D&D General A History of Violence: Killing in D&D

[Thomas Shey]

Wait do groups not offer XP for getting past encounters peacefully?

When our group tried XP that's how we did it. (We still ended up going back to milestone as less book keeping.)

It doesn't really matter. The point is "advancement based on encounters" (or really any other form of criteria) is incentivizing doing that specific kind of thing, even if a variety of approaches are acceptable. If you don't feel a need to incentivize things, just basing it on time passed will do the same job with less bookkeeping. Its not like levelling as an advancement method isn't kind of arbitrary in the first place.

 

[payn]

This is why I still like 2e and OSR for the magic loot, but I think that makes sense. 5e really doesn’t need magic items - your character gets its uniqueness and power from the class abilities. In earlier games, you got that from the magic items. By the same token, I hear much more often from players about whether taking on a side quest or an encounter is worth the effort in 5e (again with milestone leveling).

That could be a bug or feature. You need to side adventure to become level 4 so you can face the end guy at a higher level than 3. In milestone the decision is just based on whether the side quest is interesting itself or not.

In 2e, if you don’t adventure, you don’t level and more importantly, you miss out on magic items. IME, that’s less of a thing with 5e.

Well, you have to adventure to level in 5E too. You just dont need magic items to be more capable thats baked into character progression itself. (a total feature if you ask me).

 

[Frozen_Heart]

For a game that isn't about violence, there is an awful lot of real-estate on the character sheet for ways to hurt others.
The entire reason for monsters is to ausage the guilt of the player for stabbing "people".
If the DM puts the party in a position to question the morality of their actions...i feel like you're now playing a different game. I don't want to play with a DM that is intentionally trying to make me feel bad.

Players suffering consequences for their actions isn't some new thing to DnD. Even adventures back in the early days of DnD had various NPC's which weren't framed as bad guys.

If your players randomly decide to stab a shopkeeper and take their stuff in the middle of a crowded town, there will be consequences. That doesn't mean the DM is trying to force the players to feel bad or force DnD to be peaceful. It just means that the players murdered a person in the town square in broad daylight, and now the guards are angry.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It’s a good point though. The game rewards the objectives it encourages. You want players to resolve problems without combat - give them the full reward for solving that problem without combat.

I still say you need to give them more reward, because there's a lot of passive things that encourage combat, including the design of most classes in the case of D&D.

 

[TiQuinn]

That could be a bug or feature. You need to side adventure to become level 4 so you can face the end guy at a higher level than 3. In milestone the decision is just based on whether the side quest is interesting itself or not.

Well, you have to adventure to level in 5E too. You just dont need magic items to be more capable thats baked into character progression itself. (a total feature if you ask me).

I think they’re both features of those two editions. They just play differently as a result. It’s why I bounce between the two depending on the type of game I want to run.

 

[KYRON45]

Players suffering consequences for their actions isn't some new thing to DnD. Even adventures back in the early days of DnD had various NPC's which weren't framed as bad guys.

If your players randomly decide to stab a shopkeeper and take their stuff in the middle of a crowded town, there will be consequences. That doesn't mean the DM is trying to force the players to feel bad or force DnD to be peaceful. It just means that the players murdered a person in the town square in broad daylight, and now the guards are angry.

I've never played with those players.

 

[KYRON45]

Players suffering consequences for their actions isn't some new thing to DnD. Even adventures back in the early days of DnD had various NPC's which weren't framed as bad guys.

If your players randomly decide to stab a shopkeeper and take their stuff in the middle of a crowded town, there will be consequences. That doesn't mean the DM is trying to force the players to feel bad or force DnD to be peaceful. It just means that the players murdered a person in the town square in broad daylight, and now the guards are angry.

In this example the players are discarding morality. The DM isn't putting them in the position to harm innocents...they made that decision on their own.

 

[Laurefindel]

Moral implications aside, combat is fun because it’s a dynamic challenge that (particularly in D&D but in many other RPGs as well) is broken down to a very fine level of details.

No other situation in life requires such a fine level of micro-observations, where scenes need to be decomposed and analyzed to the same degree. There are other complex situation involving conflict of course, but combat is the epitome of competition that involve team-play, individual skills, equipment, short time limits, and high stakes. The only thing that comes close is competitive team-sport but event then, sport is usually ‘burdened’ with ‘unnecessary’ restrictions and rules, requires specific installations, needs a set number of players, and requires witnesses (usually an audience and referees).

What I’m saying is that in D&D, combat is fun because that’s what the game does best - no other elements of the game comes even remotely close. Perhaps
If they did we’d be doing those instead, but it would also make D&D a heavy, heavy game to play. Combat in D&D is horror for the characters but a sport for the players. We put our characters in situation of harm waaaaay more than we would in real life because as players, we want to play the sport.

(As an aside, that’s why I hate paralysis-type spells. They go against one of the core ‘rule’ of D&D combat: everyone has a turn. It’s also why I think fantasy is a popular genre, and why some people don’t want guns in their fantasy)

I’ll finish by saying that we have some control over the kind of ‘sport’ we want to play. Not all combat need to be to the death. Going to 0 hp does not always have to mean death; It means defeat. In context, defeat can mean many things, and your own life does not have to be the only stake.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just a related side comment:

The majority of RPGs that have a strong focus on combat (which is to say most of them) aren't necessarily set in uncivilized areas so much as in contexts where authorities are unwilling or unable to address certain issues that may require force to address them. This can include border areas with insufficient law enforcement in whatever form it takes, but it can involve otherwise civilized places with clusters of independent power that disregard the main source of power, or occasional intrusions from outside the area that are difficult for authorities to address (in some games this being because the PCs are, in fact, more capable than most of what the authorities have to bring to bear, or because they can act in a way that the authorities are unable to for one reason or another). This doesn't have to involve force, but most other sorts of problems are more likely to be able to be handled by actors that don't need to and don't look much like PCs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No other situation in life would require such a level of fine observation, where scenes need to be decomposed and analyzed to the same degree. It’s not that no other type of situation is as complex, but combat is the epitome of competition involving team-play, individual skills, equipment, short time limits, and high stakes. The only one that comes close is competitive team sports but event then, sport is usually ‘burdened’ with ‘unnecessary’ restrictions and rules, requires specific installations, needs a set number of players, and requires witnesses (usually an audience and referees).

I think intrusion situations and some social encounters can go the same way, but the latter gets a lot of hostility toward being played out in a mechanical fashion in large parts of the hobby, and the former usually doesn't support larger groups of PCs as readily.