I agree with both Michael and Guy on this, and would add an additional point: it takes quite a bit of player trust in the narrator to create a non-combat oriented character, and narrator trust in the players to run non-combat oriented scenarios.
I recall the horrid time I had playing what amounted to a con-man in a game with one group of friends in a home brew system. The GM was brilliant at running tight, suspensful, survive by the narrowest margins scenarios.....for fighters and magicians. I routinely got no chance to use the character's impressive set of communication abilities, and whenever a fight broke out, no matter how much I tried to avoid it my character always seemed to end up facing some psycopathic thug that was a much toughter brawler.
Similarly, I recall an adventure with the same group, in what you might think of as an X-files type setting (long before X-files came out), where the GM was running a fairly brilliant mystery. Most of us were hooked. We had carefully isolated an employee of the mysterious lab and were about to use her to gain entry, when one of the players, who was bored with it all, announced "I pull out my gun and shoot her in the head." The rest of the session degenerated into an escape from the police, and we never picked it up again.
This sort of thing can work. I met Jeff Kyer when we were both drafted to play on the same team in a D&D tournament, many, many, years ago. We had such a good time role-playing off each other that when we bumped into each other a couple of years later in a gaming store, I ended up playing in a few of Jeff's campaigns over the next few years. Twice I dared to play female characters, both with just enough combat skills to be able to be of some use around the fringes of a fight. Both times those characters were by far the leading agents of change in the campaigns. I trusted Jeff to give me opportunity to use those character's ability's, he trusted me to enjoy something beyond fighting, and we both gained because of it.
In short, play a less combat focussed campaign can be a lot of fun, but before you can even try you need mutual player-narrator trust that it can work. If that trust is mis-placed it will probably be quite the miserable experience. If it is well placed, it can be very rewarding.
Which leads to the question of how you create that sort of trust in a playing group. That I'll leave to more experienced narrators to suggest answers to.
--Bryan
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