Good points about fleeing there: there are ways to make it less annoying. Though, people will always be looking for ways to exploit any mechanic, so have to make sure that cornering something and making it flee repeatedly into a healing fountain didn't make it repeatedly drop its loot and give you XP <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
I think it is a great idea, but wouldn't feel terribly constricted in play style if it wasn't widely implemented throughout a game.
I know. But I do, and I always have done.
Perhaps it's because I started out with paper & pen roleplaying, with a GM. And I was lucky enough to get GMs who were not addicted to monty haul campaigns, but instead served up campaigns where we could experience political intrigue and Machiavellian machinations, go to strange and exotic places, meet fascinating people... and then
not kill them.
For a long time we felt lucky if computer games gave us the option to "flee", or to talk our way out before combat started. Then we got "sneak" and more recently, "yield". Now I'm asking for the next logical step: speech in combat. If a game engine already has speech, and combat, it shouldn't be critically complex.
I don't think it is a question of having to think, but (in part) of diminishing returns on investment.
For the majority of RPGs, combat-based encounters are the majority of the encounters in the game, taking up a majority of the playtime (sadly). Adding an easy-to code, generic, scalable way to deal with combat encounters that uses an existing mechanism (dialog) to add to both player choice and character depth? Sounds like a fine investment of time to me.
The costs in terms of art, music, game design, area design, character and monster design, dialog design, coding, translation, voice-acting, game-balancing, QA, support and all those other aspects of game dev seem to me like they would be a significant cost if you tacked it on at the end as an extra feature, but if you design the game from the ground up with the idea "every encounter can be resolved without player-generated fatalities", then it should add nothing to any of them other than gamedev and QA: and even those should not be even close to prohibitive.
Nothing I've suggested requires more work than the existing non-fatal options already seen in games, like casting sleep/freeze/stun/repel undead, throwing gas bombs, knock-outs with blunt weapons, disarm attacks, traps, taunting and so on. We have all these things, but they have no real
repercussions.
I agree that beyond a certain point, most people would not see a significant difference - it's a point I've made myself about how complex the rules should be for whether an NPC would attack you or not: they probably shouldn't take into account whether your socks match. But I feel that "certain point" lies some way beyond my fairly trivial suggestions:
1) Let an NPC who's about to attack someone first size the victim up and decide "...nah, not today".
2) Let people who are fighting, PC and NPC both, decide to say "hey, this hurts. Please stop" or "OK, you've learned your lesson, now sod off before I draw my weapon and stop beating you with my left hand".
3) Let your PC's approach to combat be reflected in his reputation.
