Beating up a dead horse without rolling for initiative
I'm getting rid of all combat procedures in my games. I'm a bit tired of reading a game with something that really makes my eyes sparkle (a cool resolution system, evocative and/or interesting procedures, extremely inspiring aesthetic, yadda yadda) and then flipping the page to see the word COMBAT in all caps. There is this obsessive tradition with the wargaming past of ttrpgs that a lot of games just can't let go and it really leaves me sad and grumpy.
Before I start rambling about this though, I'm gonna throw your way a bit of an obvious disclaimer: play your game at your table however it makes you and your friends and/or fellow players the happiest. If the combat procedure is what makes your day better, don't ever let me stop you. But maybe you can extract something of use from my complaining.
Combat mentality
I don't really care how OSR-shaped, external interaction pilled, or lateral thinking problem solving coded you game is1, in my experience, starting out the combat procedure makes players shift into a combat mentality. Some mechanics might even inform them that combat is a questionable option, such as their 2 hit points next to their d6 dagger, but if the player responsible for refereeing says that "the combat is starting", "this is a combat" or, in the worst case, "roll for initiative", it makes players think they should be combatting. The game has a whole set of rules for this, shouldn't they be playing the game?
I have more than once considered this to be a problem of me not being clear enough with the principles behind a certain game. My players most of the time aren't people that care about online ttrpg discourse, play culture theory and all that and I always try to be clear about theses things during session zeros or pre-one-shot talks. Even then, I still feel like I always get more interesting results out of violent situations when games don't have outlined combat procedures. Players have told me how much they loved "playing combat" in games like FIST and Scum and Villainy, to which my answer has always been "that's just the game", with a smirk of satisfaction.
Combat simulation
I've heard what, maybe hundreds of times, how combat needs more rules and needs to be more granular to simulate how "real combat" should be like2. And well, I really people to step out of their Chainmail chair for a moment and see how many assumptions are made for that to even start making a semblance of sense.
So I'm just gonna state my opinions that are opposite to these assumptions, since I don't want to start a whole other blog post just for this section: I don't think roleplaying games should be about simulating real life (and that combat, in games that already don't do that, suddenly needs to do so), I don't think breaking down things into more granular steps makes a game experience more fun3, and I don't think real combat is a granular and precisely measurable activity (especially from the perspective of the person who is suddenly ambushed in a dungeon of some sort).
Combat exclusion
I think part of the fun in ttrpgs is reading a new game, understanding it, and trying it out with your friends on the table. Simultaneously, I believe these games are written and playtested with intent and that by using the rules within them, I am learning new things and maybe having fun in ways I didn't think were possible before. That means that I generally don't like tinkering with rulebooks, but I think in the last few years I experienced enough different ttrpgs to better understand my tastes and realize that maybe I don't need to adhere to the combat section of the ruleset just because it's there.
So, how do I get rid of the combat minigame? Luckily, I don't find myself playing a lot of of tactical build-heavy games, so I don't have to worry about balancing and making sure my players' buttons still work. I do really like O/NSR stuff and it generally dedicates some pages to combat stuff, so I am going with the extremely elegant approach of just ignoring said pages. Nifty, huh?
I feel like this should also work in more trad-ish4 games, such as the Free League stuff. I already have a procedure to resolve dangerous and uncertain situations. I already have a procedure to determine the damage of an attack. I already have the capacity to look at the fiction and determine how the world acts and reacts to player actions. I just keep providing information and presenting meaninful choices and, as long as my players are informed that if they have a combat button it will likely be adjudicated differently, I think it'll be alright.
Final thoughts
In case this post makes it seem like the opposite, I really love combat and violence in ttrpgs. I love solving problems through fantasy violence because, in real life, I'll never get to punch the evil people that are making everyones' lives worse. My favorite kind of character to play is the punching and slashing muscular peeps, so I can't help but feel empty when I need to unveil additional rules, generally maximalist ones, to do the punching and slashing.
However, I also think good things can be extracted from a well-designed combat procedure and that more wargaming-oriented GMs can produce interesting gameplay in the combat minigame. I still have an interest in playing these kinds of games (there are rumours about a Lancer table within my friends soon), but for my GMing I will experiment on setting the combat stuff aside. My future Cairn and UVG tables might have to bear with me on this.
anb
This can also apply to the storygame-y, narrative-curious side of the spectrum. I'm looking at you, PbtA's with dozens of combat moves.↩
I always remember that very weird interview with Brennan Lee Mulligan where he uses an even weirder cooking metaphor to argue that yes, his highly narrative actual play game needs the heavy combat rules because he doesn't know how far an arrow travels. Do we really need to know exactly how far arrows travel?↩
There is the obvious caveat of how exactly the thing is being broken down. Measuring distances and making several arithmetics operations is generally the focus of the combat minigame, so that's what I'm talking about here.↩
I will never write the word "trad" in a ttrpg context and not feel guilty about perpetuating the awful and self-referential nomenclature that we as a very decentralized group have landed on.↩