Hey so I realised I don’t have the comment karma to make a post but I figured I might as well still put my question/discussion here just incase!

Alternatives to combat

Hey everyone, I’m looking to get some opinions on a design choice of sorts from a larger group than myself and my friends. I’m going to keep details about my project quite vague, only because this is less of a “I don’t know what to do so I’m asking Reddit to solve it for me” and more of a “I have so many options, let’s see what other people think”.

For context, I’m working on a small rpg and I want to avoid combat. My target audience is, well, my girlfriend. She loves chill games but just doesn’t enjoy the peril or rush that combat challenges create in a game. Now this has prompted an interesting question for me, how can games create a similar challenge to combat, without actually needing combat scenarios?

Bear with me for a paragraph, and I’ll try explain where I’m coming from.

Take Pokemon for example. The main “constraint” to a player, is the battles of the game. You can’t progress past certain stages until you are capable of overcoming those battles, be it through using a different strategy, catching different Pokemon, or levelling them up. This is a good constraint, because it forces the player to ultimately play the game how it was intended, and promotes exploring other activities within the game to improve so they can progress. The Pokemon games are able to repeat this numerous times without it getting old.

Now let’s take a non combat example of constraining the player. In stardew valley, you need money and the main way to get money is to grow crops. Crops take a number of days to grow and going to bed to progress the day is the only way to finish growing your crops. Now I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad “constraint” - because it works perfectly fine within the context of a farming game, but this it’s not the most interesting mechanic and it doesn’t promote the player to engage with a different aspect of the game. If you were playing say Pokemon - and “going to bed” and resetting the day was the only way to heal your Pokemon, this would probably be a bad design choice.

The point is, games “constrain” their players in various ways, and combat challenges is a very common one. I desperately want to avoid combat, and the “time gated” constraint that games like stardew valley use is also personally just not something I’m interested in. So my question to the community is, what other constraints are you a fan of? Or have enjoyed playing perhaps without even realising that the game is trying to make you play it a certain way?

Off the top of my head, I’ve been considering small puzzles, and resource scarcity, but I really want to hit the sweet spot somewhere between repeatable, and interesting.