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Greetings Designers,

I wanted to chat a bit about how to add "non-combat" elements to your games. This came to mind as I was thinking about hot to add investigation, light RPG, and other non-combat elements into a tabletop game where you could "win" without throwing a punch, shoot a gun, etc.

I have seen many games add some sort of "non-combat" actions like hiding, solving a puzzle, etc. What are some interesting ways you have seen games do it, what made it interesting, and how would you go about making a tabletop mini game that was not combat focused?

Discuss?

There's something to be said for adding non-lethal elements to combat as well. Anything to make games more interesting than Risk, honestly.

For the sake of discussion, in Titanomachina I have a laundry list of actions including

Attack - allows the Titan to attack

Jump - moves the Titan - allows the Titan to move over obstacles, straight ahead
Walk - moves the Titan - allows turns and can be combined with Attacks

Twist - increases the arc of systems, allowing it to attack more targets, or jump in interesting directions
Full Power - enables a Titan to repeat a previous action
Scan - enables a Titan to increase its initiative, potentially changing the order in which its turn is taken
Operate - adds a Crew's Effect to the Effect of a subsequent action

Raise Shields - allows a Titan to protect itself from attacks using shield tokens
Detect - enables a Titan to place a terrain piece on the board
Repair - removes damage from a Titan
Block - allows a player being attacked to interrupt an attack and propose a new target (potentially changing the outcome of the attack)

These are primarily concerned with combat, allowing players to attack each other's Titans in clever ways, or to defend themselves in clever ways. So there's four ways in which a Titan can defend itself, aside from moving, and four ways a Titan can improve its attacks. Then there's two ways to move, jumping or walking.

Out of these actions, Detect is the most interesting I think, because it allows players to build up the board, and replace building pieces that were removed or not immediately placed during set-up. A sensor system, operated by a senior crew member, can detect four building pieces, enough to cover up a Titan from most angles. It's worth noting as well that the game's scoring is based on how many building pieces a Titan can place on the board, as well as systems on an enemy Titan it can destroy.

One game I'm currently working on (a solo/co-op horror skirmish game) I'm trying to make non-combat skills important for the scenarios, too. And I think that's part of the key: you have to have scenarios that will highlight non-combat skills.

Right now, I'm approaching that in a couple of ways. In some scenarios you have to accumulate "Investigation Points" or the like by making successful checks over the course of the game until you get X number, which then causes some other event (or even win) in the scenario. Doing that with a couple of different scenarios with a couple of different skills is my current approach, and I'm hoping that will work out ok.

Even if this was strict PVP, I think having a non-combat objective, or other non-combat ways to earn victory points, is required for having any skills other than murder-death-kill related ones have any meaning. You might get some mileage out of "support skills" which can boost other models' combat skills, but you're still relying on combat skills at that point. Which, depending on your goal, may work out fine.

I'm curious as to whether people feel that non-combat and combat should feature entirely different resolution.

On one hand, most threads relating to the mechanics of games say that the resolution mechanics should, wherever possible, all tie together in the same way (EG Roll a dice and compare to target, or opposed rolls), so the players only have to learn one thing to do and then apply it to each scenario they encounter.

On the other hand, if performing non-combat efforts at resolving a situation is the exact same mechanic as performing combat efforts, then it wouldn't feel like it adds anything to the game (EG hide from the guards or kill the guards, both resolved by rolling a dice and exceeding a number, so it only matters what your choice was called. they may as well be called Option A and Option B!)

Any games I've started designing have featured fairly auto-succeeding alternative actions (like steadying your aim or searching for valuables) which just involve stating your intention then placing a token or drawing an item card, that sort of thing.

I would perhaps have fairly luck-based actions, like hiding or searching, use a portion of the mechanics for combat.
For example, my skirmish game features the mechanics of declaring an attack, rolling defence, and then drawing cards to determine the damage. Hiding could use just the card drawing mechanic, in the same way, to establish the results. That way it's familiar, but also distinct.

Agreed that the core mechanic for non-combat actions should follow the same mechanic for combat actions as much as possible (e.g., I'm using dice vs target number for both combat and non-combat). The effect of those, though, are necessarily going to be different, since in combat you're trying to cause damage to other models, whereas non-combat you're trying to do something else.

One thing you could do that might be interesting, though, is give each player a resource of some other kind (Morale, Logistics, Net-Presence, etc.) and have some actions directly affect those rather than damaging models. Setting would make a lot of difference on what you might do here, but I could see using a set of resources that each player has as an alternative to just "Victory Points".

I think it's worth considering how you might story-board a story, with each action or panel defining when you might want players to be able to do. Even a Heisei-Era Godzilla film has Godzilla do more than just hit things.