Non violent RPG?

[dolarmak 23]

Since I have become a father (and a while before looking at my nephew) I've been thinking about violence in video games and the idea of educational games for children. Having seen the games my nephew plays (GTA3, Metal of Honor, Dragon Ball Z) at 3 years old I feel a bit concerned about it. I'm not a person who blames games for violent children, but I do believe that the levels of violence he sees (all medias: TV, Movies and Games) at that age is detrimental to his being a socially stable. 

 

While I haven't looked into a lot of children's games I do have a friend who has been looking into for a while since his kids are older and he says that there aren't RPGs without combat. 

I was wondering if any one else noticed this?

 

I was also thinking about how an RPG might work without violence or combat. Though I feel like combat shouldn't be entirely removed, I think a compelling RPG could be made with very little combat or violent confrontation. Here are some of the ideas I'm looking at.

 

Compelling but easy to understand story.

Multiple conversation and story paths with differing results

Multiple endings

Skill based XP rewards or Stat boosts

Puzzle based XP and item rewards

Vast array of items/equipment to boost players skills and attributes. 

 

How would you feel about a game with these features? any other ideas/opinions?

 

 

Edited October 14, 2015 by dolarmak

[Polraudio 122]

You could still do combat but in a non violent way. I only make million dollar ideas so feel free to use this one for free :P.

Aliens came to earth and the best way to take them out is to scare them away with fart noises. So you can have guns and stuff that emit fart noises. The enemies will just get scared off instead of dying. You can craft parts and combine them together to make better fart guns. The aliens use an attack called scare. Instead of HP you have the stat called scared. To "heal" you would use items like teddy bears, candy, toys, and etc. to take away the scare.

 

The story could be something like......

Aliens have came to earth to invoke fear into everyone. The more scared people are the more power the aliens have so they don't kill people. Everytime you kill an alien every human that the alien has scared will die(if an alien scared 3 people and that alien gets killed so do those 3 people). That is why you use a fart noise gun instead of killing the aliens because your family got scared by an alien and you killed the alien...you know the rest. The end goal is to get to the alien mothership somehow to scare the alien king. The more people you rescue/make feel good about the whole situation the less power the aliens will have.

 

Theres lots of types of equipment you can have. You can have different types of music tapes you can find for your walkman(yes i know...) and each tape reduces the amount of fear/scare you will get per attack done to you. Theres many different things you can do. Just use your imagination.

[dolarmak 23]

I like your idea of a non violent combat using an item that's non lethal. A fart gun would be funny for kids and I think they would like it. Using that logic I was thinking maybe Ghosts instead of aliens, simply because conventional ideas of weapons wouldn't work and that would be obvious to a kid. That and Ghosts are naturally scary for kids but don't pose a threat of real pain, just scary.

 

Thanks Pol for your ideas.

[zahraa 26]

I don't think RPGs have too much violence for adult players, Though it's different when it's about children, Of course they should play games which have minimum violence. But I believe an RPG without combat is an Adventure game, Which is in fact a very suitable and great genre for kids. If I ever wanted to pick a game for children, I'd choose an adventure game for sure. I used to play a lot of adventure-educational games when I was a little child. Jumpstart, Humongous Entertainment and Disney had developed amazing adventure games for kids back then. (I guess I've used the word "adventure" too much lol) That genre is much more flexible than rpg genre imo, So I don't really see the point of removing combats from RPGs.

By the way I think Pol's idea sounds exciting and fun for children. Anyway it still has the concept of "enemy" or "opponent" so it kinda leads to violence indirectly. Though it's not something to be worried about, That amount of violence never hurts anyone lol

Edited October 15, 2015 by zahraa

[dolarmak 23]

I don't think RPGs have too much violence for adult players, Though it's different when it's about children, Of course they should play games which have minimum violence. But I believe an RPG without combat is an Adventure game, Which is in fact a very suitable and great genre for kids. If I ever wanted to pick a game for children, I'd choose an adventure game for sure. I used to play a lot of adventure-educational games when I was a little child. Jumpstart, Humongous Entertainment and Disney had developed amazing adventure games for kids back then. (I guess I've used the word "adventure" too much lol) That genre is much more flexible than rpg genre imo, So I don't really see the point of removing combats from RPGs.

By the way I think Pol's idea sounds exciting and fun for children. Anyway it still has the concept of "enemy" or "opponent" so it kinda leads to violence indirectly. Though it's not something to be worried about, That amount of violence never hurts anyone lol

While I agree that Adventure games are fun and there are a lot of them for kids, I am looking more into RPGs. I want to find more RPGs to get kids into the genre, to ease them in rather than throw them into games like Final Fantasy series or Elder Scrolls. 

 

I guess I shouldn't have said that i want to eliminate combat, but rather make it less violent. Instead of using Swords, Axes and Guns as Weapons, I do like Pols idea of non lethal weapons against enemies that are "scary" but aren't actually deadly. Ghosts and Aliens are a good start to that idea where they use fear to become more powerful, then the hero uses things like Fart guns and silly skills to reduce their power and scare them off in the end rather than kill them. 

 

One of the reasons I did like Pokemon was for a similar reason. You as a player don't 'kill' the other pokemon, but make them faint. But the fact that the abilities are still violent like "Bite" for example is still a violent kind of attack. Pokemon is really the earliest RPG i see kids (8-9 years) playing, so I'm looking for something kids can get into a little earlier (6-7 years).

 

The other idea I was thinking of was making a game that will have the parents playing with the kids. Since  many younger children may not have the reading skills necessary for most RPGs It might be an idea that like reading a book, the parent read the dialog to their kids and help direct them in ways of the game.

[NotYourBusiness 0]

You're not the only one out there who's wondering about the lack of non-violent RPGs or even non-violent games in general. The people at "Extra Credits" had an episode on their channel about this. It's very informative and gives some ideas for non-violent games, including the changing of RPG mechanics to be non-violent. The link is here:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QJVGtKPjNc

 

Caution: There is some mild profanity at the very end of the video, so be sure that your younger kids aren't listening if you don't want them to hear the word he**.

 

I've actually been trying to create a game where you progress by persuading people to your political standing and you try to improve the corrupt government of the game world. I've just been trying to replace normal battle commands (like Attack, Skill, Defend, Escape, etc) with more appropriate persuasive terms. The political standings may be a little complex for little children to understand though.

 

P.S. Your idea about making a game like a book for parent/child reading and interaction is an interesting idea.  :)