This is funny!
I love games where you have the ABILITY to kill others, but can choose not to without impeding gameplay. Games like Thief and Deus Ex are some of my favorites.
Also Nethack has the whole “Permadeath” thing from the start. The Game itself deletes your savegame when you die.
This is how I play.
You ever play Fallout 3 or New Vegas? Sometimes it’s just so hard to be nice…
Nope, the only modern games I’ve been playing have been on the Wii (and even then many of their games are archaic because of the systems weak power, and the fact that I play a LOT of classic games on the Wii) But I love the challenge of not killing people.
FO3 and FO:NV are tough games to be totally non-violent through simply because there are so many things in the game that want to kill you just because you’re there: radscorpions, wild dog packs, bull brahmin, feral ghouls, psycho super mutants, raiders, cazadores, etc. There is precisely no opportunity not to engage these creatures once they’ve detected you, and early in the game you haven’t the stealth skill to avoid them.
Total vegan pacifists in the wasteland are only encountered in trace amounts in piles of wild creature scat, or surrounded by burly men ready to do violence to protect them.
You can, however, take a more libertarian “no aggression” policy and not kill anything that isn’t trying to kill you first, and don’t start nothing that don’t need to be started. It’s actually a much better game when you play it that way.