Actually the first thing that came to my mind was the Animal Forest/Animal Crossing franchise.

Ultima 4? I know there's still combat, but the whole game is about being as non-violent and benevolent as possible.

And as others have posted, I'm pretty sure that if you removed the combat elements from an RPG you would end up with an adventure game.

Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance I know it is old and have combat but combat is not alpha and omega

Anachronox is also light on combat, you spend over have the game talking to people and using the characters 'special skills' rather than fighing, but there are designated 'dungeon' areas where you do a bit of the jRPG thang, they're not really the main focus though

In reguard to genre bounderies, yeah they can get blurred very easily - I was thinking about what 3D platformers and 'fighting' games I had in my backlog and realised that its hard to define what's a 3D platform game with a bit of fighting - like Soul Reaver or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and whats a fighting game with a bit of platforming like Severance: Blade of Darkness

Then those fantasy fighting games like Severance, Die By The Sword, Deathtrap Dungeon are basically just RPGs with the stats taken out but, then stuff like GTA and Outcast are basically statless RPGs too

Then there's System Shock 2 which HAS the stats but, appart from character skill development there no real choices or side mission to do that you DO get, stat free in GTA etc.

There's obvious blur between RPG and stratergy too...

True, but on top of it, Anachronox is also a JRPG-type of game that doesn't really give you the option to customize your character's stats and the story progression is very linear, too, so in this case I think it would really be justified to say that Anachronox is essentially an adventure game with some (IMO unnecessary) JRPG battles thrown in. There are also mini-games like a boat race, which could make it an action adventure.

Yeah those mini games are pretty crazy, just random other genre parts thrown in for fun - the 'on rails' shooter is my favorite so far
(you get the option to skip the mini-games after a couple of fails if they're really not your thing)

You know, wouldn't pretty much every game that had a world you navigated in and wasn't strictly linear be an adventure game? Adventure gameplay is common to a lot of games now that aren't strictly considered adventures. Perhaps "adventure" is more of a metagenre, where calling a game an adventure is like calling a game 2D.

I wonder if a pacifist run of Planescape could be considered an interactive novel, but with an isometric perspective?

Where player tactics pretty much can only be applied in combat.

I mean, take stat checks for dialog options. What tactics are there for those? In most games I've seen you either get that extra dialog option or you don't. The closest thing I've ever seen to actual player tactics to dialog is the disposition system in Morrowind and Oblivion. And with those games it's been either repeatedly clicking "Admire" while praying to the Random Number Gods, or that damn wheel game.

That's what I get for going on hearsay.

Or 'killing someone with a medication overdose' (super-stimpacks) or 'reverse-pickpocketing some live grenades'. :-)

Adventure games generally don't do what RPGs do tho (multiple solutions for 1 problem.) I'm not actually adding to the 'what is an RPG' discussion, I just want an adventure game with meaningful stats, freedom of movement and problem solving, regardless of whether or not would it be marked an RPG. .... I really do :-(

The problem with a non-combat RPG is what you replace combat with.
Right now, in RPGs it serves as the only thing thing that can make you lose the game, the main way most characters differentiate from each other (in most games the only difference between a mage and a warrior is what they do in a fight) and the primary focus of gameplay.
I'm not having any luck thinking of something that could replace all that, but maybe I just lack imagination.

The only thing I can think of that you might want to try is a game like Academagia, which is a mix of "choose your own adventure" novel and time management simulation.
There is still some combat in it, but they're just a series of skill checks same as anything else, definitely not the game's focus, and I think you could pretty much avoid all of it with the right character build and right adventure choices.

What I'd be interested to see is more RPGs that don't reward combat. In almost every RPG I can think of, the heroes are a kind of "experience vampire", increasing their own strength by drinking the blood of their enemies. It's fundamental to the gameplay concept that you "role play" by building a character as you play, and that the currency with which you do so is to be extracted from every non-friendly organism on the planet. (It kinda reminds me of the "gelfling essence" scene in The Dark Crystal.) Even in games that allow non-violent alternatives, it's usually clear that these are not the "intended" resolution, since the player is implicitly punished for taking them (via less EXP, missing out on loot, or missed quests - or even just in the sense that you're skipping the only really fun thing the game is designed to allow).

Removing EXP rewards for killing enemies completely alters this dynamic. Suddenly, instead of having an incentive to scour the planet clean of every rat and goblin, my play incentive is simply to complete quests by whatever means I think most effective or entertaining - whether that be through combat, stealth, diplomacy, trap-laying, or what have you. Combat becomes just another tool for solving problems. I can't think of many games that have tried this - Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is the only one that springs to mind.

To be clear, I'm not against RPGs that reward combat - I like grinding out a level over the beheaded corpses of mine enemies as much as the next hapless DnD nerd. I'd just like to see a few more games try things differently.

IIRC there are quite a few NWN modules that don't reward xp for killing enemies (or award very little and make sure that sneaking past the same enemies awards as much xp). The most prominent of those is A Dance with Rogues, but be warned it also includes plenty of adult content.

I don't think there are many mainstream RPGs that actually don't reward combat, or reward combat and alternatives equally. Those are mostly action RPGs where you can stealth through like the Deus Ex games or Alpha Protocol, or RPG hybrids that only give xp for mission completions like ME 2 and 3.

Well, I haven't played it yet, but Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble (http://www.desura.com/games/dangerous-high-school-girls-in-trouble ) doesn't have standard combat. Instead it focuses on social mechanisms. I haven't played it yet so I'm not exactly recommending it.

Then there are the Harvest Moon-type games, which basically avoid violence.