Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?

dragoner · Jun 20, 2019

Celebrim said:
But I still haven't the faintest idea what you are trying to say.

It does not matter, nothing I can say would change it.

Lanefan · Jun 21, 2019

Maxperson said:
Perhaps you missed the part where I mentioned that modules were different. You shouldn't look to them for what the base game expects.

Actually that would be the first place I'd look to see how the base game is intended to be played!

As in, OK - the DMG says "this", now let's see if the official published modules agree with it; because while the DMG can say what it wants the modules are where the rubber's gonna meet the road.

Lanefan · Jun 21, 2019

Ilya Bossov said:
Yes. Tieflings would like to have a word.

Not in my game, they won't. Demonspawn are, after all, still demonspawn...

Tony Vargas · Jun 21, 2019

Ilya Bossov said:
Yes. Tieflings would like to have a word.

Lanefan said:
Not in my game, they won't. Demonspawn are, after all, still demonspawn...

A Tiefling, a Cambion, and an Alu-Demon walk into a bar...

Celebrim · Jun 21, 2019

Ovinomancer said:
The best firm of your argument I can divine is that, given equal empathy and faithfulness to the character portrayed, that speaking in first person with affectations of mannerism and accent, is prima facie superior to presenting the character in 3rd person.

I think you for your considered and thoughtful response. Unfortunately, it goes wrong right with the initial assumption. You start out well enough, but you end up focusing on what is I think a rather minor characteristic of the concept of speaking - namely, affectations of mannerism and accent. Now, I like acting and accents and affecting different voices for characters. In general, I think these are all net positives, and I'd strongly encourage people to at least try these things, practice doing it, and get better at them because of the value that that those skills can bring to the table. By all means, put points on your "character sheet".

But ultimately, that's not really what I've been focused on here. What I've been focused on as the essential element of speaking is concrete dialogue. In other words, the most important element of the conversation is the words actually said, and that these are much more important and much more evocative than merely stating some abstract intention. At some point, I might develop a longer post about when you might want to use some writerly technique or cinematic cut to skip over dialogue that doesn't add anything to the story, but for the purposes of what I'm talking about, anything that involves some sort of fortune test to determine what happens that does involve a potentially important plot point in the transcript of play deserves to also have dialogue as part of that transcript.

With that in mind, I'll try to tackle the argument you develop, although hopefully you already see why I can't respond usefully to every detail of your your argument despite it's elaborate structure, because the assumption it's based on doesn't really reflect my position.

1) performative acts by themselves do not increase the honesty and fidelity of the reoresentation of a character. Else it would be true that all stage or screen representations of a given character from a novel would be superior to the written character.

Here you introduce a concept close to my concept of "reification" of the action. You want to reify the character through its representation. And while that's a slightly different idea than I've been using, it's congruent and I don't disagree with it as a goal of role-play. If no one could ever say what character you were playing, or if the character seemed to have no fixed identity beyond that of a playing piece, I think we both agree that's inferior role-play. Indeed, in point two you outline something similar to my argument by noting that the performative acts you care about can indeed increase character fidelity if done well, which is a parallel structure to my argument and honestly I think if you accept that then you ought to have no particular quibble against my argument.

However, you then go astray by focusing on the visual and audible elements of a performance, which as I said for me aren't crux of the matter. My argument applies equally if we are playing some sort of MU* or PBEM game were we can only communicate by text. Nor for that matter am I particularly concerned about first person or third person. What I am concerned about is the generation of actual dialogue. For example, I don't consider, "Good morrow, Captain. I am Sir Reginald, and as you may have discerned, I am a Knight Templar of Holy Aravar the Traveller." and "Sir Reginald says to the Captain, "Good morrow, Captain. I am Sir Reginald, and as you may have discerned, I am a Knight Templar of Holy Aravar the Traveller." to be very different. Indeed, while the first person construction is preferred in longer conversations, the third person construction has it's place at the table. For example, you might use it when it's not clear whom you are addressing, or to serve as a cue to end OOC discussion, or in an early session of play as a courtesy to reinforce the name of the character to your new comrades and to get the other players to begin to think of you primarily as your character for the duration of play. However, both the first and third person constructions of dialogue are very different than the proposition, "I introduce myself to the Captain.", and at my table, that would often by rejected as an invalid proposition and as a GM I would follow up, with a prompt like, "Ok, tell me what you say. Introduce yourself to the Captain." If the player is nervous and stumbles about doing this, that doesn't really present a problem. We have his character sheet to help inform us how charismatic Sir Reginald actually is. But not having dialogue introduces at times unsolvable problems for me as a GM, as I'm unable to determine the content of the player's action, and further produces and inferior transcript of play and an inferior experience of role-playing.

So you see, what we are comparing isn't really a novel and a movie, but a novel without dialogue to a novel with dialogue, or a movie without dialogue to a novel without dialogue. You might be able to think of a few movies or novels that use clever writerly techniques of narration to achieve effects that might be difficult to achieve with dialogue, but you'll be hard pressed to think of beloved stories that dispense with it entirely, and I think you'll agree that the vast majority of the most beloved stories feature dialogue. Heck, even the ones with just a single character tend to feature a lot of monologues, either spoken or internal, because verbal communication is so extraordinarily important.

4) Point 3 becomes even more obvious when the character becomes more fantastical and representation is outsude the physical abilities of the actor. In the case of very fantastical things, acting cannot be said to be a more accurate representation of the character than a non-acted description of behavior may be. The sound of a dragon's roar, for example, can have more fidelity as a description than as acted out by a participant.

You are I think coming toward the same conclusions I have made but from a different direction. Remember, what I said is that all things being equal, we should tend to prefer the procedures of play that most closely resemble the things we are simulating. That there are things we cannot closely simulate with a conversation I immediately conceded. Indeed, I right at the beginning brought up something very close to the dragon example to explain why although we would prefer to act out conversations, there are elements of a fantasy game - in my example I noted combat - where we would prefer some other device for representing them. So if you are reduced to describing a sound you can't in fact produce, that's OK. But, this still doesn't justify a proposition like, "I try to persuade the Baron." or "I introduce myself to the Captain" over actually producing dialogue. Even bad dialogue is more like dialogue than the absence of dialogue, and even bad dialogue and acting would be preferred to the absence of it on the additional grounds that you will never "get good" without practice.

5) Acting also tends to place more of the actor into the role. There's a reason many good actors have a niche if characters they portray (Ben Affleck is a fine actor so long as he's playing a jerk). This often results in a reversion to mean when acting -- tge further away a character's trait is from you, the less well it will be acted. Hollywood can escape this by having scripts and directors, but still fails at times. RPGs have no such controls, and player acting will always revert to closer to the player over time than to the character.

This assertion fails not just because it's not really acting that I'm concerned about, but because even if it were true the very same objection could be raised to playing a character without dialogue. Playing the character without dialogue will not stop the PC from reverting closer to the player over time. In my experience a minority of players can play a character that isn't basically themselves. But this isn't a real problem - most real people are interesting in themselves - and the character will still be more interesting with their own dialogue than they will be without it, even if the player is basically just saying what they might think in the same situation.

Finally, there is a false comparison that I think you are making throughout your argument where you are insisting that there may exist some version of the preferred thing - a thing you yourself admit preferring - which is so bad that it is inferior to the best version of the non-preferred thing. Essentially you are saying that the acting may be so bad that the player would be better of not acting. Or if we apply this to what I have been saying, that the dialogue may be so bad that the player would be better off not using dialogue. I have a host of objections to this claim. First, it is like claiming that since it might be the case that an assault rifle could be jammed or corroded, that soldiers ought to prefer going into battle with high quality butcher knifes. But this is ridiculous not only because assault rifles are so obviously superior as weapons to butcher knives, but also because the same objection can be made to the butcher knife itself. It could be broken or dull. In the same way, if a player's dialogue is terrible, there is no reason to assume that their non-dialogue is going to be inherently superior role-play. Secondly, I object to the argument because settling for not playing in a skillful manner because you aren't skillful, guarantees you'll never become skillful. I've had at least a half-dozen shy nervous players over the year begin to come out of their shell and eventually have shining moments of awesome sauce producing moments wonderful dialogue. It's not necessarily a steady path to greatness and often they'll go back in their shell from time to time, but it's ridiculous to just say, "Well that player can't role-play so they shouldn't even try." And thirdly I object to the argument because for the most part the contrived situation just doesn't come up. Even the player's nervous attempts to speak in character are better than nothing. Even putting one's foot in one's mouth still makes for more interesting play than declaring moves instead of roleplaying. Finally, I reject this argument because I strongly believe that there is a great deal of symmetry between what is good play for a GM, and what is good play for a player, and in my experience all these things people are claiming to prefer as play for their player because they aren't comfortable with it, is rarely what they prefer from their GM. Sure, there are times as a GM when you might decide that the details of the conversation aren't important, and it's best to just give a summary of what an NPC says, but as a GM I long ago learned that the impact of the scene framing "The jester tells a funny joke." is vastly different than framing the scene with the jester actually telling a funny joke and nothing could change that.

Hussar · Jun 21, 2019

It’s not really that hard to find colonialist themes in early dnd.

Isle of Dread is a start as is Keep on the Borderlands. The Giants modules aren’t a bad example, nor are the Drow modules.

While Saltmarsh isn’t too bad, the later modules are all about the (predominantly white) humans being threatened by the lizard folk and sahuagin. Finding colonialist parallels there isn’t much of a stretch.

This shouldn’t be shocking considering the roots of dnd. Pulp fantasy wasn’t exactly the most ummmm politically correct genre.

Celebrim · Jun 21, 2019

Hussar said:
It’s not really that hard to find colonialist themes in early dnd.

Isle of Dread is a start as is Keep on the Borderlands. The Giants modules aren’t a bad example, nor are the Drow modules.

While Saltmarsh isn’t too bad, the later modules are all about the (predominantly white) humans being threatened by the lizard folk and sahuagin. Finding colonialist parallels there isn’t much of a stretch.

This shouldn’t be shocking considering the roots of dnd. Pulp fantasy wasn’t exactly the most ummmm politically correct genre.

Amongst committed Christians there is an neurosis that sometimes develops where the person begins to perceive in more and more things that power of Satan evidenced in the world. Soon thier thoughts become dominated by the idea that everything is in some fashion controlled by powerful demonic forces that are manifesting around them. It's bad theology even in terms of theology, and it has often lead to some of the worst evils committed in the name of Christianity. In even it's more benign forms, it leads to people going around denouncing Satan "in all his forms" and casting Satan out of ordinary benign and harmless things, a condition which becomes eventually indistinguishable from madness.

I feel this whole "colonialist themes" has become the same sort of thing.

It is not sufficient to draw some sort of a vague parallel, proof texted from a couple minor passages taken out of context, or relying on one possible meaning of a single word to show that something has "colonialist themes". Yeah, finding colonialist parallels isn't too much of a stretch, but not because the documents are colonialist in intent or inspiration, but because finding a parallel between something when that's what you wanted to find and expected to find in the first place is not at all hard. Just cherry pick your evidence, and viola.

All you have to do is ignore that the Lizard Folk in question are actually meant to be wise allies of the townsfolk, and that the PC's are intended to ultimately discover that their actions in presuming the monstrous nature of the Lizard Folk were rash and murderous, or that the Saughin are devil worshipping fish people that live under the sea and that they are most certainly and without a doubt not intended to represent any real world ethnic group. They are freaking devil worshipping monsters. Just ignore all of that.

Yes, but other than that, yeah there are "colonialist parallels". Just set out with a thesis first, and then find the evidence. Throw in some innuendo about the relationship to pulp fantasy and you are done, right?

Hussar · Jun 21, 2019

Nice [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]. Folks that disagree with you are now delusional. Yeah, that's going to go over well.

Of course, it's convenient when you ignore 2/3rds of the examples I posted to fixate on the one that maybe you can argue with. That's pretty much par for the course.

Look, it's pretty simple. Early D&D draws very heavily from the pulps. Yes? We can agree on that? Genre pulps of the early 20th century were misogynistic, racist, bigotted and deeply, deeply grounded in colonialist ideology. So, it's not really a shock when early D&D also shows signs of being misogynistic, racist, bigoted and grounded in colonialist ideology. I'm rather surprised that this is even contentious to be honest. I figured that this was pretty much common knowledge.

First half of the 20th century genre fiction was racist, bigoted and grounded in colonialist ideology should not be news to anyone.

It's shocking how far people will go to rewrite history in order to somehow protect this idealized fiction of history that people have constructed in their heads. Tolkien included instances of racist ideas in his writing - again, this is not news. This is not surprising. This is just accepted fact that has been accepted fact by anyone who isn't interested in rewriting history for decades. It's not shocking that a writer in England at that time would have some cultural baggage creep into his writing. It doesn't make him a bigot. It doesn't make anyone who likes Tolkien's writing a bigot. It just means that nothing is perfect. We see it, we acknowledge it and we move on.

Same goes for early D&D. Huh, shock, an American using early 20th century pulps as inspiration, writes stuff that, decades later, isn't really considered acceptable anymore. SHOCK. The HORROR. Oh my god. :erm:

Good grief. This is like saying rain is wet. Again, it gets acknowledged and we move on.

What, exactly, are you defending here [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]?

billd91 · Jun 21, 2019

Hussar said:
What, exactly, are you defending here [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]?

His right to cherrypick out of context with the best of them? The issue with the lizard men in the Saltmarsh series may be drawing the PCs into a misunderstanding (and may work against the colonialist narrative), but picking that one as if it refutes all really isn't dealing with the issues in Keep on the Borderlands, the name level privileges of some high level characters in 1e, and so on. Someone who approaches the game with a perspective of wanting to explore those issues will certainly find them (but then, literary criticism is pretty much like that).

That doesn't mean I don't find problems with the colonialist conceptual framework since, as I see it, the issues are far older than the Age of Colonization. Colonialism is mostly a convenient buzzword that fits certain other political frameworks, I think, so the people using them can avoid interrogating other parts of history.

Maxperson · Jun 21, 2019

Lanefan said:
Actually that would be the first place I'd look to see how the base game is intended to be played!

As in, OK - the DMG says "this", now let's see if the official published modules agree with it; because while the DMG can say what it wants the modules are where the rubber's gonna meet the road.

I disagree. Modules were largely created for tournaments and conventions. They are also not presumed by the game to be used. They were completely optional. It's also easier to tone down a module to make it fit a smaller group, than it is to ramp it up for a larger one. These are reasons why modules are at the high end of the number of players the game expects. They don't contradict the 3+ expectation at all.