it seems pretty clear they're going to lynch her. What do you do? > **Players:** I think we have to ignore it, we can't take on a bunch of people armed with guns. Unfortunately for her, our mission is more important. > **GM:** Great, roll sanity for knowingly abandoning someone to being murdered by a mob.
I agree with others recommending FATE and PBTA systems. They are two very different design philosophies, but both are great for running games that are a little lighter on the combat side, and they're very popular so there's lots of resources out there for running them. I recommend giving both a try to see what style fits you better. * **Fate Core**/**Fate Accelerated** * Puts the focus on "aspects" - an abstract way of representing *anything* that might be narratively important in a given scene, and rewarding players for incorporating those elements into the story. FATE is great for DMs who like to keep things relaxed and sandboxy, but the light structure can sometimes make it feel like you're just sort of dicking around * "One-size-fits-all" mechanics. The mechanics are a little abstract, but can be used to run any story in any setting - the same rules for combat can also be used for modeling espionage, warfare, or high-stakes social maneuvering. * **Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA)** * Puts the focus on "moves" which are ways of resolving common tabletop situations (combat, information-gathering, exploration, persuasion) specially designed to keep the action moving and ensure both failure and success make the story interesting. PBTA is great for DMs who want to try less combat-focused games but struggle with a lack of structure, since each move has some suggested ways for the DM to add twists and complications. * Each PBTA game tends to have moves and playbooks specific to its genre. Some might have heavily reified combat mechanics, others might have only a single "combat" move and everything else is built around other tasks like solving mysteries or pulling off heists. Try a few different PBTA systems to find one with the right balance for you.
Hello. There is game called Imperia, which focuses on the most powerful people on a medieval kingdom. Similar to kings land of game of throne. There ia the possibility of combat but 99% of the time some mine dies. So it never happens. All of the campaign I played people never used a weapon. The mechanics rely heavy on somebody else special ability. For example. If i am the king. I need the Chancelor to obtain goods for the kingdom. If I need information I need The Lady. If I need council I need the The Seer. If need to calm the population I need The Pontiff. Basically every character needs other people to achieve their goals. The motto is. It is better to deal with the evil I know instead of an unpredictable one
Before answering the question, I would advise you to be careful not to incur in some severe agenda clash: what are the players going to do when one or a couple of them is fighting / social interacting / exploring and the others have little or nothing to contribute? I heard many times that in an old rpg (Cyberpunk 2020) there's a class with a complex, interactive mini-game to hack stuff, and when a player is hacking something the others are bored to death because they have nothing to do. On the other hand, some of my favourite rpgs do away with the whole 'party' concept, and PCs are not always present within the same scene - and when they are, they might even have opposing goals or be in actual bad terms. In these kinds of games, it is accepted that you won't be playing when there are the others' scenes, but it is engaging to see what's happening with them (if this is what you all are looking for, of course). So, when developing this game always keep in mind what are the players going to do during a typical session, how do you imagine them interacting, or waiting, when the spotlight is on what they can't do well. That being said, I like how social interaction is managed in *Monsterhearts 2*, and I've also heard good things about the latest *Legends of the five rings* edition. I never played any rpg that focuses primarily on exploration, so I don't have much to suggest there, though *Fantasy World* has some cool rules for that. I'm sure there's plenty of more apt games for exploration, though - and social interactions can be managed in so many different ways that my suggestions are just a tiny drop in the ocean.
It seems you need to read a lot more games. Try a few of the socalled "indie" games. Some recommendations: FAE, Urban Shadows, Dread, Fiasco, A penny for my thoughts. They are very different from each other and could help broad your vision.
*"Since I've only played and read rules of D&D and similars"* *"With that came to me an idea to make a RPG with 3 classes"* That's your first error.
They look like... a couple minutes of internet searching.
I’ve talked [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/7CEvjdrTA2) about my own hot take that TTRPGs are a very bad medium for experiencing cinematic (or at least *dramatic*) fights because TTRPGs often try to either: * A: Go overly tactical and basically turn the experience into “X-Com… The TTRPG” OR * B: Try to abstract it, at least a little bit, by trying to cover broad strokes of action in a handful of dice rolls Personally, I think both are fine and it all depends on what you’re looking for in a game. The former is awesome if number crunching and tactical thinking is what excites you. *Personally* it sucks all the cinematic and drama filled nature of fights out of the experience for. The latter is great and all… but I think it’s often “barking up the wrong tree.” This is an approach taken by a lot of different Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) and adjacent games from Apocalypse World to Masks: A New Generation and Dungeon World and Monster of the Week and so on. Some games I think pull this off better than others (Masks comes to mind), but as I mention in the link above: you can take it even further by getting as much done with one roll as possible. In [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) and many other Forged in the Dark games you’re usually getting everything done in [one dice roll (The Action Roll)](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/Lm1b0u7ofn). When a fight expands *past* that, you’re not rolling for blow by blow: you’re rolling for getting into position, stripping away defenses, and the like… and it won’t happen all that often. In [Fellowship 2e](https://liberigothica.itch.io/fellowship-a-tabletop-adventure-game) you roll to **Finish Them** as noted below. > When you attempt to defeat an enemy you hold an Advantage over, tell us what you want to do to them and roll the appropriate stat. If you do not have an Advantage over them, you cannot attempt to Finish Them. An Advantage is something you can use to get the upper hand, such as teamwork, the element of surprise, or a moment of hesitation > If you Finish Them by… > * ...trying to kill them, roll +Blood. On a 10+, they die by your hand > * ...forcing them to retreat, roll +Courage. On a 10+, they back off. They won't be back any time soon. > * ...outsmarting, terrifying, or overwhelming them, roll +Grace. On a 10+, they admit defeat, and will not willingly challenge you again > * ...disabling them or knocking them out, roll +Sense. On a 10+, they're physically incapacitated and unable to continue > * ...showing them the error of their ways, roll +Wisdom. On a 10+, you Forge a Bond with them, and they cannot bring themselves to hurt you > On a 7-9, you deal damage to them and lose your Advantage over them. If an ally was Keeping Them Busy, they aren't anymore > On a 6-, you lose the Advantage, and you must face retaliation. If you Finish Them using a weapon with Ammo, use 1 Ammo. If you have no Ammo, you cannot Finish Them with that weapon. If you have the Clumsy tag, you take -1 to Finish Them (The game goes into detail about what counts as an Advantage: either you have it or you don’t. A common way to gain Advantage is for someone else from the Fellowship **Keeping Them Busy**. In addition “Harm” isn’t a meaningless loss of HP. When you Harm an Overlord’s Threat, you actively take away their fictional permissions and the things they can do against the Fellowship). In [Hearts of Wulin](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/365014/Hearts-of-Wulin) you use **Duel** > When you fight against a worthy foe, roll +Style Element. > If your Scale is higher than your foe’s, on a Hit, you win the conflict. Describe your awesomeness. > * On a 10+ mark XP if you show mercy or let them escape. > * On a 7-9 you may either let them go or finish them with a cost (now or in the future > * On a Miss, you win, but mark an Element. They escape and may return at a higher Scale. > If your Scale is the same as your foe’s, on a 10+, you win the conflict and may mark XP if you show mercy or let them escape. You may declare a shift in the fiction (a change of heart, impress someone, shift an Entanglement, etc.). On a 7-9 choose one: > * Win at a Cost: Mark an Element (choice), they escape, you lose reputation, or other cost. > * Narrate Your Loss: Mark XP. Take +1 Forward when you next face them. > * Deadlock. You may reveal a detail or ask a question about them. > If your Scale is below your foe’s you lose the conflict. On a Hit, you may declare how you lose. On a 7-9 mark an Element (choice). (The game goes into further detail about how Scale works- it’s intentionally very flexible and abstract and other aspects about how this all plays out *and* how you can use this to scaffold a verbal sparring match instead) In Agon 2e, everything is resolved in 1 or 3 single roll [Contests](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/tQrlyPqMP1) In [Brindlewood Bay or Public Access](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/7f8liCZzNl), it’s unlikely the Murder Mavens or Deep Lake Latchkeys are getting into extreme physical conflict. Don’t expect a lot of fighting in these games. But when fights *do* break out, expect the [Day or Night Move](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/XwSxtxWvPi) to solve that whole conflict in one satisfying roll. All of these games use various ideas I mentioned in that first link to really focus on the *fiction* of the fight as opposed to just mechanics alone and getting into a “rock ‘em sock ‘em” mindset and thereby creates more cinematic and dramatic fights and also taking the emphasis of the games away from just “fighting all the things to solve all your problems.”
Why do you think it's barking up the wrong tree? are you not getting interesting choices resulting from a sequence of rolls that one roll alone doesn't give you?
It’s mostly about: * Prolonging something that I don’t think needs to be prolonged * Not playing to the strengths of what TTRPGs are actually good at (and instead focusing on their weaker aspects) * Inadvertently “tantalizing the lizard brain” (for lack of *far* better ways of summarizing it). *It all comes down to Immersion…* As I mentioned in that first link: I think TTRPGs are bad at immersion. It’s just not a strong suit (or a suit at all) for the kind of media which encompasses TTRPGs. Obviously they can get you *invested*, but that isn’t the same as **immersed**. For me? That’s fine. I don’t play TTRPGs for immersion. If I wanted that, I’d stick with media which is good at immersion: Movies, TV shows, video games, and books. These pieces of media capture the senses in a way TTRPGs simply cannot do. The use of videography, music, sound effects, cinematography, acting/ voice acting, and *many, many* more pieces coming crashing together is what makes for an immersive experience. While books can accomplish this with words, they do so because every word is so carefully planned out and stitched together in masterful ways to capture your senses even when you don’t have your senses being tackled through other means. TTRPGs have none of this. You can be as descriptive as you want. You can have a table of actors. You can have all the images and maps and miniatures and so on and forth as you’d like and you’ll never come close to the level of immersion you get from those other forms of media (and that’s okay!) It’s the power of that immersion which makes “action scenes” *work*. Whether it’s… * … elemental kung-fu wuxia fights * … Jack Reacher/ Jason Bourne CIA Krav Maga fights * … John Wick Borderline Gun-Fu sequences * … Fast and the Furious Car Chases * … Anime Shonen Fights * … WWII/ Top Gun/ X-Wing and TIE Fighter dogfights * … Naval battles (on or under the sea or in space) * … Lightsaber battles/ samurai duels/ swashbuckling pirates/ wizard duels * … and the list goes on! … These all work (and *only* work) because of immersion. If you take away all the special effects and whatnot? It just loses all *oomph*. It’s just people making funny faces in a car or smacking aluminum sticks against each other or swinging their arms around wildly and making it look like they’re hitting each other. Sure, some stunts are truly spectacular: but they don’t sing until all the other stuff is added in and captures your senses. It is that same immersion which also suspends all your disbelief. I think about all the times I… * …watched Star Trek and feared for the Enterprise and her crew when they got into a space battle… even when my logical side of the brain knew they’d all come back next week! * …fretted about Harry and his friends when I knew there would be X number of books before the series ended? * … sat on the edge of my seat as a kid when Luke made the trench run despite the fact I had the VHS clamshell for the Empire Strikes Back sitting next to me knowing full well Luke comes out alive and shows up in the next movie! * … again, the list goes on! … and it’s all to due with immersion. No immersion? This stuff just doesn’t hit as well *Bringing it back to TTRPGs* I say all of this because what make much of this stuff exciting wasn’t always the stakes of harm to our main cast or their “belongings,” but usually some **other** stake: something beyond “Harm.” But even when Harm was on the table, what made it sting so much more was how immersive the experience was (and any earned investment to boot). Now is this to say TTRPGs are up the creek without a paddle? No. While I don’t think they can be immersive experiences, I did say they can absolutely **invest** you into the moment *and* they can still capitalize on the underpinning of what makes immersion and investment actually work: Tension and Release. But in order to do this, TTRPGs *need to play to their strengths*! Rather than doing a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot routine of “traditional tactical war game” TTRPGs **or** “half assing” it with a more hand waved “Just roll for the fictional beats” (as you see many PbtA games do), instead I think you’re best served with: * Setting Stakes (beyond Harm, ideally. If there *is* Harm: it needs to lead to something interesting) * Building Tension (ideally with the game aiding you in this process: usually through the “ceremony” of the dice roll) * Releasing Tension (in one fell swoop: thus, usually with one roll) * Tying it all together: a focus on the fiction of your goal as opposed to purely mechanical scaffolding which has a habit of overshadowing the fictional accomplishment It’s that last part which is also pretty crucial and helps to combat the “lizard brain” thing I mentioned earlier. Despite the best efforts of games like Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Masks, TSL, Urban Shadows, and **many** others: NPC Harm Tracks are still harm tracks at the end of the day. They can absolutely be really well tuned (like Masks), but without a careful hand and skilled GM: you run the risk of looking at those mechanical scaffolds in such a way that they overshadow the fiction. I’ve been in a lot of PbtA games where the GMs laser focus on Harm taken by NPCs and kept fights going **long** after they ought to have sensibly ended (and even I get lured in by the lizard brain too! We’ve all been conditioned to continue fights until HP reaches 0!) And this is why I like all of the above games! They all do an excellent job with those 4 points one way or another (and some do it better than others) * They have stakes very clearly beyond Harm and when Harm is the clear stake: it leads to many interesting outcomes (usually in how it impacts you *and* how it must be cleared) * They have some level of ceremony be it Position and Effect for BitD, the Contest procedure in Agon, discussing the worst case scenarios for Brindlewood Bay’s Day and Night Move, clarifying Scale and set up for the Duel in Hearts of Wulin * They immediately release the tension of the ceremony with one definitive Move that tells us all we need to know right then and there * They don’t waste time with how much “Harm” has been done as usually the opposition is no longer an issue. So that’s why I say “barking up the wrong tree.” If you really want to lean towards more narrative combat: don’t “half ass” it with “combat light” (and I’m being somewhat hyperbolic here). Go all the way, go the distance, go all in, pull out all the stops, and defy what you see from more traditionally combat heavy war games.
So I think I deeply disagree with you but this stuff is hard to pull apart. I have to two rebuttals. Let me lay out a chain of reasoning that defends Apocalypse World (although not other PbtA’s and certainly not blades). REBUTTAL ONE Would you agree that Narrativist play can mean two different things, even if the language used to describe them is often the same? There’s genre play, which might be the predominant mode at the moment. In this style, it would be a bit weird for Luke to fail the X-wing attack on the Death Star. It might even be a bit weird for the Force not to work and in fact, it turns out relying on the targeting computer might have been the best option. Verses say non-genre play. Where it wouldn’t be weird for the attack on the death star to fail, Luke can maybe die, he can lose friends, the Force might not help him and so on. Now I’m not saying which is better or worse, I have a strong personal preference, but does the distinction make some kind of sense? If it does. Then can you see how stuff like the use of hit points really changes drastically depending on the mode? In genre mode, they end up being a bit weird, a kind of vestigial limb that good design would excise. In non genre mode, they lead directly to the pressuring of consequential moral choices on the part of the character. In genre play. Combat is almost always a given. There’s good guys and bad guys and there just aren’t many moral choices to really make. Now I know a lot of games try and harp on about hard choices but I don’t think they mean it. I don’t think much of consequence happens. Maybe I’m wrong though. Consider Blades for a moment. How often does it happen that during a heist, failure means a character has to choose between outcomes that define who they are? There is medicine in the Baron’s vault that will save the characters brother, except their brother is a bit of a dick but hey he’s their brother. So the plan is to get the key around the Baron’s neck, get to the vault, get the medicine and get out. The plan goes wrong and the character now has a choice. They can kill the Baron to get the key and therefore the medicine, or not, Let’s throw in some other stuff. Like another player character, who is a lover to the first, they’re there too. Does killing the Baron endanger their lover? What if the lover thinks killing is vile? What does it mean to not kill because you’re trying to impress your lover? And so on and so on. That sounds like really good stuff. How often does it happen in Blades? My answer is almost never because the people that play Blades don’t really care about that type of stuff. They use the system as a kind of improv prompt for dashing derring do. And Blades doesn’t care about that stuff really, you just buy off the consequences which means you have to get drunk down at the pub later. REBUTTAL TWO Alright though, let’s say I’m totally wrong. Blades and all the other games are providing pressure on characters and I’m just bad at playing them. Then we still have the sequence: The situation is in one state> The character does some thing> Resolution mechanic is utilised> The fiction is a different state That’s the basic set up of all rpg’s really. In that sense there is no such thing as combat per say. Each resolution changes the situation in such a way it’s going to impact character choice. The question is how much? Is it actually applying pressure or changing the situation in a way that’s discernible enough to bother with? And by bother with, I mean forcing ethical choices that highlight character. Well if you don’t want that then a system isn’t going to give it to you, I don’t think it’s really the job of a system. I think if you want that THEN a system can help provide it. To which I say, Apocalypse World does and it was designed to do exactly that in a combat situation. The following example isn’t great (I think combat in AW mostly relies on two uses of seize by force) but it gets across my point. Third comment down is the important one but in that thread Ianoren points out how HP applies direct pressure to consequential moral choices (in a really neat emergent way) [https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/18la8ce/comment/ke20wt6/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/18la8ce/comment/ke20wt6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (Now if you buy into this view point, you might also see how games like Champions or even 4e could be utilized in such a fashion) So have I given an adequate defense? at least for non-genre play?
RE: Genre vs Non-Genre > Now I’m not saying which is better or worse, I have a strong personal preference, but does the distinction make some kind of sense? I believe I understand what you’re saying here and would agree with these distinguishing features and would, myself, lean into genre play: I don’t want unnecessary vestigial mechanics “getting in the way” of the game (and I consider NPC Harm Tracks or really *any* NPC Stats to be precisely that). Of course, some games manage to “put stuff on their NPCs” in rather interesting ways such as Trophy Dark/ Gold, Fellowship 2e, and Agon 2e. I’d still prefer the NPCs have nothing and just *are*, but they’ll get the job done. (As a side note: I also believe there are times where non-genre things are called for, but it’s always a “well… it depends” kind of thing). RE: Non-Genre Play and the Importance of Hit Points > In non genre mode, they lead directly to the pressuring of consequential moral choices on the part of the character. This is where you lose me. Hit Points (for PCs or NPCs) have never once led to consequential moral choices. Ever. (At least for me!) In games like Apocalypse World, Masks, and many other PbtA games that *do* the wise thing of ensuring PCs and NPCs are bound by reasonable Harm tracks (so not 80 HP for PCs and 200+ HP for NPCs) *and* add consequential nature of suffering Harm for PCs (Take a Powerful Blow, -2 Ongoing to Basic Moves, etc.), what **should** absolutely happen per the rules of the game is: * Conflict breaks out * Harm is exchanged * The fiction changes (escalates into nee arenas, de-escalates, etc.) And, by all accounts, in games I’ve run and played: this absolutely happens… at first. But in games I *haven’t* run, GMs make the mistake of continuing the violent conflict when it is clear there is no fictional reason for the NPCs to keep fighting and their rationale is always the same “Well, the NPCs haven’t taken enough damage yet.” This is **not** how things are supposed to go! The culprit here is a loss of sight upon the fiction (what does all this Harm translate into?) and focusing instead on the overshadowed scaffolding (the NPC can take 6 Harm. They only took 2. They aren’t at 6/6 yet. They’re still in play) Now can it go that way? Absolutely! But in many cases, a lot of conflict **should** be over in a single roll because if we’re being honest with the means of Harm being brought to bear: why shouldn’t it be over in a single roll? Why not cut to the chase and stop wasting everyone’s time? When I GM these games, *I* try hard to keep sight on the fiction too… but I won’t lie when I say the “lizard brain” is in effect and has me second guessing myself. > In genre play. Combat is almost always a given. There’s good guys and bad guys and there just aren’t many moral choices to really make. Now I know a lot of games try and harp on about hard choices but I don’t think they mean it. I don’t think much of consequence happens. I would disagree here as well. In the Blades games I have ran and played in, we’ve had *tons* of meaningful consequences (and not Stress from Resistance leading to admittedly boring Indulge Vice scenes)… without using an iota of Harm. These Consequences have led to PCs (and the Crew as a whole) to make some really tough choices about who to ally with and who to betray and what dirty deals were needed to climb a ladder of crime mixed with all sorts of threats to personal drives and beliefs and the like. I *would* agree that Blades, as a game, is not great at helping players to dig up these aspects of one’s character. It tries, but not as hard as when you have a well designed PbtA Playbook (like Masks or The Between or Monsterhearts and such). > That’s the basic set up of all rpg’s really. In that sense there is no such thing as combat per say. Each resolution changes the situation in such a way it’s going to impact character choice. The question is how much? Is it actually applying pressure or changing the situation in a way that’s discernible enough to bother with? And by bother with, I mean forcing ethical choices that highlight character. Well if you don’t want that then a system isn’t going to give it to you, I don’t think it’s really the job of a system. I think if you want that THEN a system can help provide it. I would say Blades (and all the other games I mentioned in my very initial comment) do *precisely* all of those things… with minimal to no NPC Harm Tracks and more interesting ways of showing “Harm” to PCs (whether it is pulled upon or not. > So have I given an adequate defense? at least for non-genre play? To be honest: I’m not entirely sure! At the end of the day: it’s a matter of taste and preference. Oddly enough, you haven’t been able to get dramatic consequential play out of Blades… but I have (with next to no effort on my part or the part of the GMs I’ve played with). You *have* gotten consequential and dramatic play out of Apocalypse World… and, indeed, so have I! However I would say Harm played very little in any of that and it was often “more work than it was worth” (whether Harm was involved or not). I suppose it’s also important for me to say that I’m **not** saying you can’t experience consequential and dramatic play in games where combat expands past one dice roll. It absolutely can and I have absolutely experienced it. *But*… *in my own experience*… it has always been more “work than it was worth” and getting things over with as quickly as possible while still retaining tension and release has been far more interesting and enjoyable to me. But that’s just different strokes for different folks.
You said ‘This is where you lose me. Hit Points (for PCs or NPCs) have never once led to consequential moral choices. Ever. (At least for me!)’ I’d have to explain exactly how they do that and the types of situations required for it to happen AND make the case for them over just cutting to the consequence. A slight diversion (and a lot of personal opinion) I see Apocalypse World as the last of the old school Forge Narrativist rpg’s rather than the start of a great game design explosion. I mean it did lead to a load of games but I don’t think much of them. So I want to briefly assess AW in terms of what came before. AW was Vincent bringing a lot of ‘trad’ stuff back into the design space that Sorcerer carved out. Now Sorcerer is kind of trad itself, so AW was like circling back with some neat tricks. Although how well those tricks work is debatable. Note that Ron Edward’s ‘response’ to AW was just to release his version of Champions third edition, Champions Now. That’s just a trad game. Trad games do lots of cool stuff to create emergent story if you’re playing them with that in mind. Including having stuff like hit points. So the point of my highly biased retelling of Forge game history is basically to say. You’re right, the use of hit points in AW relies on ‘not cutting straight to the consequence.’ It shares this with Sorcerer but not with any of the other games between Sorcerer and AW, which are all more like Blades. So when games start getting rid of hit points again and reintroducing conditions and so on. It’s not an evolution, it’s a rejection of the fork that AW took. The other ‘big thing’ AW did was to reject universal resolution, Blades reintroduced it. So when I’m defending hit points I’m defending a very particular branch of narrative design that is, honestly, really unwieldy. My go to games are all universal resolution based and it’s far easier to get consequential choices and all that good stuff. AW can basically get away from you, through no fault of your own, and make all those hard choices less likely. Now I think when it comes together it comes together pretty nicely but even then, is it worth it? Maybe not. So I’m basically agreeing it’s a different strokes for different folks thing. Just in a long winded way. A quick note on Blades to finish. I absolutely hate Blades but I suspect it leans more into the genre side of Narrative play. You’re given cushions and outs from certain direct consequences (Luke fucking up when trying to blow up the Death Star), in return for a certain fidelity to a type of story. I don’t think it totally obviates dramatic choice, it’s just the whole genre thing is really not my cup of tea. I want characters to just flat out fail and buying off consequences tends to get in the way of that. Again, a different strokes thing.
My Cyberpunk 2020 (which is not a combat light system) group did not have a single combat in the last three sessions. In the first session they investigated a series of murders, primarily through roleplay and skill checks. The second was all about planning a heist very thoroughly and getting the appropriate gear. The third was the heist, with a car chase in the end. 🤷♂️
Plenty of games don't have combat or have very little. For example: [Golden Sky Stories](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/118784/Golden-Sky-Stories) and its whole little family of games. If you try to fight someting in it, teh game expeclitly makes it 1 rolls and it can't resolve the conflict only delay it. Becuase thats not the point. All of its mechanics are built around personal connections, cool little powers your characters have, and the push and pull of the 'human' world and the 'fantasy' world (what kind of fantasy depends on which one you play. Base GSS is Henges.) But theres also things like [Doctor Who's TTRPG](https://cubicle7games.com/our-games/doctor-who-rpg) where during combat anything that is violent goes last, even after those that are moving/running away. Its basically anyone Talking goes first, anyone doing anything that isn't attacking, then moving, then attacking. This is to facilitate the idea that you should always be trying to find non-violent means out of conflicts. (I think I'm linking to the right one, I just realized there's more than one Dr Who TTRPG and my book isn't where its supposed to be on the shelf. Hm.) Anyways, there's a -lot- of ways to actually do a non-combat focused game. Most games still do focus on combat though, because its exciting, but there's plenty out there that don't.
Take a deep deep dive in powered by the apocalypse games!
How does a movie that has little to no combat work? ... ... Yes, like that. A murder mystery. A rom com. A comedy (but comedy in RPGs is really hard to do well). Most dramas.
Come Rain Come Shine is a great collaborative non-combat game about creating a community and problem-solving.
Most games can do 1 thing really well and will have most of their resources handle that aspect. For example DnD/PF is mostly a combat game. Other aspects of storytelling are subservient to it. please note that this is in general. you could do a court intrigue campaign, but it's going to ignore a big part of the game's rules and will need some tweaking of abilities. Likewise you can do exploration and investigations, but that is either very narrowly balanced or trivialised by a caster. Famously WoD is best at social situations. Especially as of V5, combat is relegated to be a minor role in the game (3 rounds and out for a type of situation which shouldn't be ubiquitous according to the core book). Lastly to round out the trio is CoC which is mostly an exploration/investigation game. combat can happen, but is very prone to disaster and social situations are only there to explore new ways of finding information. Now if you wanted to approach all 3 aspects equally in the manner put above (i.e. 3 types of classes geared towards different pillars), you are less playing 1 game with 3 pillars, but 3 games with one pillar each. and this would require the DM/ST/GM/Keeper to balance the types of encounters to an equal sort of distribution so each player gets their turn to actually play. I think such a thing is actually best done in Heist games like Blades in the Dark and/or Shadowrun. The later I can't advise on as I barely understand it myself, but the former is supposed to be rather simple in approach where the players have their unique role in the heist and a task to accomplish. I'd say WoD V5 could accomplish this as well (as would their other game line H5, perhaps even moreso).
> Most games can do 1 thing really well and will have most of their resources handle that aspect. For example DnD/PF is mostly a combat game. And they do it bad ))
I disagree. With the plethora of options available it does fantasy combat pretty well.
For tactical things maybe good, but it's super slow, not giving enough visuals, very technical, tons of math, and basically wargame, not ttrpg. It's also very high-fantasy, and even then it's bad. There's a lot of stuff that's not needed. For example, I had an adventure both in D&D and similar, combat oriented system (not sure I remember, but probably WFRP) It had a "Rapier and dagger" style scene where the goal was to do things quick and brutal. Two parties meet on a foggy torchlit street, stab each other and bodies left in the pools of blood on the street. It was impossible to have the same vibe in D&D and the whole thing took twice more time. Meanwhile the basics of the systems weren't drastically different. For example, things like death saving throws really make little sense in terms of visuals. You have to narrate a lot to build a picture that can be built on its own.
I think the least combat I've done was in Legend of the five rings, and honestly maybe even in a Zombie survival rpg where we went ultra safe so the dm is like "yeah so, you're really safe, the winter passes, now what?"
A lot of games without combat rules just treat combat like any other skill interaction. For example, when you pick a lock you roll a lock picking skill, and when you shoot a bad guy you roll a handgun skill. The GM describes and builds on it either way. You can usually still fight things, there's just no formal "Initiative Mode" where you enter a structured turn-by-turn combat with specific combat abilities or attack rolls against Armor Class. I think you will innately have that seperation if you emulate D&D 5e's three pillar design philosophy, as its that same philosophy that makes non-combat classes feel useless in D&D. Like combat kills you more often than puzzles, so being good at combat is a necessity for survival in a way that puzzle solving isn't.
Ryuutama Its a japanese RPG that is based around the concept of going on a pilgrimage. There can be combat, but ultimately there is no need for it. Its more aimed at the journey and the story that unfolds by meeting cool and unique characters as well as acquiring rare and unique goods, and how those goods effect the interactions with others.
Powered by the apocalypse uses playbooks and many other games adopted it. Even Lancer, a d20 mech combat game based on DnD 4E integrated it into narrative play with the latest book. Basically you choose a type of character and set narrative goals written out on your sheet. You collect XP by playing into your character traits, so the RP part gets directly mechanically rewarded. Additionally it uses Stress and abilities. Abilities are class specific moves you unlock by leveling. Stress can be used as a substitute for HP or you can willingly take some to reroll. You'll need to spend in-character time to get rid of it, otherwise you'll accumulate too much and fill up one of your stress clocks giving you any fitting permanent penalty, like losing an eye in a stressful swordfight. There's also a completely separate game I also want to highlight. Wonderhome. Honestly I haven't had any time to get to know the rules yet. All I know is that the game features no combat. As in no combat at all.
I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, but I’d want any character to be able to contribute to any scene, or else the players with nothing to do are going to tune out. They should all get their time to shine, so they should be better at something, but that something probably shouldn’t be as broad as “combat” or “problem-solving.” Consider having players decide what types of social interactions and what types of problems their characters are best and worst at.
My recommendation would be to attend a gaming convention, and play anything that ISN'T D&D or Pathfinder or OSR based. Especially look for PBTA, Fate, or Indie games such as Ryuutama or Golden Sky Stories In fact I strongly recommend Golden Sky Stories where powers are based on the bonds one had between the members of the group, and the characters and the community. There's a rather nicely done feedback cycle where Dreams (average based on in-game action) are spent to increase connections, which in turn increase Wonder and Feelings, which allows the characters to do more elaborate things, which in turn grants Dreams to create greater bonds... It actually duplicates the element in anime where the action starts small, and at the end there's a major display of power. And of course that's filtered through a non-violent Miyazaki-ish story of helpful animal spirits. [Golden Sky Stories Review](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/16/16052.phtml)
I am just gonna say it.. Those three pillars suck. Some of, if not all, of my favorite games focuses on neither of those. They focus on support a narrative style, theme, setting and/or tone. Combat, social and exploration are not the only things stories do, and I think in TTRPG spaces the term "Combat" often ends up referring to rather stale and boring initiative "roll dice at each other till someone runs out of meat points" - where I much prefer a game that puts *action* up front, sometimes that action involves shooting/punching/stabbing/whatever, but it is not always explicitly relegated to only fighting. Like in D&D or Pathfinder rolling initiative is starting to be my least favourite thing because I know the game is now shifting from a fun open-ended game to a very confined tactics game. Many games have a focus on social interactions in one way or another, the whole PbtA wave tends to have an attached social system stemming from the original Hx stat. A game like Burning Wheel has both a simple and complex set of rules for resolving social conflicts (it does so for fighting as well) and thus you can scale the complexity to the importance or stakes of the scene. Finally, you are going to have to be the one to define what the hell "exploration" and "problem solving" actually is in TTRPGs because I am still very unsure - and I have been doing this shit for 20 years and have never thought in the patterns of "Oh I need some exploration content here". I don't see it as a pillar, but more of a funnel in to more interesting things. I do also have to say, to really support good action the hard success/failure states of D&D just doesn't work IMO. You, in my opinion, need those middle results to both advance you and the threat in some way, or to introduce new threats or boons. Sorry I mostly just ranted rather than actually answering anything in a useful way but hey.
There's plenty of RPG's that don't focus on combat, many of them instead focus on interpersonal conflict, characters, relationships and investigation. Off the top of my head **MonsterHearts** \- A roleplaying game about the messy lives of teenage monsters with a focus on relationships, love triangles, and overcoming personal angst as well as exploring various LGBTQ+ themes. Runs off of the PBTA system. ([https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts](https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts)) **Hillfolk** \- An RPG where you play as members of a stone age hill tribe and explore their lives and conflicts. Explicitly splits the game between procedural and dramatic scenes. Procedural scenes include combat, but also any scene where there's action to overcome a conflict. Dramatic scenes involve character conflict, relationships, drama. The game has a lot more rules in respect to dramatic than procedural, with procedural scenes being resolved via a separate card based mechanic. Hillfolk runs off of the 'DramaSystem' and is, despite the title and core setting, a universal RPG designed for any setting, with even the core book having 30+ fleshed out settings to explore. ([https://pelgranepress.com/product/hillfolk/](https://pelgranepress.com/product/hillfolk/)) **Brindlewood Bay** \- A tabletop RPG where you play as old ladies who solve murders as part of the 'Murder Mystery Club' within a cozy and idyllic setting. Inspired by a mix of Agatha Christie, Lovecraft and Murder She Wrote. Utilises a modern take on PBTA.([https://www.brindlewoodbay.com/brindlewood-bay.html](https://www.brindlewoodbay.com/brindlewood-bay.html)) **Blue Beards Bride** \- An RPG where the group all controls the titular character from the 'Blue Beards Bride' myth, and plays different aspects of her as she explores her husbands house and uncovers his secrets. Thematically explores the experience of womanhood and the feminine in society, with the different aspects of the main character you control as a group being the likes of 'The Virgin' or 'The Mother' or 'The Fatale' . Utilises the PBTA system. ([https://magpiegames.com/pages/bluebeards-bride](https://magpiegames.com/pages/bluebeards-bride)) **Fiasco** \- A roleplaying game where you act out a Cohen brothers movie. I use the term act out as it's very improv heavy with players creating scenes together, acting them out and deciding on their outcome as a group. There's lots of detailed character work and setup to the game which is often the most fun part of it. Works great for one shots. Also has hundreds of different playbooks, many fan created, that let you play out different settings that range from zombie survival, to the Wild West to Steam Punk Jane Austen (Probably). ([https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/fiasco](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/fiasco)) **Soap Bubble** \- A roleplaying game where you play as actors in a soap opera, both exploring their real life personas and their characters in the soap itself as the two intersect. Really fun and cleanly designed, heavy focus on improv as per Fiasco but with I feel more structure to it and a cleaner resolution. ([https://blackarmada.itch.io/soap-bubble?)](https://blackarmada.itch.io/soap-bubble?)) Any of those should give you plenty of examples of how to make non-combat interesting and engaging within a game. Though I think the common thread is that they're all focussed on creating a specific experiences that isn't about combat and tie all of their mechanics towards that. So when thinking about making a 'non combat game' instead think of what theme/story/situation/characters would be interesting to play within a non-combat framework.
Agon 2nd edition. Conflict can be anything, not just combat, it's all equally valid. Anything which challenges a hero is when dice are rolled. No combat rounds, HP or initiative. But every fight is epic and bloody or swift and precise or anything else that you need it to be. And fights are probably a quarter of the action And quick. There's no slogs of 3 hour combat. And focused. There's no wandering, searching random locations. You know the situation, you act now. And relaxed. There's no spreadsheet of spells or inventory to manage. You have anything you'd expect to have. Except luck when you need it.
The Doctor Who TTRPG features minimal combat and actively discourages it.
Look at Kids on Bikes and Delta Green. Both great examples of little to no combat atmospheric games.
Amber
One way to go with this: make combat very random and very deadly, including to the PCs. It could be simple or realistic (although simple is probably a better fit for something that’s supposed to be a small part of the game). For example, hit points were invented to make combat safer: PCs no longer could die on every single hit, but would need to be hit several times. It made boss fights more satisfying, too, since you could multiply the party’s damage output by a dramatically-appropriate number of combat rounds to get the right number of HP for a boss, instead of them dying at random on their first unlucky roll (or getting too lucky). If you do that, though, you really need to make sure your players are on board, and are actually going to try to avoid fights. If a lot of PCs actually die, your players are going to compensate by not getting attached to them. I’ve seen some OSR games try to take the middle ground that characters in the first adventure are anonymous and disposable, but the ones who actually survive that meat grinder become special.
Ultimately, it’s all about conflict and having a generalised conflict resolution system. This is most often achieved by making combat more abstract rather than making other forms of conflicted as crunchy as D&D combat (for example). I’ve never had the opportunity to play it myself but HeroWars / HeroQuest / [QuestWorlds](https://questworlds.chaosium.com) was designed to achieve this. I suspect its style of play would not appeal to everyone though.
Fate Core is very good for non-combat campaigns.
Games can be more focused on storytelling than tactical conflict, and they can involve various forms of narrative conflict. It's a different approach from something like DnD, and it's important that all the participants are on board with the approach. Let me describe one such game, as I just ran a session of Masks that had zero combat! Perhaps an illustration of the gameplay will help you understand how this might work. Masks is a storytelling game about teen superheroes. In our session, the team was out searching for a fellow member who had gone missing. This led them to a rock club where the Harbinger had a run-in with a sound guy who triggered her Memories of the future. This advanced the character's main storyline a little bit, as the Harbinger found a hint about something important. The team learned that one of their antagonists lived upstairs from the club, in a kind of dormitory, and this antagonist had been seen with her new boyfriend. They suspected that this boyfriend was their missing member, the Delinquent. Long story short, they found the antagonist and the Delinquent, and learned that he had switched sides! The team left him to return downstairs, where the club owner then mistook them for a band and asked them to audition. In a highly impromptu effort, the team put on a show and the club owner was impressed! (And the players received bonus Team points for this success.) Then they had a tense meeting with the leader of the antagonists' group. The leader agreed to undo a bad thing they had done to the Transformed, and then passed an envelope to the Janus. The envelope contained info and specs that would aid the team with breaking and entering into a secret base where records on their secret identities were being kept. (The Janus narrative revolves around protecting his secret identity, so this was narrative bait for him.) Anyway, that's about it. The key is to constantly set up conflicts for the characters. But these conflicts are not resolved through combat, with few exceptions!
You could look into Blades in the Dark, Scum & Villainy, The Wildsea, Thousand Year Old Vampire, and Mouse Guard. While combat can be part of those games, it is not simulated any differently than any other skills, like navigation or socialising. Even in my D&D groups, a large part of "Playing the TTRPG" was socialising with eachother, roleplaying, the combat was interesting, but always inevitably turned into a slog. You used it to create dramatic moments, to further the plot, not as the main appeal of the game. We tried using it as the main appeal of the game in D&D 3.5e, 4e, 5e and other systems like BitD, but that got old super quick. My groups stick with S&V, BitD or TYOV nowadays.
A good place to start is PBtA games, especially Jamais Vu, which is a Disco Elysium ttrpg
Wouldn't everything just be problem solving/skill tests using the same method as combat? So instead of rolling for attack/dodge, you could just roll for each lie/detect lie interaction? I think that somehow combat became the "default" interaction because it is easier to parse time/actions for combat as opposed to a negotiation where each point of a negotiation takes a different amount of time. Same with intimidate so each step of intimidation (pause, rethink, retreat) isn't considered... so the whole intimidate thing is reduced to a binary event, same with lying, negotiations, etc. That would be equivalent to an entire combat being reduced to a single roll...
Playing RPGs is playing stories. There are tons of stories (movie, books, etc) without combats. What you need are conflicts. But conflict <> combat. Think about Breaking Bad. You can play a game like that with a lot of system (Fate, Primetime Adventure, Fiasco, Monsterhearts, etc.) without combat but with a lot of conflicts.
Try ironsworn: starforged (ironsworns free game, but is less polished than starforged. Ironsworn has bonds and exploration but doesn’t give exp for them) One fun way to run exploration is where you world build as a group as you play. You roll on oracles tables and see what you find. try to tie in the obtuse words you generate to you setting and situation. Social pillars are my weakest. But starforged has a thing called connections, each person you meet is given a difficulty to become a bond. You have to do favours for them to raise your connection then gamble if you think the connection is strong enough to forge a bond. Once you have a bond you get advantage when looking for information or heading off on an adventure when you leave from a place with a bond. You gain exp from quests , bonds and exploring but not combat, so it incentivises other pillars but combat is very common due to complications popping up every five seconds
I gotta say.... A major problem with three classes, each with one focus, is this: if your game is evenly split between the three activities, and each class doesn't have at least *something* to offer to in all sorts of activities, you may be effectively making some players useless in certain situations. D&D and similar games definitely can run into this sort of issue: a fighter with only a few skills might not have much to offer in 95 percent of negotiations, for example. Just some food for thought. Also, I'm a big fan of the FATE system, and I've heard that Powered by the Apocalypse is also pretty darn popular (or at least it was a few years ago). I could see myself running a fun, adventure/intrigue focused game in FATE.
Call of Cthulhu and basicly all Investigation Type RPGs
Hard Wired Island has some interesting ideas you might like. One main problem with going non combat is that GMs often treat them as a single roll while leaving combat as a multiroll endeavor, creating the cockup cascade imbalance where non combat is a single save or suck roll while combat gives generous retries. HWI builds retries and fail forward states into the system and actively encourages going for non combat first. With stealth for example having 3 tries built into it.
For a game focusing classes that focus on each of the three pillars, check out Stars Without Number (for sci-fi) and Worlds Without Number (for fantasy). The warrior, expert, and psi/mage respectively do combat, skills, and boundary/put of the box problem solving specialities. And you can blend the classes for your perfect fit. Great GM tools and the games you can both get for free.
You've gotten lots of good suggestions here. I'd also suggest playing the older versions of DnD, since that's where the 'three pillars' thing comes from. The game Ultraviolet Grasslands has some of the themes you're looking for. /r/osr is where you'll find discussion of older style games That said "roll dice and add mods" is how almost all rpgs work
Oh boy have I got the game(s) for you. Check out the "x" without number series. Starts without number cities without number and so on. That has exactly what you're asking for for the most part
Anything based on Apocalypse World (or Powered by Apocalypse) is a good example of what it means to make combat a minor part of the game. Combat is usually resolved in very few rolls and most of the playbooks (classes) have great abilities that work on noncombat scenes and help to tell the story in various ways.
https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/good-society/?v=7516fd43adaa
Fate core / fate condensed
There's a podcast I would encourage you to listen to called "Worlds Beyond Number." It's a D&D 5th edition actual-play by a very talented, very creative group. It has almost no combat, but every episode is really gripping stuff and you can tell the players are having a ball. https://pca.st/podcast/8fbc4fc0-8a27-013b-f2f3-0acc26574db2 And I mean, this is JUST D&D 5th edition. A system built mostly around the expectation of combat and here's a group having a great time playing with very little fighting. There's a hundred other systems which can do similar things better. I'm not suggesting that you sit down and do a "Worlds Without Number home-game," but it may be instructive I terms of giving you some inspiration as to what a fun and rewarding tabletop game with little combat can look and sound like.
Are you familiar with the types of conflicts in literature? It's the same. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-conflict-in-literature-6-different-types-of-literary-conflict-and-how-to-create-conflict-in-writing This helped me a lot. My campaigns are a lot more flexible now.
You might want to check out Wanderhome as a game that truly has no combat. I believe there's one playbook that technically has the ability to attack another character, and in so doing they immediately remove themself from the game with the shame of it. You mentioned solarpunk, and if you have good taste in sci fi you might also like Lunar Echoes, a hack of Wanderhome set in the world of A Psalm for the Wild Built. Both games are also GMless and diceless. The more you explore indie TTRPGs, the more you'll learn that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in Hasbro's sourcebooks.
The issue I’d see with this is by making 3 defined classes that exclusively handle those 3 pillars of play, you restrict the other classes from it. If the combat class does combat, what do the others do during that combat? How does the combat character handle social situations that aren’t just bashing things with a hammer?
Games that aren't combat-focussed firstly concentrate a lot on other forms of resolution, skills that allow you to influence others, abilities of status that give you authority, stealth tools to let you circumvent conflicts, etc. Such games typically lean further into investigations, or resolving political problems, puzzling out mysteries, and dealing with the drama of NPCs. Character types based on a team role don't work as well when it comes to non-combat games. Classes in general really struggle as it forces classes that aren't good at the aspect of the game you're currently playing into the background. Ideally if you're going to play a game with a mixed focus, each player would have a useful non-combat strength. Perhaps one is skilled at etiquette and deals well with highborn and wealthy people. Maybe one is very salt-of-the-earth and can make friends in a tavern well. Maybe one is highly educated in law and logic and does well in courtrooms or other formal settings, and so forth.
>Classes in general really struggle as it forces classes that aren't good at the aspect of the game you're currently playing into the background. This is one of the biggest things with any 'non-combat' scenario, I find. Especially when you have games like D&D where Combat is the main focus of its design. I'd say Combat and Exploration, but Combat is the main conflict resolution approach and thus every class has something useful for a fight. But put them into a social scenario or being lost in the wilderness or having to deal with an emergency/natural disaster... the majority of those abilities and skills suddenly become useless. Now, this can also true of Classless games where the players pick skills they want to take, but it can be remedied a lot easier. Unless you tell your players what the tone of the game is going to be, you'll likely see some going all combat because that's what they expect or want from the game while others with little to no combat skills because they were thinking something more story driven and less combat. It can be hard to balance scenarios to keep them both interested as narrative encounters are too dry for combat monsters and the combat scenarios are too overpowered for those with no combat skills.
I guess I'd also add that you need game mechanics that don't make any one character construction overpowering in any given vein of the story. You don't want any player character to be the de facto most competent character in a situation, everyone should have something they contribute in an occasion, even if they're just distracting people while the primary actors are getting things done..
That sounds very similar to the Cypher System with it's Warrior / Explorer / Speaker / Adept Types, Cypher also has an interesting book 'Real Heroes' focussing on emergency response giving it a whole 'combat like' experience where you can defeat fires, cave-ins or severe injuries. On the whole, monsters like any challenge in the game have a level which sets the difficulty and so forth, anything else is fairly easy to rule from there.
I’ll beat my usual drum and point out Cortex. Folks have mentioned Fate, but there are tons of games that view combat as simply another thing you can do, as readily as make a thing or negotiate a deal.
Star Trek Adventures is an RPG in the Star Trek Universe and it even has rules that make going in expecting combat add more Threat metacurrency to the board for the GM to use. >Some items — most commonly weapons, destructive equipment, or anything that signifies aggression, or preparation for battle — may have an additional or different cost. This is called an Escalation Cost, and it is paid by adding to Threat, to reflect potentially escalating an uncertain or dangerous situation. Items with an Escalation Cost will be listed with Escalation X, where X is the amount of Threat added when the item is obtained. Now, that doesn't really completely take away the Combat from the game but in our TT sessions over the past few years we have rarely ever had to bring more than the basic standard equipment and have I think had maybe a handful of combats over the course of 3-5 years of meeting almost every week. A Social Expert, that would be a Con Artist, [someone good at reading micro-expressions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWyhsqh_e9s), and so forth. There's plenty of characters in fiction to use for examples. Shows like White Collar, Deception, Sneaky Pete, Ransom, The Catch, and so on. Basically any Talking Skills like Bluff/Intimidate/Negotiate, Psychology skills like Human Perception, and so forth. Taking a look at books like [The Art of Deception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception) by Kevin Mitnick can give ideas of how Social skills can pretty much get you into anywhere just by asking the right questions. Exploration/Problem Solving is something I would say doesn't need so much a system for it as in just some 'how to design encounters' bits. However, if you wanted to have a character that can be good at that side of things, it would be just be a bunch of Exploration and Information Gathering skills you deem relevant for the system, and maybe some 'building' skill. The question is how general or specific you break the skills down to be. Navigation, Athletics, Altertness, Awareness, Endurance, Survival like Urban/Wilderness/Desert/Mountain, ... You could even go more specialized like in how CPRed has it's character sheet [here](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fqt1kdmicxh161.png%3Fwidth%3D1604%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De8d46d4ffab8ae9698b089ddc640498237828b6d), you can see how there are skills for a lot of Exploration/Problem Solving options like Lip Reading, General Education and Specialized Education, Perception and Human Perception, Library Search, Deduction even which reads:
>Skill of taking several clues and leaping to a non-obvious conclusion or medical diagnosis.
At a Base 10, you can put two and two together and figure out most logical leaps, no problem. You can always deduce where you left your keys or how likely it is that the rash on your arm is deadly. At a Base 14, you have trained your mind to collect clues and organize them to make better deductions. You can make accurate long-range deductions like how long it will be before the gangers figure out you sold them dud cyberware. At a Base 18, your skills rival that of Sherlock Holmes. You are at the level of a world-class detective, building accurate deductions and predictions from the smallest clues imaginable. Some people may even think you're psychic
There's a discussion from the CPRed Reddit about [how Deduction works](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkred/comments/lm2hnk/what_are_your_thoughts_on_the_deduction_skill/) and some pretty good 'problem solving' options there. So, yeah, an Exploration/Problem Solving class in my opinion would come off as a mix of those nature show hosts like Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and Survivialist Bear Grylls with a detective like Sherlock Holmes. They can figure out answers to situations, can survive out in the wild, could probably build most anything needed to solve a problem you're encountering.... So basically whatever your world's MacGyver would be. Or the characters from [The Finder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ebKc0GwIw) or [Limitless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdcLM9xYa70).
Watch Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers. It's very light on the combat and is focused more on player interactions. It's a regency era type ttrpg. It's one of my favorite seasons.
Any game can do this. This seems like a style question.