ALTERNATIVE TO BATTLES

See my post on the last page!

Anyway:

It may sound pointless to make an RPG without battles... but an RPG is a story, and not every story should involve fighting.

One thing I have trouble with as a writer is not including "fighting" of some kind, at some point, in my stories, including the ones that aren't at all RPGs. I am fairly envious of writers who can resolve dire conflicts without any reliance on violent action; Neil Gaiman is a great example of this.

I accidentally double posted somehow.

Pen & Paper RPG is way ahead of computer RPGs regarding the point we're discussing. Even though we're back to D&D era, there's been a time in RPG, not too long ago, when dungeon-crawling and battles were out of fashion... mostly thanks to the Storyteller line (Vampire: The Masquerade). You could RPG for hours and hours without a single battle. I can even play D&D for quite some time with no battles (but I admit I couldn't remove battles completely from D&D; wouldn't make sense). But a P&P RPG sheet involves much more than combat. In case you're not familiar with it, take a look:

http://2.forumer.com/uploads/metanet/post-24-1132417509.png

Of course there are battle-orientede stats, but they're not nearly half the sheet. There's a lot to be done without battles, and it still involves challenges, character progression, game mechanics, and it's not like an adventure game.

That is because Vampire: The Masquerade is for mincy little eurotrash faggots who don't like fighting and just want to be Lestat and get laid.

Which is fine, I quite like VtM, but around second edition (LOL ANCIENT HISTORY) White Wolf even spelled this out in the foreword/afterward to Werewolf: The Apocalypse. It says that Vampire is about sex and that Werewolf is about ripping people in fucking half. In other words, it all depends on the game:

Sorry, I love this topic and I design P&P games and have been for years so.

what if just maybe you used a fallout-ish percentage thing for different skills that would gain exp when you used 'em, and have multiple characters with different abilities and give them missions.

What if, indeed. (I wish that I had added my Shadowrun: Missions game to the DB so I could link that too.)

Anyway the answer, apparently, is that people will manipulate the percentage system if you let the save anywhere, and save before every die roll, cheating until they win. Later they will fault the game for this. Of course the alternative is DENYING them a save-anywhere system which can be pretty harsh, especially in this style of game.

I think we can boil this issue down to what exactly in the game rewards the player, particularly with experience points or whatever their equivalent is. In most RPGs, you get experience entirely from battles, so therefore its going to be battle-centric, since the player wants to get as much xp as possible to raise levels (or what have you) and get more powerful. So, they feel the need to fight all the time.

Really, the trick to make a game less combat-centric (even if they're still the choice of engaging in combat) would be to give the player other equally lucrative ways to gain xp, possibly even to the point that you gain more xp from other things than combat, or even gain no xp from combat at all.

For instance, I too hate the "fight and level constantly" paradigm, so I was trying to come up with some kind of alternative that allowed combat, but didn't constantly encourage it. The idea I had was to have something more of an objective system, where you get rewards from completing quests, missions, and discovering things like treasure in dungeons. In the course of, say, exploring a dungeon, one may come across monsters. Some might be squarely in your way and need to be killed, but I'd likely give you a lot of options to try to get around them, either through alternate paths or stealth skills. Really, you have to ask yourself whether or not you're okay with the notion of the enemy still being in that same place later on when you maybe trek back through the same area. If you're okay with that, you can just pass the fight up, and not lose anything for it. Your real goal is to reach the treasure or whatever other important things are in the dungeon, and that's you'd earn all your xp there.

Of course, since combat is less of a necessity in that system, you could have other challenges within a dungeon, such as traps and puzzles, which you could again decide whether or not you want to deal with. Outside of dungeons and other kinds of exploration, you could have complex social situations that require you to use social and diplomacy skills (as well as your own thinking as a player) to settle a conflict or dispute. Even that has the potential to get you into fights, but not necessarily, assuming you maneuver through the situation well. Resolving the situation in at least a somewhat successful manner will earn you xp.

well, in KOTOR and D&D computer games in general, when you level up, your battle-related and outside-of-battle skills both increase. So if you are a thief you get better at hiding in shadows.

Alternatives to battle depend completely on the game. Going from the tabletop RPG perspective (it was already mentioned) there's lots of conflict resolution to be done in those without resorting to fisticuffs. And EVEN when resorting to said fisticuffs they can be resolved in a way that doesn't involve a side-track that takes more time than it should.

For example. RPGs are about player characters. NOT about players. So player character skills could have more effect than player skills. So you just pick a number of specialities from a list (this is where you can look at tabletop RPGs for skill lists and other stuff. The problem is implementing loads of these and then going "HOLY SHIT THIS IS USELESS") and these will... affect things.

This way you could essentially play out battles like any other thing. Like turning pages in a choose-your-own adventure book. You get to certain pages if you have certain skills and not to some pages when you lack those skills.

(you meet thug in alley, he asks for you money and your nice watch. If you have fisticuff skill you might fight him succesfully. If you don't have fisticuff skill you might be better off not fighting him all that much. If you have rabbit-run skill you'll try to run away or if you have psychiatry skill you might talk the thug into giving up on crime.)


Of course it's hard to get some great game mechanic to replace battles. Since oftentimes battles are essentially the only gameplay element in some of these games. It's a game within the game. It's when the roleplaying ends and the dice and hex map comes out. I really think that the only way to get rid of the bore that is the battles is to turn it into "just another thing that happens". After all RPGs are about freedom and freedom means that you should be able to kill someone if you really, really, really, need to. (With all the consequences of course. Being wanted for murder for the rest of the game should really make the game a lot harder, perhaps even impossible)

So yeah a final point (that was touched on earlier). A character's skills are always more important than a player's skills. The player directs a character and decides what the character is going to do. But the player's skills shouldn't ideally affect the outcome of the decision. Instead it's the character that should do all that jazz.

Now this might not really be all about them battles and stuff but it's part of the whole... thing.


As far as leveling goes you could also look at the scope and length of the game and have very limited leveling (I guess people like to level). But I'd like to see a short-ish game where there was no leveling.

blahblahblah I probably have some more ideas on it all. But I've already thrown out a bunch of things that most of them have nothing to do with battles. I just want other skills to have as much worth as battle ones. I'm for the Equal Rights of Skills!

:iceburn.gif:

bahleted

VtM doesn't have no fighting ,it just has no fighting compared to WtA. Celerity/potence/thaumaturgy and what have you will still fuck you up.

Anyway at some point this conversation changed from "how to make an RPG with NO fighting" which is more or less impossible (without it no longer being an RPG) to "how to make an RPG with LESS fighting" which is extremely doable.

I've had a similar idea. Basically, you play a magician and mostly you use magic to manipulate people (mind read, charm, e.t.c) or the environment.

if you make this game and it doesn't completely suck I will play the entire thing seven times through! I love mind control/illusionists.

This way you could essentially play out battles like any other thing. Like turning pages in a choose-your-own adventure book. You get to certain pages if you have certain skills and not to some pages when you lack those skills.

(you meet thug in alley, he asks for you money and your nice watch. If you have fisticuff skill you might fight him succesfully. If you don't have fisticuff skill you might be better off not fighting him all that much. If you have rabbit-run skill you'll try to run away or if you have psychiatry skill you might talk the thug into giving up on crime.)

I have tried to design some games with elements of this and one game that was EXACTLY LIKE THIS. It is extremely tedious.

This problem is so easily non-present in the little side game I was making, pretty much if it moves and looks at you funny you shoot it. A really good way to resolve typical RPG battle tedium is to make a different game instead and just add as much RPG element as you want.

I once had an idea to actually make a Racing RPG, the design was delightfully bizarre but I never really went with it since I didn't like Racing games that much to begin with.

post=130284
Go with the Professor Layton route. That sounds like what you want to accomplish.

It sounded like he wanted stats for this.