Soapbox: About the Industry

The Hazards of Non-Combat Gaming

by Sandy Antunes
Aug 05,2005

The Hazards of Non-Combat Gaming

by Sandy Antunes

While the cognoscetti often lament the lack of alternatives to the standard dungeon crawl, truth be told I haven't seem many flock to the alternatives.

There is a tiny, tiny subgenre of gaming that seeks to avoid combat. Focusing on puzzle-solving and, in place of combat, the act of deliberately avoiding combat, this 'sneaker' genre exists in both tabletop RPG and in first person shooters.

And in both, no one buys them. Hmm... let's examine this.

In first person shooters, you have the game "Thief" and, umm... its sequels. That's it for 'first person sneakers' in the computer world. Those wishing to debate this can check an older slashdot thread. I mention "Thief" here to show that, hey, the market for non-combat-focused stuff in a combat-heavy medium is hard all over.

Okay, to RPGs, those brilliantly crafted collaborative epics of roleplaying and character. Where everyone wants to bash someone with a sword (or just shoot them).

No, correct that. Many people run games that are combat-light. But it's rare to see a game that doesn't _allow_ for combat, even if it deemphasizes the necessity.

It's not that we all want to kill our enemies. We just want that to be one of our possible options. Even in "Call of Cthulhu", we arm ourselves to shoot raving cultists, minor monsters, and (when the big beastie appears), ourselves.

I have standing to rant on this, because I've been writing non-combat stuff for a while and, gosh darn it, sometimes I get so little response I just want to shoot someone. But I can't, because in the real world, you just can't do that-- all the rules are _against_ it.

Is the presence of combat in games simply part of the power fantasy, the wish fulfillment then? Well, duh, yes.

But it doesn't have to be. For Thrilling Tales' Ace Reporter, an ace reporter is a problem-solving machine. They specifically can do end runs around combat to finish quests and get answers. Sure, they can pack heat, but they don't have to-- they can bend the rules of the genre instead.

But "Rocket Ranger" outsells me. Ouch.

For Redhurst Academy of Magic (a great "Harry Potter sans Harry Potter" D20 world), I wrote a 'sneaker' called "What's In Her Name" specifically as an avoid-combat challenge because, well, call me old-fashioned but I just don't think teachers should be requiring teen students to be fighting each other at school.

I wasn't able to get webstats on how it did versus their second one, but they stopped printing free PDFs shortly after. Coincidence-- or the curse of non-combat?

For the 24 Hour RPG Challenge, I created The Monitors, a near-future SF world where combat literally was impossible, the titular Monitors preventing it. All conflict had to be non-combat.

It got a B+.

To find examples of non-combat, I can reach into gaming sessions from the past, sure, but these were always in games where combat was a likely prospect. The absence of combat was occassional, but the risk of hostilities was always present.

Even the kid-aimed "Faery Game" upcoming from Firefly has extensive combat rules because, some days, you just wanna fly around and kick butt.

My question is, does an audience exist that wants no-combat scenarios, and the publishers I wrote for are just not reaching them? Or is there no real market between "folks that like tabletop RPGs"and "people wanting no-combat scenarios", meaning we'd have to invent a new market to get further on this?

Indeed, it seems the main alternative to a combat-heavy dungeon crawl is... a post-modern revisiting of the concept of dungeon crawl ala Hackmaster or Return to Tomb of Horrors. Such irony.

But the true irony is, some days I just want to game and not kill anyone. It's getting harder to do every day.