Thorn RPG released! I have not played it, its description just reminded me of the thing I am always thinking of. Thorn is a Diceless, Healthless game where you use resources to move the game forward. Enemies die in one hit. I don't know how much fighting is in Thorn, but it sounds like that's the main conflict it puts in people's way (as many games do). I have been wondering for a while what we, as small rpg people, could do to move away from this.
100% agreed. The best explanation of why video and tabletop games focus so heavily on combat (outside of "genre literature focuses heavily on fights") I've read comes from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules, which is a collection of three essays which only references D&D in a single paragraph. I still think the framework it builds is useful for thinking about game design though!
In the first essay, "Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity" Graeber lays out how violence simplifies and flattens interaction between people. Here is a concise summary he gives early on:
[V]iolence may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and what their aversions and proclivities are. Hit them over the head hard enough and all of this becomes irrelevant.
Later in the same book, Graeber has a chapter titled "Bureaucratization of the Antibureaucratic Fantasy". In it he touches on D&D:
There are catalogs for everything: types of monsters (stone giants, ice giants, fire giants …), each with carefully tabulated powers and average number of hit points (how hard it is to kill them); human abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution …); lists of spells available at different levels of capacity (magic missile, fireball, passwall …); types of gods or demons; effectiveness of different sorts of armor and weapons; even moral character (one can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil; combining these produces nine possible basic moral types …). The books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics.
These catalogs mostly exist to enable the game to simulate violence: the center of gravity of monsters, stats, hit points, spells, armors, and alignments is the combat system. Violence allows the RPG author and referee to order the world in a simple, legible way the same as it allows the bureaucrat. The violent "verbs" players have access to can be much simpler and broader than the non-violent "verbs", because they don't require a deep understanding of the situation at hand. To paraphrase Graeber's quote above, "[h]it them over the head hard enough and all of [the complex NPC backstories] becomes irrelevant." Outside the rules, violence also simplifies the scenario. "Three automatons who fight to the death" is simpler to write and run than "three wolves, hungry to the point of starvation" which is simpler again than "a confused dryad, who mistakenly believes the players to be part of a logging operation (see Bunyan Co on pg XX)". As we move further from hitting people over the head, the situation becomes more complex and therefore more difficult to systematize.
Unfortunately I don't have a prescription, just a diagnosis: the simplifying effects of violence make it more amenable to gamification.
As an aside, the inverse is also true: the more you simplify social mechanics, the more violent they look. "Conversation fight" systems like Negotiation in Griftlands or my dim memories of Burning Wheel's "Duel of Wits" model an argument like a battle. I find these sorts of systems extremely unsatisfying, because they render social interaction exactly as flat as a combat encounter. Instead of granting interesting mechanical complexity to conversation, they strip away all the social complexity! This is fine in a video game (which is a finite machine that requires all creative labor up-front), but in an RPG I don't see the benefit.
Disclaimer: I am a complete neophyte at ttrpg design BUT I teach video game design and have thought obsessively about a number of related problems for decades.
Freedom's Landing by Anne McCaffrey is one of my very favourite Sci-Fi novels. In it, the principal cast are humans taken as slaves by alien invaders and then marooned, as punishment for various forms of rebellion, on a habitable-but-apparently-uninhabited planet with some very basic survival equipment. The aliens' intention is to use the humans as the disposable vanguard of a colonisation project - if the humans survive, and manage to identify which plants are edible and find defensible locations with access to clean water and so on, the aliens can then come back and settle the planet that much more easily.
(I'm simplifying, and then a whole bunch of other stuff happens, idthink the book is super deep but it's a very enjoyable read and it's stuck with me since I first read it as a teenager, go check it out).
The story is primarily about a group of desperate folks figuring out how to survive in an unfamiliar environment. Early on, there's a fair amount of 'crunch' to this, if 'crunch' can be applied to a novel; there's some detailed thinking about how basic tools might be used to solve not-so-basic survival problems. Most of the drama comes from friction among the stranded survivors - some of them are jerks, some of them respond poorly to stress, some of them have disabilities or vulnerabilities that require particular consideration that others resent. There is -some- combat-like danger in the world, wolves-in-the-woods type stuff, but overall this is handled much more with terrain and planning than fighting and extermination.
I feel like this would make a fantastic low-to-no-combat RPG. You'd need a crunchy set of terrain generation and survival mechanics - ways of tracking how much food, water, medication etc. the survivors have (I feel like there must be euro board games that could be drawn on here) - and to balance it so that survival required the players to make difficult decisions about which tasks to prioritise, to create enough pressure to bring their characters into friction with one another. A set of psychology systems to simulate the prior state of slavery and subjugation might also contribute to this.
Outright physical-infliction-of-harm violence is pretty heavily punished in a situation like this, because it's inevitably going to cost time and resources that can't be spared. There's still going to be conflict of the kind needed to drive stories, and I'm sure that it's still possible for a setup like this to devolve into bloody, factional collapse (the history of colonialism is full of this), but also recently I read the desperate appeal not to fight that opens Unknown Armies 3rd ed's section on violence and I feel like that's got to count for something.
If you want to add a little bit of more deliberately crafted violence? Make it mafia/werewolf. The GM conspires with one player to make them a plant, an agent of the aliens sent along to keep an eye on the project or an operative of the human resistance there to drum up the survivors into rebellion or something else that threatens to bring the universe outside this isolated world crashing back in.