I often say that the more I age the less combat I put in my game. It’s a tendency that has been ongoing over more than 20 years of game.

Firstly, we had discussion with other players about shooting at target isn’t interesting, combat needs to be challenging and dangerous which basically involve removing any easy/useless encounters like this easy ambush to warm-up the party which doesn’t bring much to the story, and I slowly evolved to combat still happens every session but it’s one big/relevant combat rather than small random combat.

Then, when not having a “student agenda anymore”, I had less time to play, when you need to finish the game-night at midnight rather than at 04, you need to cut-down stuff, and this is how I switched to occasional combats rather than regular combats.

In the last decade, I’ve been doing more and more drama-focused games rather than action focused game making combat even more useless. Even in more classical games, I often end-up skipping the combat, So you’re well prepared the terrain have the advantage of the number, the surprise and the terrain, no need to roll the dice. This trends also goes with my players, like recently I had players solving a Cy_Borg one shot only by talking using spies drone (even though it’s a game where I would have expected some fight) turn-out that when they understood *PCs are weak, fights are dangerous) they’ve done everything to avoid-it.