Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?

Celebrim said:

And then there was that time the sons of the local KKK chapter told our RPG group we couldn't call ourselves Knights, and we had to explain to them with more than words that we really weren't going to be intimidated.

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On one hand, EN World is for gamers regardless of political allegiances, and for all I know, some of us (in this thread or otherwise) have a positive opinion of the KKK while others have a negative opinion of the KKK; there are differences we "check at the door" or take to PM. On another hand, bravo for standing your ground on "knight", and (if I infer accurately) for succeeding.

Celebrim said:

Certainly if I also had that background, I think I'd see why that would be your first pass understanding of the structure of D&D, but the fantasy foundations of D&D go back to a time well before Europe was a mighty colonizing power, to a time when on the contrary Europe was one of the world's cultural and technological backwaters and more often than not, it was being colonized by foreign nations (Huns, Turks, Moors, etc.).

D&D's fantasy and folk roots don't start in the 18th or 19th century. Trolls and goblins and elves and dwarves and the like didn't come out of Europe's colonial experience, but out of its dim dark prehistory. The fantasy roots of goblins and trolls and the like aren't Europeans driving out indigenous groups in the Age of Exploration, but the brutal man versus nature fight of the European Dark Ages.

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my nephew use to watch the cartoon series Blinky Bill, which is about a group of Anthropomorphized Australian animals having adventures in the Australia bush. Anyway I remember watching one episode when Blinky and friends go back in to the past to explore history, except they didnt go back in Australian history, instead Blinky (who is a koala) becomes a armoured knight out to save the princess from a medieval castle.
I for one was really disappointed, sure it was a kids show but the example does illustrate the inherent bias of 'Western' views of their romantic 'fantasy' past - Fantasy has developed from the old folklore rendering of the Dark/Middle Ages with its Rogues, Knights, Castles, Wolves and Dragons who lived "Once Upon a Time" in a "Land Far Far Away".

They might well, predate the imperial era of the 18th/19th century but the modern understanding of them was most certainly transformed and modified by the era.

Tolkien, who popularized this sort of thing as much or more than any other, was a medievalist. His inspiration was Beowulf and the Viking Eddas and the rest of that Northern European we are just now emerging into literacy a good 5000 years after writing was discovered literature. The northern Europeans that believed in savage fairy people and driving them into the wild country weren't thinking about non-European peoples of which they had almost no contact. They were thinking of their own bitter cold, inhospitable, and savage land with its long lightless nights and short growing seasons.

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Its notable that you raise Tolkien as he also reflects some of the colonial reality of his era via the inclusion of the 'elephant' riding black Southrons, a 'warlike people' who side with Sauron and fought alongside the Orcs against the heroes.

When D&D establishes the idea of driving out monsters, and settling the land in a pastoral manner, it's entirely self-contained within European setting...Even writers who held at times in their life deeply racist attitudes, like Robert Howard, when they projected their own race into this fantasy setting, they projected them as the barbarians in the setting and not the civilized peoples. The white peoples of Howard's setting were the primitive, unsophisticated ones, limited in technology, lore, commerce, and wealth. Howard's setting isn't about white colonialism per se - it's about a yearning for that mythic primitive bygone time when supposedly Caucasians were more manly, honest, virtuous or whatever than they were now in his eyes, polluted by commerce, decadence, excessive learning, and the sort of things that Howard thought led to social and racial decline. In other words, it's back to yearning to that just emerging from the dark ages mythic narrative. Does this not being colonialist necessarily make it better? No. But there is a danger I think in seeing things too much within the lens of your own experience.

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I accept that most of the Eddas and earliest European folklore has Man v Nature as its foundation, that of course is very evident in the development of the dragon, ogre and of course the wolf, witch and fey. But to say that the foreign other is unknown is incorrect as Africa and Near East were known, and even within Europe you have people like Saami, Roma and Picts who were other'd.

REHs states that the Cimmerians were ancestors of the Irish and Scots Gaels and while Conan is a barbarian herepresents the finest ideals of the North West European as he is set against both decadent civilization of the northern lands and the exotic foreigners further south in Stygia (Egypt), Kush, Zamora (Middle East) and Vendhya (India).

While these renderings of the exotic other as dark scorcerer and beguiling enchantress may not play to the savage image (although the Afghuli of Afghulistan do) they are nonetheless colonial images of other as untrustworthy enemy that influenced the development of RPGs.

As an aside does anyone remember Aesheba? an older setting envisioned as Greek-Africa? The book had some good research and nice ideas but for me there was always that niggling thought that Africa is rich enough to have its own existance without needing to overlay ancient Greece on top

I think it bizarre to self-identify with orcs. I don't identify you with orcs. Why would you identify yourself in that way? Why consciously adopt a negative stereotype? The orcs, ogres, trolls, goblins, kobolds, and so forth were never meant to mean you.

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Actually my playing orcs was probably more inspired by my love of Pigsy (Cho Hakkai) from Monkey Magic, I also used a half-orc to approximate Woefully Fat the Pirate bokor in On Stranger Tides. The character I played most often was a gnome - also non-human, but more easily kept out of conflict.

So if you appropriate them and self-identify as them, then of course you are going to see all violence against them as some sort attack on yourself whether it is meant that way or not. But then, you are at that point the one engaged in cultural appropriation - taking dark age fears of a different culture and reskinning them for your own purpose. You can't blame the author for that baggage. I spent almost my entire youth playing a 1e AD&D Thief. I probably did it because I was an adolescent and adolescents are almost always attracted to rebellion.

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That indeed is one of the dilemma in playing DnD races as races rather than as monsters and of course I am not unique in that as can be seen in the various cultural reskinnings that have happened over the years, most notably of course the Native American Elfs of Dragonlance.

Anyway this thread has been popular and the discussion moved ...

While it has been mentioned that the game and/or DMs sometimes fail to reward non-combat solutions I think this kinda sidesteps the main issue: that for many characters the main form of advancement is getting better killing things and that for all characters advancement means de facto getting better at killing things. And in D&D and Pathfinder at least any class that lacks plentiful skills or magic is going to be extremely sub-optimal in a game with minimal violence. Violence is baked into these systems from top to bottom; they are designed for it.

Umbran said:

Talk about your questionable choices.

One reason why we are okay with violence, is that in the real world, some people have issues letting things go, and that tends to escalate....

Gentlemen, be warned - dragging around drama from closed threads is an astoundingly good way to get yourself a vacation from the site. Both of you drop it, now, please and thank you. I would, in fact, take this exchange as an indication that neither one of you should be responding to each other in this thread. It does not seem that either of you has cooled off well enough to resist the temptation to take pot-shots.

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Why am I getting warned, I didn't bring the other thread up. I was talking about this thread.

Violence is a fundamental aspect of the human experience whom we have spent centuries to figure out how to get rid of. First, delegated away to government and professional troops to avoid it in our daily lives, whoin turn fought god-awful wars and found it better to be at peace. We are all fascinated by it, but the truth is, violence does not reflect our reality any more. It is the exception, or a sign of societal decay.

Still we endlessly fetishize it in games and pop culture. Sexuality, on the other hand, very much reflects our existence. As humans we procreate and fornicate in the millions every day! And yet we are so afraid of it in games.

Someone make me understand us humans, because I dont.

Riley37 said:

Perhaps you have taught your children that danger and morally questionable choices are best left to adults. IMO, this is good parenting of five-year-olds. If your children's off-the-cuff response to "you see something moving in the windows of an abandoned house" is "find Daddy and tell him", so much the better. Have you tried games written for young players, such as "No Thanks Evil"?

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When preparing to run a game for them, I looked over some of the other options out there and decided (characteristically) that the systems were too complex and not expressive enough, so I wrote my own which I dubbed SIPS (Simple Imagination Play system).

Riley37 said:

On one hand, EN World is for gamers regardless of political allegiances, and for all I know, some of us (in this thread or otherwise) have a positive opinion of the KKK while others have a negative opinion of the KKK; there are differences we "check at the door" or take to PM. On another hand, bravo for standing your ground on "knight", and (if I infer accurately) for succeeding.

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There aren't enough KKK left in the USA to fill a basketball arena. The leadership got busted up by state Attorney Generals about that same time, and they never recovered. Heck, even the neo nationalist socialists that we do have left in the USA have a bad opinion of the KKK because they consider them too soft. I can feel pretty safe in saying that no one in these threads has a positive opinion of the KKK.

That said, I don't agree with your first sentence, nor does the management.

Kaodi said:

While it has been mentioned that the game and/or DMs sometimes fail to reward non-combat solutions I think this kinda sidesteps the main issue: that for many characters the main form of advancement is getting better killing things and that for all characters advancement means de facto getting better at killing things.

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The game's rules are certainly largely about combat. The *could* have rules that were as rich for dealing with social/political action, or other activity, but they don't. If we hand players a hammer, we should expect them to treat problems like nails...

There are games that do better. The CORTEX+ based Leverage game, for example, does include combat. But that is only one out of five major skills, and the other four are expected to be just as valuable in getting through to the conclusion of an adventure - and in fights it is generally assumed the PCS are not using firearms, and are knocking out bad guys instead of killing them. There are FATE variants that put intellectual and/or social conflict on the same mechanical basis as physical conflict.

lowkey13 said:

There's a fine line between fun happy combat and ... um ... uncomfortable colonialist massacre of women and children, if you catch my drift.

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Coming from people that genocide was committed against, yes, it was immediately noticed, and it was uncomfortable. Eventually it was one of the motivators to move away from that system. Personal combat, combating supernatural horror, that's fine; wiping out entire groups down to women and children? No. It wasn't even a fine line, I remember my friend reading that and being like "eh".

Immortal Sun said:

I think this question deserves some refining.

What kind of violence? Murder-hoboing? I'm not really okay with that because A: it tends to draw a crowd I don't like, and B: I find it boring.

Collective violence? Like, waging wars, fighting over resources, that thing?

Individualized-violence? Like one dude killing another dude for *whatever reasons*?

Though I think these deserve different specific answers, the general answer is that I think a lot of people believe you can't accomplish anything without struggle, and the fact that we're simulating an often medieval era or apocalyptic era or other kind of dystopian era with RPGs, "struggle" most always translates into physical conflict. We must overcome certain obstacles and those obstacles are usually other living things.

Also, because DMs don't reward non-combat solutions or situations.

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I think it is also just a natural thing that people like to see in their entertainment. Violence isn't unique to RPGs. It exists in movies, books, television and even music. I watch a lot of Kung Fu films and a lot of action movies. And I think the reason I like those is probably tied to the same reason I like killing monsters in an RPG or having a campaign that is about a massive sect war. It is exciting and cathartic. It also creates very high stakes (the threat of character death for example).