It seems to me that setting out to run a non-combat scenario (instead of one just happening spontaneously) breaks down into several distinct issues:

• prep and management
• what the PC's will be doing instead of combat
  
• why the PC's will want to avoid combat, and the non-combat price they will pay for any outbreak of violence

Prep and management
From the premise of a Le Carresque espionage game, and other posters' thoughts, I would say that you're going to be running a game with PC's who have overlapping and conflicting goals and loyalties, and a dense plot containing several subplots, blind alleys and red herrings. So I think prep will be very important. If I was going to try running a game like this I'd discuss the basic idea with my players; then sketch out a basic plot with key NPC's; then do a separate chargen session; then fill out the plot; and then run the game.

As well as conflicting goals, hooks like sympathetic villains- or outright PC loyalties to villains- would be a good way of creating immersion in the requisite atmosphere of suspicion and so on.

Instead of combat?
It strikes me that a game like this would also benefit from allowing the PC's to split up more than the average party. Time pressures would also be important for generating tension. So attention to methods for dealing with these, and for handling tasks like research and so on would also be useful. Making the main investigation an aside to the PC's 'day job' might work here, so the PC's are constantly being called away to unrelated mundane tasks, or having to explain to section chiefs why they aren't attending to their regular in-tray could provide useful obstacles and conflict if it wasn't overdone.

The cost of combat?
What would make the absence of combat in a game like this dramatic is not that it was impossible, but that it would cost the PC's something other than the normal price of injury. Legal repercussions and capture are 2 obvious options. A bad reputation that encourages people not to help them is another. I'm sure you could think of others. The point though is that I reckon this would work better if the players were being driven towards wanting to use violence but had reasons to hold back.

These the kind of things I'd be thinking about if I was to try a game like this. I hope they help. I know that they've given me a hankering to dig out my Smiley novels and put together a mini-series of my own! If I was to do a game like this I think I'd probably use True20 to run it, which would give me the perfect excuse to buy Spycraft to see if I could graft anything from that onto True20.

:forge:

RPGPundit

Quote from: JMcL63These the kind of things I'd be thinking about if I was to try a game like this. I hope they help. I know that they've given me a hankering to dig out my Smiley novels and put together a mini-series of my own! If I was to do a game like this I think I'd probably use True20 to run it, which would give me the perfect excuse to buy Spycraft to see if I could graft anything from that onto True20.

I think if you could make the skills match up neatly enough, and borrow a few feats, it's not inconceivable that you could get Dramatic Conflicts to work with True20 without an excessive amount of work. They already do a few of the same thing with skills (e.g., IIRC, true 20 rolls athletic skills into 1 skill; Spycraft does the same.)

Quote from: RPGPundit:forge:

RPGPundit

... and your point is caller?

Quote from: JMcL63

• prep and management
• what the PC's will be doing instead of combat
  
• why the PC's will want to avoid combat, and the non-combat price they will pay for any outbreak of violence

  Yep, that all makes sense.  The prep-time would be necessary because you'd have to put some thought into the plot and the network of relationships and different factions that make up the thing to be discovered.  You'd also need to think through some of the permutations of what should happen if the PCs alienate important contacts and so on.

  As for what people would do other than combat, I'm not sure why people are finding this so counter-intuitive.  Most political dramas have very little combat in them... it's not as if this is come completely unknown plot structure.

  In the context of a Smiley-type game MI6-types aren't allowed to act in Britain and if they start killing people the police, special branch, MI5 and the cabinet office would be spitting blood.  Also, in the series, MI6 types tend to be public school boys and oxbridge graduates rather than former marines.  There's no reason why they'd know how to kill people or be capable of it.  the whole point of the exercise would be for it to not be James bond.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalAs for what people would do other than combat, I'm not sure why people are finding this so counter-intuitive.  Most political dramas have very little combat in them... it's not as if this is come completely unknown plot structure.

It's not that I find the idea counter-intuitive at all Mr Analytical. Rather it's an issue of PC specialisation I guess. I mean to say: if winning combat is the major objective of a scenario, then the different PCs' roles in that are easy to understand. When there are a variety of non-combat tasks that are to be more important objectives than winning combat then that will effect what PC's should be good at, how skill-use will effect pacing and so on. That's it really.

QuoteIn the context of a Smiley-type game MI6-types aren't allowed to act in Britain and if they start killing people the police, special branch, MI5 and the cabinet office would be spitting blood.  Also, in the series, MI6 types tend to be public school boys and oxbridge graduates rather than former marines.  There's no reason why they'd know how to kill people or be capable of it.  the whole point of the exercise would be for it to not be James bond.

Yes, that makes sense. Although a little bit of hurting wouldn't necessarily be out of order!

I think it's a little hard to generalize about non-combat games, since they can vary widely.  

The one extended campaign that I ran which had zero violence was a fantasy game where characters from the real world were sucked into a strange fantasy world (dubbed "Water-Uphill World" since water there falls upwards).  There wasn't any rule against violence or anything -- it just never came up, at least for the PCs.  The PCs were all schoolchildren who in that world had magic powers.  So they weren't suited either tempermentally or physically for violence (though Noriko did study kendo).  

I don't think I did much different than in my other games.  Actually, I used a bunch of examples that campaign in my article on general game prep -- see Jonathan Walton's journal PUSH, Volume 1 for the article.  I came up with interesting things to explore, and interesting characters to interact with.  The one thing which was different was that exploring magic was a big part of that game.  So that fits as another outlet of play.

Quote from: RPGPundit:forge:

RPGPundit

Dude, I'm currently running Pendragon vikings, before that I ran a historical Runequest game and prior to that Space 1889.

You really do need to learn the difference between "hey, I'm thinking of trying out x" and "hey, x is superior to your gaming you mouthbreathers".

You did make me laugh though.  I think the smilie would be better if it read "go back to the Forge, hippy!"

For the record, I am not saying "combat is bad, m'kay?"  Just, "hey, how would you make this interesting?"

Quote from: BalbinusNow, I'm not saying combat is wrong, I'm running a Vikings game at the moment after all, but let's say I wanted to run a game with suspense and intrigue but no combat.  What tips would you all have and how would you keep it interesting?

I've mostly run without combat because until recently -- last week, in fact -- I was never satisfied with the way combat worked online.  (Last week I managed to integrate a collection of partial solutions I'd thought of over the years into a package that worked, so now I'm not as likely to avoid it as before.)

I don't suppose that anyone really needs to know what a suspenseful fictional scenario that isn't built around combat looks like, since there are numerous examples in movies and books.

There are some things I learned by experience in my first campaign, which I thought was going to be a pretty typical adventure, but which turned out to be political intrigue instead.  The typical GMing advice and assumptions didn't prepare me for all of the changes that non-combat-focused play would produce.

1.  You want Real Roleplayers for this.  Seriously: people who are interested in social interactions and the repercussions thereof, and who don't need their hands held when you point them at disparate collection of NPCs who control access to resources or information.

If they insist that the important contests be mechanically arbitrated imagined-physical battles -- if they're not interested in roleplayed social maneuvering, or else if they have no idea of how to do it -- the game isn't likely to come off.

Probably pretty obvious, except one of the things that happened early in my first campaign is that the campaign took on political overtones, and the players tended to fall into two groups: the people who happily leaped into the maneuvering on their own because their characters had purposes and drives, and the people who tended to do nothing useful if I wasn't actively pushing a plot at them and steering them, saying, "Here, you need to be doing this now"; these players weren't especially interested in political and social problems and hadn't built characters with strong motivations along those lines.  I'm sure there are GMs who'd be happy running for the latter sort -- if you routinely do suspense-novel-style plotting, say -- but I wasn't one of them.

(If for some godforsaken reason you want a mechanical resolution for social interactions instead of roleplaying them out the way all right-thinking people would, maybe ripping the conflict resolution system out of Dogs in the Vineyard would suit.  I find it unimmersive, but it does what it sets out to do well.)

2.  You want everyone to have a chance at doing interesting and significant things, at making a real difference in the course of events, at having their moment in the sun.  Nothing different there.  But how you go about addressing play balance and niche protection in a noncombat game is generally different.

Most game systems assume that combat is the focus of play, and they attempt to balance or limit the PCs' ability to harm the enemy in a fight.  And the default assumption is that the power of the characters needs to be reined in; the starting character is weak, and probably a social nonentity.

But in a noncombat game, how good a PC is in a fight is so much background color if you're not going to be doing much fighting.  So I don't have a problem if a player wants to run an ex-Special Forces type who's stayed in shape -- so what?  It's not going to make him outclass everyone in investigation and intrigue, and it may give him both background knowledge and a different set of contacts from everybody else.  Different knowledge and different contacts are good -- that's where we want the niche protection.

Just because a character comes in looking way overpowered compared to the others for a combat game doesn't mean that it's going to break out the same way in one based on roleplayed intrigue.

In fact, the player who naively builds a combat monster who doesn't have social status, useful investigation skills, or contacts in an intrigue game is likely to be turn out to be underpowered.  Every PC needs a way to connect to the main action, and the pure combat monster in the intrigue game may not have one, and may be completely overshadowed by the characters who do.  If you take every build you'd accept for a garden-variety combat-based adventure, some of those characters may end up having no fitting entry into the intrigue plot itself.

The character's niche may be defined by their professional skills, but it doesn't have to be.  If there are different allied factions in the game and the factions are important, being able to get cooperation out of different factions can also be a niche.  (This character can get information from the elves at Shironlea.  This one can expect some cooperation from Aerhen intelligence.  This one has an influence on dwarven policy ... and so on.)

3.  The big hazard in my experience is setting up a situation where one PC can expect to give orders to another, if you don't know the players well enough to know that they'll get along.  It's social maneuvering ability that's the currency in this game, and you just put one in the shadow of the other.  It can work, but it's a risky construction.

4.  Not much of a concern in modern spy stories, but some fantasy systems have  intrigue-killing magic.  If there's magic, make sure it doesn't give the PCs ways to separate truth from falsehood, the real face from the mask, too readily.

I was in a game of transhuman space (great game, hold your nose to cover the stench of it being a SJG product and get it) in which we won the game (it was a con demo) without one single incidence of combat, and won it perfectly with all goals achieved.

The last group had basically blown up half the base to get the mission done and hadn';t gotten it all right.

So the GM said we did the best run thru she'd ever seen and gave us ALL prizes.

Combatless games can rock when you have ways to solve them thru cunning and planning.

Quote from: Dominus NoxCombatless games can rock when you have ways to solve them thru cunning and planning.

That's how I run games with little combat.  My current game is very, very combat light.  I doubt very much there will be combat in any of the upcoming sessions.  Most of it will be political manuevering.

Quote from: Balbinushey, how would you make this interesting?"

Setting and stakes.

One of the things a lot of players love about combat is the stakes are living or dying, right?  So:

A. Build into setting and chargen a sufficient number of conflicting motivations, so the characters can be working together on a main plot level, but at subtle cross-purposes on a micro level.  Definitely work with the players to zero in on some stuff that really gets them going.

B. More importantly, the motivations should involve something desperately at risk.  Family, well-loved career, world hunger, again, a riff on whatever really makes your dominant players go.  Otherwise, where's the need?  And subsequently, where's the drive?  If you build a situation where the consequences of ordering the correct donut are life-or-death important, it doesn't matter that it's ordering a donut vs. blowing a new pie hole through a zombie.

Personally, I loves some zombie explodin.'  :idhitit:

Quote from: Keranplayers tended to fall into two groups: the people who happily leaped into the maneuvering on their own because their characters had purposes and drives, and the people who tended to do nothing useful if I wasn't actively pushing a plot at them and steering them, saying, "Here, you need to be doing this now"; these players weren't especially interested in political and social problems and hadn't built characters with strong motivations along those lines.  I'm sure there are GMs who'd be happy running for the latter sort -- if you routinely do suspense-novel-style plotting, say -- but I wasn't one of them.

  This is true.  It does require players who are self-starters and who are able to sit down, look at a bunch of clues, formulate theories and decide upon courses of action.

  Alternatively, the GM has to know how to string an intrigue-based plot together.  I remember once playing an Amber game in which I was desperately trying to get into a position where I could make plans and pick sides but the GM would stone-wall every action that wasn't in accordance with his GTA-style plotting (i.e. you can do what you want, when you want but you need to do X before the plot can advance).

I'm not sure I have a lot to add here, but my current game has now gone four sessions without any combat.

I didn't specifically plan to have a no-combat game, and it's set in a violent and lawless period (the Dark Ages), so if anything I suppose I expected there to be fighting at some stage. But it has gone otherwise, and the players have been engaged and having fun.

How is this? I see several interrelated reasons:

1. We're using a system in which all conflict is treated the same way, viz. HeroQuest. A debate is as interesting and system-supported as a fight.

2. The players had a free hand in choosing abilities, and for the most part they chose non-combat abilities, such as 'Speak in Tongues' or 'Unnerving Gaze'. Neither did any players take templates (Keywords for those who know HQ) that emphasised combat.

3. The players have been free to chart their own course. I have no planned adventure, just a web of NPCs and their motivations.

4. I have adapted my approach to the players; ie when I saw the characters they created I went away and thought about how they might be engaged.

Combat simply hasn't come up as a solution to problems, and as I haven't forced it on the characters, it hasn't happened. The threat (or promise) of it is always there, but there is no imperative to fight.

I think that going into a game with the notion that you will avoid combat is about as full of traps as going into a game assuming there must be combat.

HeroQuest is incredibly good at that sort of thing.  I ran it once and the climactic battle was a PC storyteller trying to impress the military governor of the city with a stirring tale while a paid heckler tried to ruin it for him.

Every bit as tense as a fight to the death, great stuff.

When I played it, I had an old women in a Gloranthan setting and I used my Scold menfolk ability to stop a raiding party.  Again, brilliant.

But, sadly, I really don't enjoy extended contests and I find bits of the rules just too abstract for me.  I may reassess it when Mythic Russia comes out.