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As the title says, are you in one long dungeon crawl surrounded by monsters or are you an armchair thespian who seldom picks up a sword?

There is no right or wrong here, I have played in both kinds of campaigns and I am just curious.

I am a big fan of combat light campaigns. It makes the combat a bit more tense. Especially when it's super deadly. There are some games that are just dungeon crawls but combat becomes monotony after a while.

It really depends on which system I'm running from, there is after all more to roleplaying then just D&D.

Honestly, however combat-heavy the PCs make it. I try to design adventures with ways around most combat (stealth, talking, etc). If the PCs go in guns blazing, that's fine too... each approach has its risks. PCs who go in guns blazing without TACTICS however, tend to wind up dead.

Very little, unless we are playing World of Darkness where it would move up to some.

Hell in my fantasy games I don't even roll dice for my npc's anymore. I'm not looking to kill the characters, and unless they mishap on the roll with a 001, I just narrate the combats via how well they hit the target by, or miss etc.

Have any of you ever encountered the homicidial maniac PC who just wants to kill everything?

I like to remind players that if they want to kill everything, they have their XBoxes for that. If they want to think, solve problems, negotiate, and deal with a more nuanced environment, then role playing is the place for that.

Now, that being said, everyone likes a good gunfight.

snurl wrote:Have any of you ever encountered the homicidial maniac PC who just wants to kill everything?

Yeah, something huge and gribbly they have zero chance of defeating kills them ten minutes after it gets annoying. Players either then realise that isn't how we play and get into the actual roleplaying spirit, or they leave.

So far, only one person has ever left, and thats over twenty years of gaming, with somewhere in the region of fifty players.

The answer to that question is very dependent on system and setting. So I'll kind of reverse the logic. Generally, I've been looking for systems and settings that de-emphasize the frequency of combat (but not necessarily because it is always or almost always fatal). MouseGuard is a good example.

The D&D campaigns I've played in have been almost entirely combat.

All other campaigns I've been in have either had no combat whatsoever, or maybe 1 very short combat every 10 sessions or so.

I prefer games where I am in combat about 25%-35% of the time. I like to be able to explore social and actual RP aspects in my gaming as well as hack n slash.

Most games I play are combat centric. Almost all of the players I have met want to play a game where they get gear/loot/level up/become mr. Badass. As such I mostly play D&D (3.5) and DH/RT/DW these days. Since that is the majority of what those games are about.

Combat based for the most part, seeing as my players lack social skills and a better understanding of how to about their business in a normal manner. I tried a negotiations setting, but that quickly devolved into an episode of "Blood on the Carpet"

combat takes up roughly half the actual real life time devoted to playing tabletop RPGs. while an hour of ingame roleplaying can take 60 seconds of real life, the reverse is true for combat (60 seconds of combat ingame takes an hour of real life to resolve). when it gets to more than that amount (like with our short attempt at the long drawn out combat in d&d 4e where 1st level kobolds can have 30hp), it doesn't feel like an RPG.

In the 4e game I play in, we have combat-centric sessions about every other to every third game. Sometimes it's for a few sessions at a go - like now we're in Thunderspire - but then we have combat-down-time where we're solving mysteries and being diplomatic. It's a nice balance that our DM has struck and works well since my wife gets tired throwing dice to kill monsters.

I'm ramping up to run a GURPS campaign featuring a post-apocalyptic, high tech, robots + zombies+ aliens game where the heroes are little more than average joes forced to survive in small settlements. GURPS has an excellently detailed combat system that can (relatively) accurately duplicate fantastic genres like superheros or the Matrix films.

However, as one of my old players pointed out to a new player, "In GURPS you avoid the fights because they're so real, they're deadly." When a blow to the head that does no damage has the potential to knock you unconscious (50% of the time to an "average joe") for a few rounds, you do your best to avoid getting hurt. My last fantasy game lacked magical healing, providing further incentive since it can take weeks to fully recuperate from significant wounds in a medieval setting. The fights in the game took on a much more visceral feel, with the characters resorting to tactics that subdued their opponents as quickly as they could without sacrificing their own defenses. All that being said, it wouldn't be a good apocalypse game if folks didn't bite it occassionally. So there will be blood.

Recently got into a game of Changling so very little to none on my scale.

In 15 years or so of playing D&D I've never actually set foot in a dungeon. Killed a few dragons though. My brother has always been my DM and has a gift for improv. He almost never actually wrote a story, we just sat down and he made it up as we went.

Vampire games went the same way except they did to degenerate into a blood bath (excuse the pun) quickly. Somehow as a mighty wizard I was benign and good but put the Beast inside me and I became a homocidal maniac.

For some reason I can't vote....

Most of it. We just explore around verbally. Isn't that how most people do it?

"Yeah, so I'm going to look around the library"
"You found 45 gold and a couple books of interest. Reading them gave you a +2 in history"
"Nice"

It varies wildly for night to night with my regular group. Sometimes we won't see combat for a few sessions (our sessions tend to last from 4-8 hours) or we'll spend an entire night doing an epic battle.

On average I'd say somewhere around 25% though as my boys thoroughly enjoy RP'ing their characters.

I try to break it up but in DND combat always takes ages.

Thanks everyone for all of the replies.

I was wondering to myself if it was odd to be attempting non-combat based solutions to RPG scenarios.
Now I see that it isn't me, it's the players I am with at the moment.

snurl wrote:Thanks everyone for all of the replies.

I was wondering to myself if it was odd to be attempting non-combat based solutions to RPG scenarios.
Now I see that it isn't me, it's the players I am with at the moment.

If they make it interesting though and make the effort. Its maybe worth seeing where it goes. Part of why I like RPG's is that unknown element where you don't know how each engagement will work out.

My efforts at stealth are often thwarted by other PCs before they ever begin. I have concluded that it is the group I am in at the moment.

snurl wrote:My efforts at stealth are often thwarted by other PCs before they ever begin. I have concluded that it is the group I am in at the moment.

Unfortunately that's the case a lot of the time and it depends on the crowd your with and sometimes even the moods of players. I love seeing my PCs try to solve a problem with minimal or no combat by being creative. It's great. I like it even more when they actually attempt to talk to intelligent creatures before drawing weapons and going in swinging.

Yes, now when I DM the sky is the limit for just what shenanigans my PCs may attempt.

But as a PC in the current group / game I am in everyone just wants to kill.