Pacifist build?

[corujadiurna]

Hey guys, i was wondering, is it possible doing a no kill run? Even if is possible, can be done on dominating?

[TheAverageGortsby]

It is not possible to complete the main plot of the game with a zero-kill, pure pacifist run.  You can however do an "ethical" pacifist run, where you don't kill any humans.  You can also get almost all the way through the game without killing anything at all, I do believe.  Game difficulty won't really be what keeps you from making a complete run; a good while ago a forum user showed that with some significant savescumming you can beat DOMINATING at level 6, so if you're playing Oddity it won't even be all that hard to get enough levels to make it all possible.

[DerivativeZero]

How do you avoid killing humans? You need to kill people in the arena to progress if I'm not mistaken? Same for the faction quests?

[TheAverageGortsby]

How do you avoid killing humans? You need to kill people in the arena to progress if I'm not mistaken? Same for the faction quests?

You don't have to kill your enemies in the arena if you just hurt them a good bit and let them die from a morphine debilitation.  Is it pedantic? Yes.  But technically you're not killing them, they're dying from a drug "overdose" effect.  Strictly speaking, they're killing themselves with their own tools and by their own actions.  It's been long enough since I played any Arena fights that I'm not sure I remember if they all had morphine, but some of them certainly did.  If any of those necessary first three do not, you'd have to reverse-pickpocket it, which can be a pain during a fight.

For the CoreTech warehouse, at least, you can - with Grenadier and ideally LTI - in fact just stunlock the enemy and let your NPCs kill them.  Again, you're sort of complicit in their death, but you're not killing them.  For the mad scientist, you can kill him with his own traps, which again is maybe not within your definition, but it's pretty arguably him doing it to himself.

You could stretch things even further and decide that player traps don't count either, but in that case it is in fact something you do that kills the human. Whatever.  A pacifist run is by its very nature navel-gazing self-limitation.  Set whatever restrictions you feel are most enjoyable for you, like I do when playing psi.

[DerivativeZero]

Ok, under that definition this makes sense. I played pacifist runs twice (dominating, xp) and always bit the bullet that arena means killing some people. JKK faction can be played without killing except for Bogdan, so I preferred this over having "friends" kill for me. My house rule for pacifism was robots don't count if they can't be avoided (but if possible: robots are humans, too) but I also did not kill anything else, let those rat hounds live to see another day.

That made Newton in the beginning of course quite a stretch: avoid killing the beetles, tell Newton he can make it and pretend I didn't know they would kill him... And then try and sneak out of the bunker... bad memories.

I guess you are right, our mileage may vary as to what we consider "the rules" for a pacifist run.

I was really hoping there you would have had a way to avoid the arena. For instance, if you allowed the JKK faction quest line to unfold without being arena champion (JKK becomes aware of you because you managed to do a lot of things without making waves...), made the Bogdan quest completable without killing the guy (just run away once he attacks you) and all of a sudden, you would have a play-through which I'd call "reasonably pacifist". Maybe even talk the big bad at the end out of killing you with high persuasion?!

In any case, OP: doing a stealth run without killing nearly anything is extremely fun!

[Bruno]

Hi, I am playing a very stealth-centered character now, with pickpocketing and traps. It is on hard, oddity mode, stealthily killing isolated enemies with a silent weapon. It is by no means pacifist, but rather a silent thief type.

It is a pleasant way to play, so I recommend this for people wanting to play without the need to kill everything in their path. You have to kill some times, it is pretty much unavoidable.

[corujadiurna]

I was really thinking about a zero kill run, where you can avoid arranged combat, like core tech warehouse invasion, without losing anything from the game. it is a shame that you can't actually do it. I didn't played the game enough, so i don't know most of the possible paths of the character development. In my first run, i did a psi build, expecting that going through this way i would be able to change dialogs and some events in the game. It didn't hapen, but i could cast fireballs in my enemies. The the game doesn't have non-lethal mechanics at all, like leaving someone unconsious. Maybe they will add something related on Underrail: Infusion, it would be pretty nice