How do you run games where the problems are almost never solved by killing someone?

You're not going to have police going into dungeons to arrest you for murdering goblinoids

OP asked how to run such games. My solutions is to not run them in dungeons. Run them in modern day if you want that.

Run games that take place within civilization then.

>implying that killing all cops wouldn't solve their problems

This doesn't work. Your players will get pissend and bitch and moan.
If you run a game where the players actually think they can solve problems by murderhoboing, they will do so.
You have to stop that right at the gate. Investigative and social campaigns facilitate this the most. It's also a lot about presentation and the motivation which drives the adversaries. Your villains/opponents will need to have fleshed out motivations and goals which they also want to achieve in a non-lethal way.
Setting the game in more modern times helps too.

Does having armed forces and the national guard hunting you mean having solved your problems?

If you kill all of them too, then yes.

But how does this stop players from killing stuff? You've only created more and more situations that the players will attempt to solve with violence only to inevitably fail because they fucked up for real

>This doesn't work. Your players will get pissend and bitch and moan

If this is at the forefront of everything you do then you have shit players. That or you give them too little credit and are just projecting your issues onto them without every actually finding out what they will and won't do.

Either way, that's at the crux of why your games don't work. No amount of finagling with game details will fix that.

The solution to this is make them fail fast enough for them to realize that murder isn't the answer. Once they write their sixth character sheet, even the most trigger-happy hobo will realize that something has to change.

Nah, you missed the connection there. Withholding information from your players simply does not lead to a better experience - and that's why your players are more likely to get frustrated themselves. You need to clearly telegraph to them, not do the whole "Oh you killed that guy so you miss this and that" as a baseline idea.

This seems highly inefficient though. Has it worked for you?

>Has it worked for you?
Nope, my players are still functional and capable human beings who know how not to murderhobo.

Why wasn't your advice then to get players that simply don't murderhobo. That seems to be a much easier solution than trying to hammer players with repeated death to compliance

I assume that OP already did this. Otherwise he wouldn't be asking us for help, right?

>Elves are like extremely needy girlfriends
>More of them than humans
How do you deal?

I'm always skeptical of when fa/tg/uys complain about murderhoboing. Murderhoboing is just needless violence committed indiscriminately against anyone, typically because the players think it's funny. And more often than not, the people who say their players are murderhoboing present situations where it's just some random NPC well below the player's CR who tries extorting the players for no reason. Then the GM gets buttmad when the players say fuck that.

It's not murderhobing to kill the goblin chieftain who's raiding villages. Nor is it murderhobing to tell the guy trying to twist your arm behind your back to fuck off, then icing him when he pushes too far. Murderhobing is going "lol I stab the guard".

Creative solutions are all well and good. But players should not be punished for preferring direct answers to problems over obtuse ones.

A game where killing has religious or psychological consequences?
A game with a defined end goal, with said end goal or goals being worth points, and each kill costing a point, with the best case scenario causing you to be remembered as basically jesus and have bragging rights toward anyone else who has played.
Nicotine girls?
Youre gods or nearly gods and the best you can do or the most practical thing you can do is imprision something, alter their mind, or weaken them?

A lighthearted game in a magic school setting?
A stealth game where stalthy weapons are rare?
A situation in which you clearly gain more by capturing/converting people than by killing them?

>no encouragement for not being a murderhobo, only punishment

Back in the infancy of Accidental Magical Girl, I wrote up monsters without stats. Stuff like a monster who attacked with a door that led to any door, a monster that you only saw when you closed your eyes, and a constricting snake that slowly added mental weight to the point that people didn't even care to eat anymore. While I haven't taken part in years and can't speak of the state of things now, it was a time when the rules were still nebulous at best. My intention was to make enemies more a puzzle than a force that you could just beat down.

I would still like to apply that in my games if I ever get the chance. Have enemies be something you trick or outthink, or they're restricted to some rule or ritual like truenames or not able to cross running water. Suddenly it makes sense to seal the ancient evil away.

Give the antagonists both ample reason to not resort to such murder themselves, and give them complex enough motivations and problems that the PCs have the room to find alternate solutions.

If the goal of the bad guys is to destroy the world, chances are that there isn't going to be much of a nonviolent way to stop them because shit is already escalated.

If the goal of the badguys is, say, social or political in nature? That gives you more wiggle room to go back and forth without shots fired.

Alternatively, pit the players against problems where violence literally can't solve their problem. Like a natural disaster or a disease. There might be individual assholes between you and what you need that you can shoot, but shooting that guy doesn't really solve any of the larger issues.

Make it easier to solve conflicts without murdering the other side.

CoC isn't exactly a game where you want to get into too much combat.

Play games where the people aren't the problem, like golden sky stories.

I've yet to play a game of golden sky stories where the problems were solved through murder.

They were in fact solved by the opposite of murder.

So how do you promote problem solving that doesn't involve colored alcohol then? Because I know my playgroup would be shitlers with that.

>solved by the opposite of murder

But user, institutionalized necromancy solves nothing!

A. Social Combat systems
2. Strongly reward roleplaying
#. Strongly penalize killing in game, i.e. arrests, murder trials, vengeful family members, etc.
x. Designs sets of challenges for your player to overcome which match their characters non-lethal skill sets.

Penalties don't help.

Penalties help if AND ONLY IF you have a massive pool of potential players to draw from AND your players are invested in the campaign already AND you don't mind massive turnover until your group comes together the way you want
Otherwise you just alienate the players and die as a GM.