They bravely ran away: on players eschewing combat

[dorchadas]

I've been thinking of writing this post for days but, well, my appendix tried to kill me so it took a bit. I should also say this is mostly about dungeon-crawling-style RPGs and other games don't always have this problem.

tl;dr: RPGs are games and how to reward players matters.

I'm going to start with a pull quote from my review of Deus Ex:

DX:HR has a flat XP reward per enemy killed, then a bonus for knocking them out instead and an additional bonus for concealing the body, with extra bonuses for not setting off any alarms, never being seen by cameras, and so on. That meant that when I played, I would sneak through the entire level like a shadow until I got the bonus, then double back and knock out every guard and stuff them into the ventilation shafts. This got me a bunch of XP, but it made every level take twice as long and trivialized the difficulty curve because I could buy almost every upgrade by the halfway point.

I didn't write about it in that review, though I was tempted, to, but even though original D&D was a haphazardly-designed game that included a lot of Gygax and Arneson throwing in whatever they thought was cool, it had a great gameplay loop and well-thought-out reward system. OD&D is about going into holes in the ground, fighting monsters, and removing treasure, but in contrast to later editions of D&D the focus was on the treasure (to fund castles and armies to play Chainmail with, of course). Treasure was the source of XP, so all the rules that I thought were weird, coming to D&D with AD&D 1e with no context, worked in service to that rule.

Encumbrance is so that the PCs have to make decisions about how many items they're going to bring into the dungeon vs. how much treasure they can haul out of it. Henchmen and hirelings are the same thing but in mercenary form--more people to carry treasure, but those extra people need to be paid. Wandering monster rolls and food and water requirements add time pressure, because food and water weigh a lot and wandering monsters don't carry any treasure, both of which prevent the PCs from simply searching every single 10' square of wall multiple times.

All of this put together means that combat is more of an obstacle than the focus on the game, and since combat isn't rewarded the players are free to pursue their objective of acquiring treasure any way they want. They can bribe the goblins by saying they'll fight the hated orcs if the goblins let them through, they can sneak past the ogres to get to the gargoyle caves, and most importantly, they can run. When combat doesn't provide much XP, there's no reason to fight everything.

When I ran Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom and posted my summary of session ten, some of my friends were astonished that the PCs had run from the giant spiders and the river dragon without fighting either, but it made perfect sense. That game had two separate drivers of action--in-game, I kept meticulous track of the PCs expenses, so they needed new sources of treasure to pay for food, lodging, medical care (they had almost no magical healing), gear repair, and so on; out of game, I gave a flat XP reward based on their deeds, so I gave them more XP when they finally got to the city of Etemenanki even though they spent that game session traveling and talking to other travelers. As such, they were incentivized to pursue personal goals and to seek out treasure, and fighting wild animals didn't fit into either of those.

In contrast, later versions of D&D--and especially the various computer games based on D&D--tilt the reward structure completely toward combat. Treasure is nice because it provides a means to get better equipment, but the real game is fighting the monsters. Monsters provide the XP, monsters provide the challenge, monsters are the reason you're playing. And CRPGs are obviously not as good at non-combat challenges as they are as combat challenges, which is why the dungeon crawler was the first kind of CRPG. With combat coming from XP and no mechanism for surrender, though, every monster un-killed represents lost XP. Monsters that run are lost XP--the text in the AD&D 2e DMG about XP coming from "defeated" monsters rather than dead ones seems to have been overlooked by a lot of people--which encourages PCs to be sadistically homicidal. Kill every enemy because they represent a source of power, don't let enemies run because that's lost power, don't run yourself because that's voluntarily giving up XP, etc. And thus the PCs murder everything and never run from battles.

Reward structures is one way to deal with this, as I mentioned above. Another is having some kind of consequences for indiscriminate murder, much like in the real world. This is harder in the context of a dungeon crawler, where conflict is expected, but it's possible--one thing I really like that I took from Exalted is the idea of hungry ghosts, where people who die violently create hungry ghosts that attack anything living, so if the PCs just murder everything in their path they're creating more enemies for themselves (and harder enemies, because unlike living beings the undead never run). Social consequences work too--in a tabletop game where the dungeon factions actually have personalities, if the PCs break every agreement with the goblins, attack them relentlessly, kill their patrols, murder noncombatants, and otherwise act like complete monsters, when they try to make an agreement with the orcs on level two they might get back "Nah, we heard what you did to the goblins." That can lead to a spiral where the PCs are unable to deal with anyone except through murder because they're too well-known for murdering everyone, but if they're so good at murder they can back up their violence they can actually loop around into using intimidation to avoid combat. If the PCs kill the dragon on level 10 and swing by wearing dragonscale armor, the ogres on level 3 certainly aren't going to start a fight and might even bribe the PCs to leave them alone. Historically we called this "paying tribute" and it was a cornerstone of international relations.

I've been reading Dungeon Fantastic, especially the comments on this post about how the PCs there are constantly putting more and more and more points into combat skills because every time they miss or are hit, that means they need more skill. GURPs has flat improvement costs, so Broadsword-25 costs the same as Broadsword-10, which shows that the game can work against the reward structure. That game has XP for treasure, but since the PCs have low to no social skills and every attempt to improve them could have been improved combat skills, combat skills go up and the PCs fight everyone. In a system with escalating costs like Exalted, where my PCs could buy Socialize ●● and Presence ● and Investigation ●● for the same cost as Melee ●●●●●, there's greater incentive to spread out a bit.

I'm thinking of gearing up to run another megadungeon in the refined version of the WotMK systems I've been tinkering on for years, so this is on my mind.