How to make a primarily non-combat based campaign?
How to make encounters exciting and interesting?
Some ideas to make exciting encounters... (the system I'm GMing now are Pathfinder/dnd 5)
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Exciting encounters (with combat)
>Random X-men Power
In my campaigns, to make the battles interesting and unexpected, I improvise some of the abilities of the monsters.
The systems I've GMing are Pathfinder and DnD 5, so, I choose via "random page" of this wiki (http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Powers) and put it in the monsters sheet as spells, abilities or etc, all improvised (sometimes adjust the CR like the mythic creatures do: more powers, more CR...);
I've always indicate one of the enemies as "special" (so my players know of the presence of a "superpower"), so the rhythm of the battle isn't determinate on the beggining and giving the chance of the GM improvising, the monster tatics will be different too.
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Exciting encounters (without combat)
>"Encounter" Traps/Haunts/Hazards
In dungeonscape (of the 3.5), there are methods to make "encounter traps" - in the essence traps, but they have iniciative and the trap will be continue attacking round after round unless the PCs discover the weak point of the trap. The book says this "weak point" in general will be a skill check, but you as GM can determine this weak point as a enigma, logic puzzle or what shit you like! With the answer, they win the encounter. In the end, the PCs use nothing more their our brains!
You can go beyond and make haunts or hazards that use the same idea. With this in mind, you can make entire campaigns of investigation that relies in the inteligence rather the general "dungeon crawl" strategy or make hazards in the way of the travel of the heroes to the BBEG castle (like have to escape a magical storm created by the BBEG to delay their journey).
>Hero's dilemma
Use some of tropes of movies (like isolation, moral choices and so on) and add to the adventure plot. The choice/discussion It's the encounter! It will be more improvising than planning of the GM.
Politics, example saving an accomplice from being assassinated by talking it out, or stalling. Just a thought.
It's all about the characters man.
If the players play characters that doesn't fight for a living or even practice combat abilities, then they will want to seek other solutions to the campains conflicts.
But that is also dependent on the system you play with, since many systems like DnD leaves few options for that sort of group.
Choose a system that gives the players options to create "peaceful" characters and make the conflicts of your campain such, that it can be resolved either through roleplay or non lethal competition.
Like if the players were all owners of a company that made the newest cybernetics, but were pressured by a close competitor on the market.
The players can then through their influence, money, social skills and guile investigate and defeat their competition without ever rolling for initiative.
You have to have some interesting ideals and backgrounds in play and then you can have your characters have well, fantastical banter.
For instance, the last third of a session last week was spent with the human characters of the party trying to convince the alien characters of the party that imperialism is bad and leads to bad things.
One of them was from a HONORABLE culture of giant otters who were obviously still ruled by competing monarchies, and whose culture had literally never even experimented with any social structure than monarchy.
The character was from a race where the global government that controlled 2/3rds of the planet was a secular, scientifically enlightened monarchy which had persisted IN DIRECT CONTROL OF ALL GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS for the past 1,250 years (And their species only live to like 40-60 anyway) and the remaining league of democratic states were basically impoverished religious shitholes.
We essentially argued that "Look I don't know how you guys managed to fuck up imperialism on your planet but we have several millenia of evidence to suggest that it is the best system of government that pre-singularity beings can achieve."
It was hella fun. Making fun of humans for stuff like only having one body, thinking that democracy makes sense, treating their family as a unit of social mobility outside of noble bloodlines, etc.
>>46308644
Sorry
>MY character was from
Dudes were kind of... small kangaroo crocodiles that were always born as twins and didn't consider twins to be separate individuals?
>>46307165
Make combat too difficult to main for your party's characters, to force them to seek non-violent options.
>>46308644
All the otters came up with was absolute monarchy, like in North Korea?
Monarchy has a hell of a lot of variation on Earth.
>>46308747
The otters had a lot of different variations on monarchy which were roughly as successful as their Earth equivalents, its just that come the industrial revolution, the monarchies were long sighted enough to retain effective economic controls. Helps that they are as a race intrinsically lot more honorable than greedy.
The roos on the other hand, have been through every system of government around, but most of them were subsumed by the Empire, an initially small monarchy which has progressively expanded across the planet's surface over the last 1200 years to the point that it covers the majority of habitable land on the planet. 30 years back the remaining governments created a democratic ruling body to try and unify them against imperial aggression so they could preserve their culture and religions, but shitholians still live in a shithole so doing so pretty much only saved them from being annexed quickly or peacefully and instead guaranteed a slow back and forth meatgrinder that was gently giving way to the empire.
Then an alien invasion happened and humans showed up to to interfere with and disrupt said invasion. We ended up siding with the Empire to reconstruct and modernise the planet because well, shitholians are backwards literally moon worshipping (They have a lot of moons to worship okay) savages that live in a shithole.
>>46308957
It occurs to me on further consideration that if I think of the sheer extent and size of their absolute monarchy, the limiting factor on the empire's rate of expansion may well have been something to do with the rate at which the royal family could breed.
The monarchy is seriously just... east and west berlin levels of enlightened compared to its competitors. Given enough time adjacent to the border with the Empire, I think states tend to just give up and peacefully get annexed from cultural pollination by the Empire.
>>46309009
At any rate, this is the impression that both humans and citizens of the empire have. I imagine citizens of the Caliphate see it differently.
