How important is combat to your game.

[Omega Man]

Fairly important. I've never ran or played an adventure that didn't have at least one significant combat in it. It's not all me, of course. My players tend to like playing the action hero types. We've played a lot of James Bond Roleplay and WEG's Star Wars RPG and that style tends permeate our games regardless of the system played or the person GMing it. For us, I think it could be likened to a visit to a steakhouse. Comabt isn't the steak we came for. It's the fork and knife we use to carve it up. You know?

[trooper6]

I just want to say that action =/= combat. At least for me.

The games I've been in that haven't have lots of combat in them have been very exciting. And in the games that have had combat in them, often the most exciting things haven't been the combat.

Some exciting things that aren't combat--

-Air/Raft Racing.
-Trying to follow someone/sneaking around without being caught.
-Trying to save the life of a person you were questioning when they took a poison pill in order to avoid detection.
-Trying to escape from Singapore before the Triads find you.
-While testifying at a Grand Conclave, trying to work the evidence so that the Terrans don't lose trade status with the Vilani, and your ship doesn't get majorly screwed over...you do this with shocking revelations!
-At the Grand Ball, trying to out dance you parter (who is also a dangerous agent), so you can lead them closer to your allies on the dance floor (so you can scan to see if the dance partner has a bomb), while the dance partner tries to lead you closer to the planetary governor (but for what reason?!).
-Making a rival look bad through social cutting or through outright framing.
-Programming the autopilot on new hot rod you acquired to fly the bomb into the atmosphere, thus saving everyone!
-Seduction, Dancing and Singing!

So much fun and excitement can happen with out fists or bullets flying.

[ziresta]

It varies.

My dungeon crawls are combat heavy, usually two to four small fights per session and one big one, but that's been increasing as we become more familiar with GURPS Martial Arts so we spend less time looking stuff up.

My space opera campaign — counting all previous versions of it — has varied from epic battles that took twelve hours to play to no combat at all for over a year of almost weekly sessions. Currently the characters in the one-on-one sessions with my husband haven't seen combat of any sort since a sword tournament last year, but are likely to be in their first ever serious fight next week. The characters in the sessions played with my gaming group are all members or trainees in a private military company, so the current lack of combat for them is simply because I like starting with "Day In The Life" sessions to get a feel for the characters. The martial artists have sparred with each other, but that was more showing off than actually fighting, to the extent that some of the matches were resolved by quick contests.

My IOU game had one fight, with rats in the steam tunnels, in about ten sessions.

My long-running Dragonlance campaign had combat in about 50% of the sessions, I'd say.

The Forgotten Realms game I'm a player in hasn't had any combat in its first two sessions, but I expect it to have more combat once the PCs get where they're headed . . . especially since the GM keeps asking me questions about converting creatures to GURPS.

[Sydney]

My group tends to like action and some will get bored if there's not much of it going on. So, I put in lots of action when I can, be it combats or chases, or some other variety of action.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I'm often in games where no combat takes place for several sessions in a row...or only once a year. When I say combat, I mean combat. Fighting and actual violence. Every session I've ever GM'd or played in involved rules and the character sheet and dice rolls. In GURPS at least, there are a lot of rolls that can happen that don't involve violence. That's why I like GURPS, it's strong support of non-combat activity.

That's one of the things I like about GURPS too. Especially in 4th Edition, where mental skills stopped being dangerously cheap.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Sydney

My group tends to like action and some will get bored if there's not much of it going on. So, I put in lots of action when I can, be it combats or chases, or some other variety of action.

Fortunately, I don't have to deal with that sort of thing much.

My last cycle of full-length campaigns had one campaign that focused on combat and two that didn't. The combat-focused one was set in the Buffyverse in 1810. And it varied from session to session in how much combat there was. For example, I sent the Slayer, her half-demon best friend, and the soldier who was attracted to both of them to San Francisco for several sessions. On the way there, they ran into a mission that had been taken over by vampires, with the former priest as the boss vampire, in a deliberate tribute to films like "Night of the Living Dead." But on the way back, they stopped in a grove and got zinged by the Roman god Cupid, with entertaining consequences that included almost no fighting. The players were perfectly happy with both sessions.

As to the other two-thirds of my players—one session near the end of my Transhuman Space campaign had one of the PCs getting a message from the Montreal Department of Child Welfare, who wanted to show him street camera images of his eleven-year-old daughter smoking a cigarette while she walked with a boy from her dance class. This led to his wanted to know why her virtual interface implant hadn't told him, calling in his hacker co-worker to help him find out, and then having it tell him, "You told me not to tell you, by choosing the option of maintaining her privacy. Do you want to change options?" And then they went through a discussion of the details—"Do you want to know if she reads scriptures other than the Bible? If she uses profanity? If she kisses a boy? a girl?" And the thing is, the other players were sitting there listening to this dialogue and laughing and having a wonderful time with the player's brilliant roleplaying of a father having to think about aspects of his little girl's life that he had never wanted to imagine her having. . . .

Bill Stoddard