Too much fighting in our RPGs?

A couple of posts back, I reviewed Michael Shea’s The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

I haven’t quite finished with it.

At the back, in the appendices, Shea lists the questions he asked DMs during his research for the book. One of the questions was:

“D&D players, of the three pillars of D&D game play, which do you enjoy the most?”

• 59% NPC interaction and roleplaying
• 27% Exploration and investigation
• 14% Combat

I was surprised by the result. 14%, or about 1 in 7 players, prefer other things to combat when playing D&D.

Given how much focus combat is given in D&D, I thought the figure would be higher. One reason I don’t play D&D (or other fantasy games) is that I find them very violent.

That’s not to say I’m a pacifist, but I have two big issues with combat in RPGs.

1. Combat is often slow and dull. And full of fiddly rules edge-cases that I can never remember. And it turns into a boardgame when the miniatures come out.
2. In a lot of fantasy RPGs, combat is consequence-free. I prefer settings where getting into a fight has proper consequences rather than just losing hit points. (When I run Call of Cthulhu, don’t run around with shotguns unless you want to see the business end of a police armed response squad.)

(@vodkashok ruminates more on this in his recent blog post.)

So maybe more gamers are like me than I realise.

Of course, I’m delighted that “NPC interaction and roleplaying” gets such a high score. (Although aren’t those two different things?)

But two things intrigue me.

1. Does this hold true generally? This was a small, self-selected sample and so wasn’t very representative.
2. If it is true, does that mean we have too much fighting in our games? Would we be better suited with fewer combats and more interaction/roleplaying? And if so, what’s the best way of doing that (I’ve already said that I like to see players banter amongst themselves as characters.)