As a young DM I felt the pressure to have at least one combat every session because I didn’t think the group would have “fun” without it. As a more experienced DM, I can say that a session without a combat can be equally fun.
Currently, I am playing in a Monday night Shadowdark game and our party is way underground in a mega-dungeon. There have been plenty of combat opportunities in our sessions but in last night’s session, there were none and I barely missed having them because there were interesting things to do.
Ken, our DM, designed this dungeon and these were a couple of the fun challenges we experienced.
We entered one room to find a Giant Stone Snake Statue. There was a brief swinging of swords but there was no real threat because it turned out the snake statue “ate” us in order to move us (poop us) into another room.
We found the goblet we were looking for and it sat on a pedestal 15 ft from the room’s entrance but every time we tried to reach it we would shrink into a time hole and the pedestal moved further way. The secret? We had to figure out how to not touch the floor.
I’m not the kind of DM that puts a lot of puzzles in my games for fear that the challenge might take too long and frustrate my players but Ken was judicious in hearing how we came to the solution of how my character Zal, a halfling, would swing from a rope, tied to a spear which was thrown into the ceiling by Baregar and grab the goblet from the pedestal.
All he want to hear us say is, “we wrap the rope around Zal to where the rope does not hit the floor” because we couldn’t have any physical contact with the floor lest it activate the time-wimey effect. So, did we did have to “math” a little, yes, but it didn’t turn into a trigonometry class.
According to the Escoffer School of Culinary arts,
“a palate cleanser refers to a literal “rinsing” or reset of the flavors in our mouths, erasing those you just consumed to prepare for the next ones and allowing you to savor each to its fullest potential”
A think a session with little or no combat can make players and the DM appreciate, or savor, combat a little bit more. I don’t think Ken designed our session to be without combat, it’s just where we happen to be in the dungeon.
Sessions like these, to me at least, give our characters an opportunity to communicate more creating more opportunities to role play, flesh out our characters and build bonds between our PCs in a way that combat does not.
What do you think, do you enjoy playing in sessions without combat? Do you like running sessions without combat? Have you ever purposely designed a session without combat? What has your experience been?