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

[Thomas Shey]

I completely agree. The very structure of WotC 5e classes tells you what their primary purpose is: mechanically representing how they fight. Very little in the way of non-combat mechanics. One of the things I love about Level Up is effort it goes to to shift that balance somewhat. That is a game where combat is important, but not the main reason we're here.

Well, my feeling is that's been true about the majority of classes in D&D since day one; if anything it was even more true in the early days, even with spellcasters since you only had a limited degree of control over what spells you knew, and a rather lot of them were combat or combat-support focused.

You can make an argument about the early thief perhaps, though even then that surprise strike was right there.

I feel similarly about many OSR games, although in those cases it's the general rules that push non-combat solutions as opposed to class mechanics, which tend to be simpler across the board.

You don't have to have complex class mechanics to produce this result though. An OD&D Fighting Man really wasn't good for much except what it said on the tin, and the mechanics were downright schematic back then. You can, of course, pull out the whole tendency in the OSR to avoid mechanics whenever they can in some cases, but at that point it almost doesn't matter what you're playing (and I still wonder if in a lot of cases people not entirely onboard that may attempt to steer solutions toward things that do have mechanics because they at least know what they can and can't do in advance there).

Basically my line about classes "as they are now" wasn't in contrast with any particular past take on them so much as to cut off any discussion of theoretically non-combat focused classes that could be created (though I think that only solves half the issue).

 

[payn]

I do somewhat apologize for helping the side trip, though I think initially it was fairly on topic (i.e. what sort of actions advancement systems incentivize).

What's your feeling about my position that the very structure of classes (at least the ones that exist now) tend to put their thumb on the scale of wanting most things to turn toward violence? In its most basic form, if you're playing a class who almost all their abilities are about fighting, its hard to see that you're not going to want to fight a lot in most people's case?

Any thoughts you'd care to express?

Shameless plug time, but I made a thread about giving the fighter some exploration and social skill. It didnt last long as I was told thats just role play stuff that needs no mechanics.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I do somewhat apologize for helping the side trip, though I think initially it was fairly on topic (i.e. what sort of actions advancement systems incentivize).

What's your feeling about my position that the very structure of classes (at least the ones that exist now) tend to put their thumb on the scale of wanting most things to turn toward violence? In its most basic form, if you're playing a class who almost all their abilities are about fighting, its hard to see that you're not going to want to fight a lot in most people's case?

Any thoughts you'd care to express?

No thoughts! I agree. D&D is designed to incentivize combat, and the classes are part of that.

 

[MGibster]

Shameless plug time, but I made a thread about giving the fighter some exploration and social skill. It didnt last long as I was told thats just role play stuff that needs no mechanics.

You take that hippie role playing stuff somewhere else! (I kid. I kid.) One thing I can say about earlier editions of D&D, I didn't feel quite so constrained so far as what my character was capable of doing. My Fighter might not have been able to Hide, Climb Walls, or Move Silently, but he was just as good at talking to people as any other class.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Shameless plug time, but I made a thread about giving the fighter some exploration and social skill. It didnt last long as I was told thats just role play stuff that needs no mechanics.

I suspect it'd have had to been a fair bit anyway. I mean, even if you add on some non-fighting stuff, its hard to see anything resembling the Fighter as its been constituted for the history of the game not dragging people toward, well, fighting.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You take that hippie role playing stuff somewhere else! (I kid. I kid.) One thing I can say about earlier editions of D&D, I didn't feel quite so constrained so far as what my character was capable of doing. My Fighter might not have been able to Hide, Climb Walls, or Move Silently, but he was just as good at talking to people as any other class.

As I noted, that could easily be a case where the answer was either "For what that's worth" or "no better than anyone else". I still maintain one of the reasons combat is so common throughout the hobby is that, unlike a number of things, its easy to have a group combat, but a group negotiation is more difficult in the first place, and harder to set up and run.

And of course there's always the question of why, if they're aren't going to be engaged most of the time, why those mechanics are all laying there.

 

[Voadam]

Well the game historically originally was take chainmail wargaming and roleplay a group of the individual soldiers in a squad exploring a dungeon. I don't know if there were any mechanics other than chainmail in Arneson's original Blackmoor game. Given Arneson's Free Kriegspiel type innovation background just leaving combat to mechanics and ad hoc adjudicating everything else seems at least plausible even though that is a lot of noncombat everything else.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

There's a strong cathartic element to the violence in games and media in general. People like catharsis. It's a thing.

But how any one person feels about the framing of that violence in any given situation is going to vary a lot. Which is to say, the catharsis one can get from a piece of media is going to vary depending on the person and the media. Me, I don't like the way GTA frames violence. But I recently finished Baldur's Gate 3 and I promise you I left a massive body count behind.

If one is just playing a beer'n'pretzels kick in the door and kill the monsters game then there's not really much more framing than you get out of a board game. Playing in such a game provides the players with some easy, uncomplicated fun. Let's them blow steam and all that.

If one is more into the role play side of things you'll want better reasons than a character being tagged "good" or "evil" to reach a satisfactory level of catharsis. For myself I always feel more satisfied with a game where the baddies have a chance to really get under the players' skins. That's whether I'm player side or GM side. The vast majority of people I've played with feel that way too.

But part of having more fleshed out enemies is that the framing of the violence runs the risk of modelling/resembling/paralleling real-world violence. And how one feels about and specific example of that is going to vary on one's life experience and a host of other things.

Me, I long ago found the "kill orcs coz they're orcs" thing problematic. Therefore, nowadays, most of my adventures are not set on frontiers where societies rub up against each other. They are set within a society and the villains are in some manner acting from within to destroy/take over/re-shape that society in ways that are just plain wrong. And sure, some (many?) people might find my repetitive use of the rich and powerful as villains to be problematic. This would be one of those specific examples that varies with one's life experience.

 

[Lanefan]

In my experience it was an issue.

I ran a long time 1e game with a big core group who mostly were there a bunch but also some people who were there every once or twice a year or couple of years. Everyone was different levels pretty soon due to the different xp charts, multiclassing, ability score xp bonuses, and not being there for 100% of everything but the core group was all within two or later three levels of each other even with the ranger betraying his nature god and losing a level as he turned non-good and now a fighter.

Then someone is in town and shows up who has not been there for three years, and I have basically four options.

1 Play their old much lower level character who is way below the current module guidelines.
2 Play the old character but level him up some.
3 Make a new character who is at the party level or whatever the guideline for new pcs we are using (lowest active PC's xp amount, that amount but one level lower, or whatever).
4 play an NPC for the game.

I don't really want the guest experience with our group to be playing a second level character as the otherwise high level group goes through the frost giants or whatever.

What I'd do in that situation (and have done, many a time) would be a variant on #2: get together with your visitor ahead of time* and spend half an hour on some quickie rolling to determine what the old character has been doing during the intervening in-game time since that character was retired from play when your friend left town. This also gives your visitor a chance to reacquaint with the character.

This rolling might determine that the character has died in the meantime (in which case it's straight to option #3) or has levelled up some, or hasn't done much and is still lower level, or has levelled up a lot.

* - if the long-absent visitor drops in without warning you in advance and yet still expects to play then that's not your fault, and in that case it'd be option 1 or nothing.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Violence is part and parcel of D&D. It's what the rules are built to support by and large, and it's where most of the mechanical fun of the game comes from.

i'd say it's a very much 'chicken and egg' scenario, is there more mechanics because combat more fun or is combat more fun because there's more mechanics dedicated to resolving it.
edit: if where was actually a nuanced set of social combat mechanics and classes all had their own abilities that could impact things wouldn't we probably see alot more purely social games.