Help me figure this out, Veeky Forums

After sever attempts at making my own setting that would include all my favorite things, I keep running into the same problem:

On one hand - I enjoy intense, visceral close combat fights and shoot outs between human (or human equivalent) characters - fast resolution, harsh consequences and real human emotions and motivations on both sides.

And on the other hand - I dislike edgy and depressing settings filled with death, where "heroes" have kill counts of thousands. If anything, I like when things are kept lighthearted.

As you can imagine, these two things are pretty contradictory to each other. So how do I do it? What kind of world am I looking for?

How do I make a setting where players have to fight their way through other real thinking humans(or humanoids) without becoming mass murderers?

Don't treat lethal combat as the default? Getting taken out can be fast, but it might not mean the end of a character, especially if they're an important one, whether friend or foe.

Yeah, I suppose my question is how to allow players to do all the dumb cool violent stuff like cutting, shooting, exploding and all those fun things that Adventurers do and still plausibly justify lethal combat not being a default? And keep things lighthearted in the process?

Depending on how okay your players are with playing to genre, you could just talk with them about it and establish it as an in universe rule.

While some action shows justify all the horrifying injuries their characters manage to survive, others just roll with the punches or use bullshit deus ex machinas to revive/restore people whenever they feel like it.

Combat without a sense of lethality can still be fun, mind. It's just a matter of always having something else at stake, instead of just a fight for fightings sake.

all the enemies players fight are spirits/demons/whatever and destroying their physical body doesn't kill them. it can still have consequences if you want, doesn't have to be pleasant for the spirit.

failing that, a martial arts or superhero kind of game where players beat the shit out of people but rarely have to land a killing blow.

finally, the kind of story where combat just isn't very common, even if it's really important when it happens. police stories often fall into this niche, with a lot of detective work leading up to a big confrontation. working as police officers give a credible reason for using non-lethal force where possible (at least that's how it works here in the UK) but also for the occasional big action scene where the big guns come out.

Would you say real-life is lighthearted?

Thanks user! I like the first option, haven't thought about that one yet.

Second option did cross my mind, but that kinda limits what the players are allowed to play around with by some degree

Third option is really good as well, gonna think if that one over

Well there's anime like fairy tail where the characters do a lot of those things and almost no one really dies in it.

Most of this sound like you are mixing "system" and "setting."

>"heroes" have kill counts of thousands.
This has nothing to do with setting. It depends on system and how challenging the GM makes encounters and/or how much risk players take.

>How do I make a setting where players have to fight their way through other real thinking humans(or humanoids) without becoming mass murderers?
Don't call combat kills murders. That one is a setting detail.

WoD-style cheap self-healing. Geist probably does it the raddest way where everybody basically has a Stand that keeps picking them back up as long as they dropped in a way it thinks looked cool.

spy games where combat is a very real possibility but almost always desired to be avoided

Play a system with proper morale rules.

Just don't have combat be lethal by default. Most battle shonen do this just fine.

Make combat extremely dangerous with enemies that are basically on equal footing as your players so they try to avoid starting shit and getting hit unless absolutely necessary.

One solution is that battles are established with some sort of magic thing to make all battles end non-lethally, or some shit like that, but that just goes down to some wack bullshit. Maybe it's a common courtesy to do these sort of fights? Hm, really makes you think what sort of injuries people get from all this. Does it leave people sore? Broken-boned? Bleeding?

I like This Guy, , though. He gets it pretty well.

So, i've been designing a game with a similar thing, cinematic hard-hitting combat, and didn't want EVERY FUCKING COMBAT to result in death, so i took a cue from Numenera/cypher system and introduced three health pools that bring a character closer to death when they get exhausted. this way everything with a fight or flight response is going to be picking flight when faced with death as the alternative. it works, it's a lot more realistic than EVERYTHING fighting to the death, and it's genuinely pretty fun to keep characters alive, both GM and player, by having those points in the pools replenish at different rates so people think of the consequences first.

One Piece does this. Lots of good shounen do. Just have 'defeat' in combat not mean death. Defeat can be comically running away, being beaten to a pulp, being left crippled and wounded, or dying. It just depends on the dramatic stakes at the moment. In One Piece most people don't die, or end up crippled or with lasting injuries...but people do die and lasting injuries do occur. One Piece doesn't sy away from blood or injury, and being defeated always carries serious consequences. But it's certainly not full of death and grimdark.

Any thing that involves mass use of non-lethal weaponry.

Fighters in the setting can have various abilities. Quick healing, Enhanced durability, the ability to keep on trucking even when you've got a spear in your gut, personal, skin tight force fields, and so on. You can also wave away certain types of damage as being less dangerous than it should be. Or you can just have people not die. Even in Fullmetal Alchemist, characters could get fucked up a lot without dying.

Warhammer

Is this a bait thread?

the God of Lush Soils blessed the folk with hella strong health before getting corrupted by blood sacrifices and going haywire