Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?

Bedrockgames · Jun 17, 2019

Flexor the Mighty! said:
I don't know if anyone ever asked Gary this, but did OD&D/1e not have all kinds of rules for social situations because he didn't think that was important, or because role playing non combat encounters was something the players at the table did? Granted I don't think the focus of early D&D was deep social interaction, it was adventure, exploration, and combat.

You don’t need rules to deal with social interaction and many other aspects of play. But you need combat rules

Flexor the Mighty! · Jun 17, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
You don’t need rules to deal with social interaction and many other aspects of play. But you need combat rules

Oh I agree. IME the heavier the social interaction rules the more that part of the game becomes "I make a skill check!" rather than trying to roleplay it. Many don't agree and that is fine.

Thanks Lowkey. Been a while since I've cracked that part of the DMG open.

Umbran · Jun 17, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
You don’t need rules to deal with social interaction and many other aspects of play. But you need combat rules

Why do you need rules for one, but not the other? GMs are capable of just saying, "Yes, this social interaction plays out in this manner, with these effects," and do so fairly, but they are somehow incapable of doing so with combat? They can't take a player's description of physical and magical actions, and just run with that like they can social interaction?

That, really, is kind of preposterous. GMs certainly *could* do without rules for combat. I have played in games with entirely narrative combat. They aren't impossible.

It isn't that we "need" rules for one or the other. We *choose* rules for one over the other.

Dannyalcatraz · Jun 17, 2019

Umbran said:
Why do you need rules for one, but not the other? GMs are capable of just saying, "Yes, this social interaction plays out in this manner, with these effects," and do so fairly, but they are somehow incapable of doing so with combat? They can't take a player's description of physical and magical actions, and just run with that like they can social interaction?

That, really, is kind of preposterous. GMs certainly *could* do without rules for combat. I have played in games with entirely narrative combat. They aren't impossible.

It isn't that we "need" rules for one or the other. We *choose* rules for one over the other.

Personally, I like having rules for both. IME, there are just as few masters of social interaction as there are masters of combat in gaming. Having rules for both lets players who aren’t play characters who are.

Bedrockgames · Jun 17, 2019

Umbran said:
Why do you need rules for one, but not the other? GMs are capable of just saying, "Yes, this social interaction plays out in this manner, with these effects," and do so fairly, but they are somehow incapable of doing so with combat? They can't take a player's description of physical and magical actions, and just run with that like they can social interaction?

That, really, is kind of preposterous. GMs certainly *could* do without rules for combat. I have played in games with entirely narrative combat. They aren't impossible.

It isn't that we "need" rules for one or the other. We *choose* rules for one over the other.

Fair enough. You can run without either, but on the whole I think most people want combat rules. It is a lot harder in my opinion to adjudicate a game with zero combat rules than one with zero social rules. I think most social interacts can easily be handled by role-play. Combat screams for a resolution mechanism

hawkeyefan · Jun 17, 2019

Maxperson said:
I'm not sure about page 84. I'll look in a second. However, the intro section of the PHB says the following.

"While initial adventuring usually takes place in an underworld dungeon setting, play gradually expands to encompass other such dungeons, town and city activities, wilderness explorations, and journeys into other dimensions, planes, times, worlds, and so forth."

It's pretty clear that things like "Rescue the princess" and other such adventures were intended as part of 1e from the very get go. That also jives from my play experience. I started playing in 1983, 6 years before 2e started and every DM I played with had these sorts of adventures. Often it was a dungeon. Less often, but still fairly common were the rescue, infiltrate and steal scenarios.

This is the relevant portion of page 84.

"Tricking or outwitting monsters or overcoming tricks and/or traps placed to guard treasure must be determined subjectively, with level of experience balanced against the degree of difficulty you assign to the gaining of the treasure."

This section seems to indicate that a monster level should be assigned when treasure is accomplished without combat so as to figure out the award of experience for gaining the treasure.

Edit: If you were going by published adventures, then I can see where you'd get that impression from. The vast majority of them were some form of invade the dungeon and get the loot after killing things that got in your way.

Oh, our games with homebrew settings and adventures often included saving the princess and all other kinds of things, for sure. But I think it's pretty clear as displayed in the published modules of the time, and in the pretty skimpy bits about it in the DMG, the rules about rewarding non-combat were far from robust. It basically boiled down to what the DM decided to grant. So if your group wanted to play a more heroic style, and your DM embraced that, then sure, it'd work out. That's how I'd describe my home game at the time (although we were also kids with a tenuous grasp on the way the game was intended to play).

I think that the XP for GP helped mitigate this somewhat (that was my original point, although it wasn't very clear) but how much depended on play expectations and practices for each group. But we can look at the MM, the DMG, and the published adventures and have all kinds of specific examples of how much XP would be granted for killing a given monster.

Bobble · Jun 17, 2019

Hussar said:
Like a lot of things AD&D, it was pretty schizophrenic.

For example, while you can talk about xp for "tricking" monsters being in the 1e DMG, you also have the training rules. A fighter that didn't fight was actively penalized by being forced to take longer to train and

Um, NO. "Hanging back from combat" means that combat is ongoing with the rest of the party and the fighter is not involved but hiding behind the party. That is NOT equal to the fighter working out how to trick the monsters so no combat happens in the first place. Nice try but you got it wrong.

hawkeyefan · Jun 17, 2019

Hussar said:
Like a lot of things AD&D, it was pretty schizophrenic.

For example, while you can talk about xp for "tricking" monsters being in the 1e DMG, you also have the training rules. A fighter that didn't fight was actively penalized by being forced to take longer to train and spending far, far more money on training, for example. In 2e, while there were "bonus Xp tables" again, fighters ONLY gained bonus xp for killing stuff.

Add to that the published modules of the day, which again, leads to a VERY schizophrenic experience of 1e where the DMG advocates one thing and the modules pretty much entirely ignore the DMG, and it's very easy to see why murderhobo play was pretty common.

Referenced: 1e DMG p 86

It was pretty clear the implication that combat was pretty strongly expected.

1e DMG P 85:

And then there are pretty complex maths used for calculating that xp. For stuff that isn't killing and/or looting, we get this piece of advice:

IOW, if you kill the monster and take the treasure, you are guaranteed a certain xp award. If you trick the monster and steal the treasure, your xp reward will be based entirely on whatever you DM feels like. You tricked them too easily? Oops, sorry, no xp for you. And, frankly, that sort of thing just leads to far too many arguments at the table. So, DM's and players both shied away from it and relied on the codified rules.

And, lastly, we're left with this bit of advice on page 85

IOW, all that stuff that isn't killing and looting is "conducive to non-game boredom".

Yeah, the game very clearly wanted you to engage in combat, with maybe the occasional attempt to avoid a particularly deadly opponent through trickery or stealth, or by simply avoiding it if another route was possible. The game could punish those who always attacked, but didn't do a lot to help support any other approach to a challenge. Or at least, it didn't really do so in a mechanical way. How sneaky was the average party? No idea, really.....only the Thief had the ability to Move Silently and Hide in Shadows. So much was left up to DM judgment. And while I generally don't think that's bad (assuming a reasonable DM), I think that such judgment is better off when there are established rules or guidelines on how to handle something so fundamental.

Like with many things in D&D, there's a sweet spot of sorts; too many rules, and the DM's judgment doesn't matter as much, too few rules and it becomes supremely necessary. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

Tony Vargas · Jun 17, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
You don’t need rules to deal with social interaction and many other aspects of play. But you need combat rules

You don't need rules, at all, it's true: the DM can just rule on everything - combat, absolutely, included. If you feel you /do/ need rules for combat - because it's life-or-death, presumably, what about life-or-death exploration challenges or negotiations?

D&D grew out of wargames, they were heavily combat-oriented, so D&D rules started out heavily combat-oriented. The game happened to progress slowly and haphazardly, at first, then fall into the hands of people who neither understood nor cared about it - so the first 25 years saw very little progress towards more formal, more functional, coverage of other areas. But that was just an accident of how the game developed.

It's not that you do "need" rules for combat, it's that you've always had them. It's not that you "don't" need rules for non-combat, it's that you'd gotten accustomed to getting by without them fairly well before even comparatively dubious ones were even published.

Bedrockgames · Jun 17, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
You don't need rules, at all, it's true: the DM can just rule on everything - combat, absolutely, included. If you feel you /do/ need rules for combat - because it's life-or-death, presumably, what about life-or-death exploration challenges or negotiations?

D&D grew out of wargames, they were heavily combat-oriented, so D&D rules started out heavily combat-oriented. The game happened to progress slowly and haphazardly, at first, then fall into the hands of people who neither understood nor cared about it - so the first 25 years saw very little progress towards more formal, more functional, coverage of other areas. But that was just an accident of how the game developed.

It's not that you do "need" rules for combat, it's that you've always had them. It's not that you "don't" need rules for non-combat, it's that you'd gotten accustomed to getting by without them fairly well before even comparatively dubious ones were even published.

I disagree very strongly. It isn't just about the stakes. It is about how difficult it is to adjudicate something as physically unpredictable and dynamic as combat fairly without a resolution system. With social situations, it is much easier to adjudicate based on the NPC personality in question and the reasonableness of what players are proposing. Negotiations are things we do all the time. Not saying it is the only way to do it But I think if people are honest with themselves, they will have to admit, most people find it easier to manage the social aspect of play without mechanics but harder to manage combat without mechanics. I don't think it is purely because it comes from war-games. I think there is also a very functional reason you see combat mechanics being so central to rules systems. It doesn't need to reflect a focus on combat. It can easily just be that combat requires it more, and the other stuff is more manageable without.