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Old 05-08-2017, 10:33 PM   #1
Canology
 
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Default What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

On my way home I was thinking about a campaign that I had worked up many years ago that was going to focus on a bunch of youngish academics who were contacted by a beloved and respected instructor who had suddenly discovered that she was able to heal people psionically.
The game was going to revolve around the characters trying to help their professor figure out how to deal with this. I imagined the situation spiralling out of control with the prof being hailed as a god, a witch, a monster, etc. I never actually got to run it (and it is quite possible it would have sucked). ;)

But it got me thinking, since GURPS *is* universal, what kinds of non-traditional (?) (or just very low-combat/action) campaigns people have run, and how did they work out?
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Old 05-08-2017, 11:43 PM   #2
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

In GURPS, specifically?

Uplift, my first GURPS campaign, 1994-1995, had only two sessions where combat rules were used: once for a space battle, and once to hold a Tymbrimi crew member still so the medic could treat her for gheer reaction.

First Contact, 1998-1999, focused on diplomatic negotiations between an advanced alien race and Earth's great powers in the 1930s (Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Vatican City). Each player had two characters, a diplomat and a scientific advisor. There was an attempted assassination in the final episode, but hardly any combat in the earlier ones.

Whispers, 2005-2007, my first Transhuman Space campaign, was about a private investigative agency specializing in informational crimes, and had lots and lots of hacking and sneaking, but very little actual combat.

Worminghall, 2012-2014, set at a medieval university with a Faculty of Magic, had some combat, largely street brawls between different groups of students, but that wasn't really its main focus.
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Old 05-08-2017, 11:50 PM   #3
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

Back in the late 80s, I co-GMed a GURPS Stanford game for the Stafnord Gamers. The only "combat" was getting past the co-opted football players to get to the board meeting to stop the University of California and Dean Jean from absorbing Stanford into the UC System. Oh, the horror!
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Old 05-09-2017, 12:03 AM   #4
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

The least action-oriented game I've been in was a GURPS In Nomine game run by our own William in the late 3e days.

The least oriented game I've run was... hmm....well, it depends on how you define "action-oriented". My one Star Wars game had little actual combat, though it popped up, but the highlight of the first arc was actually an airspeeder chase through the skyscrapers of Nar Shaddaa. My most recent Monster Hunters game had even less combat, being more investigation-oriented (the PCs ran a private investigation firm), but the game was still billed as "action-adventure" and had its share of non-combat action sequences.

I try to treat combat as a climactic moment in most of my games, though the GURPS Rifts Mechanoid Invasion game has currently devolved into a combat-heavy dungeon crawl (probably why I'm running out of steam on it).
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Old 05-09-2017, 02:06 AM   #5
simply Nathan
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

In general, the least action-oriented games I've been in were about being heroes called upon to overthrow evil overlords threatening to conquer the land on a regular basis, but where the heroes owned homes in town and some of them had regular day jobs when not fighting. Rebuilding walls and houses after climactic battles smashed the place up were a staple activity as much as pitched battles themselves were - and I got a lot of roleplaying mileage out of being incompetent at masonry (to the point that the city filed a restraining order against my PC active during the rebuilding phases). It wasn't that these structures were unsound, but that they were extremely awkward shapes and sizes and it broke the uniformity the city needed to make the streets navigable.

For GURPS specifically, I've only been in the one campaign. One of our guys was a minmaxed dwarf warrior, one was an anti-optimized human ninja, one was a wizard-knight played very well for how suboptimal his build was, and one was an honorable dwarf thief (more a jeweler, prospector, and merchant who happened to know her way with a crossbow and a set of lockpicks). Our few adventures usually had some component of violence to them, but not a large one.
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Old 05-09-2017, 03:21 AM   #6
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

I have run a fairly short (about 10 sessions) exploration/stranded on a planet game after their starship war destroyed where actual combat rules were used exactly once briefly when the characters killed a threatening bit of native fauna that could not be scared away from their camp, but it was hardly actual combat. Combat time was used twice more for chase type situations once from a herd of stampeding creatures and once from falling rocks.

There were several other threatening situations but they were resolved with diplomacy, intimidation or by evading.

The focus of the first part of the campaign was husbanding their resources and building their base before winter came while exploring the surroundings for both their job and the resources. The second part was when they realized that no quick rescue was likely and they had to thus make contact with the local low tech human civilization after a long trek to get there and then finally they built the resources to repair and build a jump drive for their shuttle so they could leave.
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Old 05-09-2017, 03:47 AM   #7
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

The least action campaign I've run was a rules light adventure based on Gurps about the test of the first ftl engine on a lost and farflung human colony. It was more about figuring out who was working against and for the tests success, politics, espionage and only had one combat encounter with some jurry rigged terrorist space craft attempting to make the test a failure and partially successfully so.

That entire campaign however was overally shorter then some of the low action sequences in my longer Exalted campaigns.
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Old 05-09-2017, 06:35 AM   #8
ericthered
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

Least action oriented?

Probably a Play by Post series about folks who woke up naked on strange worlds. Each character was solo, but it was all the same premise and a few ran into each other. The game had some philosophical exploration, a lot of talking and working out a place in the world, and a lot of learning magic. Sometimes there were sinister mysteries to be solved, but even the climax's of those didn't involve too much action on the part of the characters.

To call it action-free would be a mistake though: the emphasis was just in other places.
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Old 05-09-2017, 08:43 AM   #9
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

Hmm... I can't count how many one-shot games I've run with no combat, but campaigns...

I just finished up a 10ish-session game where my heavily-armed TL10 super-soldier PCs avoided combat like the plague. They kept it to two combat encounters and further managed to limit casualties to only one enemy death each time. (I'd planned more combat, but no plan survives contact with the players)

I ran an extended GURPS Mage: the Awakening game with zero combat. lots of sneaking and escaping, but no combat.

There were a number of Vampire: the Masquerade games with little combat, some in GURPS.

I have an ongoing sporadic single-player game with my wife which has spanned several years and has had only one or two combats.

It's mostly about genre and the players. Some of them demand combat, some loathe it, some are indifferent. Some genres are incomplete without it, some genres stretch verisimilitude if you have too much without character death.

Most of these worked out well. The total non-combat mage game didn't work out because I misread one of my players on another front and set up some bad social situations.
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Old 05-09-2017, 09:13 AM   #10
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Default Re: What is the *least* action oriented campaign you've run?

Uuh, my group had a short spinoff from our (much more action-oriented) fantasy campaign in which we played "arbiter's aides", I.e. some sort of lawyer-investigator. It was half whodunit, half courtroom drama, inspired by the Ace Attorney games. Our long-running setting (a steampunky JRPG world with well-defined magical rules) added significant flavor. It was as close as you can get to a "cinematic" legal drama - outlandish protagonists, quirky witnesses, supervillain prosecutors, over-the-top antics during testimonies, and mysteries involving a mind-controlled roc.

We use, erm, gamier RPG systems for our main campaign in that setting, but for this, we switched to GURPS because of its robust skill system.
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