frankthedm
First Post
When it comes to sandboxes, some players act like incontinent cats.
Might as well rename the towns
Hamlet of Killed'emall
Can-NEVER-go-back-there-ville
Shot-on-sight-town
Kicked-out-of-every-inn-ton
Capitol-punishment-city
-
The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is LIVE! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Always with the killing
- Thread starter Clarabell
- Start date
Might as well rename the towns
Hamlet of Killed'emall
Can-NEVER-go-back-there-ville
Shot-on-sight-town
Kicked-out-of-every-inn-ton
Capitol-punishment-city
There are RPGs that have no combat mechanics at all. See: Nicotine Girls.
There are RPGs that treat combat as any other kind of conflict. See: In a Wicked Age, Dogs in the Vineyard.
There are RPGs that have combat mechanics, but it is there to actively discourage resorting to violence. See: Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies.
I'm sure that people who played more games than I did may supply a lot more examples.
We have combat in most fantasy RPGs, because it is a part of the genre. First games were strongly combat-centered and many later ones took it as a default. But it does not mean that violence is present in all games, nor that it should be. It's just a matter of the themes the game explores.
There are RPGs that treat combat as any other kind of conflict. See: In a Wicked Age, Dogs in the Vineyard.
There are RPGs that have combat mechanics, but it is there to actively discourage resorting to violence. See: Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies.
I'm sure that people who played more games than I did may supply a lot more examples.
We have combat in most fantasy RPGs, because it is a part of the genre. First games were strongly combat-centered and many later ones took it as a default. But it does not mean that violence is present in all games, nor that it should be. It's just a matter of the themes the game explores.
GregChristopher
First Post
Seems like a pretty obvious solution to ditch the players here.
But assuming you cant do that, you could take a single powerful NPC and go Oceans Twelve on their ass. Demand that they accomplish some really hard mission or be destroyed.
But assuming you cant do that, you could take a single powerful NPC and go Oceans Twelve on their ass. Demand that they accomplish some really hard mission or be destroyed.
I don't think you've checked out a lot of RPGs, if that's your impression.
- Wraith: The Oblivion is focused on 'being killed' and the consequences thereof.
- Ars Magica: is focused on 'surviving' within a medieval society controlled by the church and nobles as a magus, on thriving and advancing in a magical society, and on accumulating up personal power.
- Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye): While this is your typical generic fantasy kitchen-sink, you can play pcs with any kind of background, not all of them suited to go adventuring, much less killing things. Combat is a part of the game but it's clearly not the focus.
In our Earthdawn campaign we recently had five sessions full of investigation and exploration without a single combat. I have to admit that made me slightly anxious for the next opportunity to kill something...
The reason why so many games focus on 'killing things' (or more accurately on combat encounters) is that this typically one of the most engaging situations you can find yourself in. Matters of life and death are simply the most dramatic.
As others have said, this is clearly an expectations issue. The RPG market has always been dominated by D&D, and D&D evolved from a wargame, so one has to expect that the majority of RPG players are at least okay with the idea of going around slaughtering stuff, and have come to expect it. D&D promotes this approach with intricate and detailed combat rules, while everything else is handled in a vague, "Yeah, roll some dice so we can get back to the killing" way if it's addressed at all.
If you want to draw players away from that model, you need two things:
1. Players that are not actively committed to killing stuff. Some folks game to solve puzzles or to explore mysteries or to roleplay social interactions. Other folks game for combat or to stir up trouble. Make it clear up front that the latter are not going to be happy in your game, and be prepared for some players to walk away. (Be prepared also for some players to stick around but whine and complain and pick fights with every passing town guardsman. You may have to give these people the boot.)
2. A clear and well-defined alternative. Even players who aren't combat-monkeys by nature may fall back on it if it's not clear what they're supposed to be doing. It's a rare gaming group that can deal well with a total sandbox scenario; most require some direction from the GM.
Question: Can you give us an example of a non-combat-oriented adventure you would like to run? Just a rough sketch of the storyline, so we can see what interests you and give better targeted advice... "non-combat-oriented" covers a lot of ground.
If you want to draw players away from that model, you need two things:
1. Players that are not actively committed to killing stuff. Some folks game to solve puzzles or to explore mysteries or to roleplay social interactions. Other folks game for combat or to stir up trouble. Make it clear up front that the latter are not going to be happy in your game, and be prepared for some players to walk away. (Be prepared also for some players to stick around but whine and complain and pick fights with every passing town guardsman. You may have to give these people the boot.)
2. A clear and well-defined alternative. Even players who aren't combat-monkeys by nature may fall back on it if it's not clear what they're supposed to be doing. It's a rare gaming group that can deal well with a total sandbox scenario; most require some direction from the GM.
Question: Can you give us an example of a non-combat-oriented adventure you would like to run? Just a rough sketch of the storyline, so we can see what interests you and give better targeted advice... "non-combat-oriented" covers a lot of ground.
Last edited:
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Clarabell said:
Well, you are working against what many people consider to be the essential experience of D&D: kill things, and take their stuff.
Now, it's possible to work around that, but it sounds like that's what your players want, and if you don't give that to them, to some degree, they'll find a way to take it from you, which sucks for you.
So here's what I would do, if you wanted to stick with D&D and your current group and work up-hill against the downpour:
- Give 'em a target: If your players want to do something, you are probably better served by finding a way that they can do it without stomping all over your fun. In your case, your PC's clearly want to beat some face in, so give them some legit things they can beat up. Give them goblins and trolls and orcs. Let them kill those things. They'll have fun, and you won't fret about your hobo-murderers. If they want to feel like big tough dudes, give them a few weak and cowering kobolds to smash all over. Stick those antisocial murderers in the wilderness and let their antisocial murdering do some good!
- Make It An Adventure: Personally, I'd disagree with the advice here that says to kill or harass your party for their deeds. It's a little 'DM Power Trip'-y for my tastes, and it might leave your players irate. Instead, make it part of the story. The PC's killed the inkeeper, so harass them with the town guards, but let them win. Then, have goblins attack the town. No town guard, and NPC's dropping like flies -- this is when they stop being petty vigilantes, and start being heroes!
- Connect Them: After you've got their magic swords pointed at the right Bad Guys, maybe introduce things that they can begin to care about. Ask them questions about their character's personality. I find that two of the most effective connecting questions to ask are: "What is your character the most afraid of?" and "What does your character most desire?" These give you some deep character hooks you can pull on to motivate the party in the right direction. Is your party hobo-murderer afraid of losing his magic sword, and does he desire more gold than he can ever spend? You've got an adventure: put a rumor of a pile of gold in his head, and, when he goes to investigate it, introduce a monster famous for devouring metal (rust monster!).
- Look At Other Systems: D&D in any edition does a pretty shoddy job of making anything aside from beating up monsters fun over the long course of a campaign. Look at Blue Rose, or even Mouse Guard, or Dogs in the Vineyard. Indie games should be great for you to look at, since they're freer to play with this. You don't have to play it, but you might find some ideas you can steal. I'd say the number one thing I'd do to have fun in D&D noncombat is to introduce noncombat powers that the characters get. This requires some work, but at it's most simple, it would simply be a binary ability that the character possesses that can be used maybe once a day. Say, the Fighter has an "Intimidate" power that automatically makes whatever he is facing a little afraid of him. The Barbarian might have an "I smash it" power that instantly breaks an item. You, as the DM, get to figure out the consequences of the action (which can be kind of fun), and the PC's get to feel powerful when they're not wailing on things with kodachrome skin tones.
That's short, but I'm late for work. If you're still surviving by Monday, I might be able to add a few.
Celebrim
Legend
One other scenario is possible that hasn't been mentioned. An RPG can be heavily focused on violence, but be strongly skewed away from death and murder. An example would be 'Mutants and Masterminds' played under its default rules. M&M emulates a comic book universe, so the expectation is for large amounts of violent conflict, that usually end up only with heroes or villains merely temporarily defeated or incapacitated.
On the broeader question of, 'Why the killing?', the most likely answer in my opinion is because role playing sex with each other makes the players of the game uncomfortable. That's only somewhat tongue in cheek.
Violence is strongly linked to pleasurable responces in humans, especially males but even in females as well. A game with a large amount of violent conflict helps keep the players from being bored. Also, violence can be intellectually as well as emotionally stimulating. It's not just role-playing games where the focus is on violence - virtually every board game features some sort of abstract violence. The whole notion of 'tactics' is intimately tied to violence. Most sports feature some sort of controlled (or not so controlled) violence, and even those that don't usually rely on displaying and honing the skills humans employ to commit violence. So with violence you have an easy mentally stimulating jolt to the game session. It's used in movies for much the same purpose. Even a bad movie can keep many people's attention if it has enough violence in it.
Violence is strongly linked in people's minds to the scale of the conflict. If the matter isn't worth risking violence over, then chances are people percieve the matter as being petty or trivial. If the matter is worth investing emotion in, then its percieved instinctually as something worth getting angry over. If its percieved as worth being angry over, at some point people will assert the rightness of violence. People will talk about their 'right to be angry' and the 'justness' of their violent reaction. And even if you don't agree with that, that in itself is an interesting emotional conflict and moral philosophy that only can be explored in the context of violence.
Pacifism is a very rare moral position, even among pacifists. While quite a few people claim to be pacifists, in practice virtually no one actually practices it because the logical upshot of pacifism is that someone who isn't a pacifist kills you in very short order. One really easy test of this is to ask the supposed pacifist whether they believe that they should contact the police in the event that they have been wronged (robbed, assaulted, raped, had a family member murdered, ect.) If the answer is yes, then they believe in 'pacifism for me, but not for you' which is far far more common of a position than actual pacifism. Likewise, ask yourself if the pacifist community has put itself in a position where its existance depends implicitly or even explicitly on non-pacifists protecting it. An example of this would be various caste systems, whether in medevial europe or India where the high caste 'pacifists' depend on 'lesser honorable' castes for protection and legal enforcement. In any event, the upshot of this is regardless of the focus of the game, if the topics explored in it are serious enough, the game will probably eventually feature a choice between violence and non-violence and most players will probably at some point regardless of their beliefs feel compelled to resort to violence.
My little ones are natural RPers. They'll sit and play informal roleplaying games with each other for hours. Usually what they are playing bores me to tears. I can't play with them for more than 5 or 10 minutes because the scale of the conflict is so petty. They RP 'where they are at' regardless of setting, and so conflict in their games revolves around whether or not a character is using good table manners, whether or not a character is sharing the toys, and who gets to take a turn at some occupation. The extent of the violence being played usually quite appropriately to the scale involves nothing more than scolding the naughty character. They play what ammounts to a rotating GM structure, and after a little coaching quickly grasped proposition/response structure, and the separation that prevents a GM from taking control of another player's primary character (afterwhich the number of metagame conflicts drastically decreased). As far as I can tell they play in an unstructured improvisational sandbox with no metagoals other than absorbing themselves in the moment. It's quite engrossing to them, but not particularly engrossing to me yet (though its getting there).
However, even they don't play a game that is fully without violence and killing. Sometimes naughty characters break the rules and find themselves killed. Sometimes naughty characters commit murder and have to be hunted down and put in jail. Some of the heroes are effectively 'anti-heroes' who are swift to punish naughty characters with instant death. This doesn't serve to make the game any more interesting for me, but does suggest that as there game play evolves into more mature games and as they start to find the need (or at least intellectual ability) for more formal game structures that the resulting games will feature at least some violance and killing.
On the broeader question of, 'Why the killing?', the most likely answer in my opinion is because role playing sex with each other makes the players of the game uncomfortable. That's only somewhat tongue in cheek.
Violence is strongly linked to pleasurable responces in humans, especially males but even in females as well. A game with a large amount of violent conflict helps keep the players from being bored. Also, violence can be intellectually as well as emotionally stimulating. It's not just role-playing games where the focus is on violence - virtually every board game features some sort of abstract violence. The whole notion of 'tactics' is intimately tied to violence. Most sports feature some sort of controlled (or not so controlled) violence, and even those that don't usually rely on displaying and honing the skills humans employ to commit violence. So with violence you have an easy mentally stimulating jolt to the game session. It's used in movies for much the same purpose. Even a bad movie can keep many people's attention if it has enough violence in it.
Violence is strongly linked in people's minds to the scale of the conflict. If the matter isn't worth risking violence over, then chances are people percieve the matter as being petty or trivial. If the matter is worth investing emotion in, then its percieved instinctually as something worth getting angry over. If its percieved as worth being angry over, at some point people will assert the rightness of violence. People will talk about their 'right to be angry' and the 'justness' of their violent reaction. And even if you don't agree with that, that in itself is an interesting emotional conflict and moral philosophy that only can be explored in the context of violence.
Pacifism is a very rare moral position, even among pacifists. While quite a few people claim to be pacifists, in practice virtually no one actually practices it because the logical upshot of pacifism is that someone who isn't a pacifist kills you in very short order. One really easy test of this is to ask the supposed pacifist whether they believe that they should contact the police in the event that they have been wronged (robbed, assaulted, raped, had a family member murdered, ect.) If the answer is yes, then they believe in 'pacifism for me, but not for you' which is far far more common of a position than actual pacifism. Likewise, ask yourself if the pacifist community has put itself in a position where its existance depends implicitly or even explicitly on non-pacifists protecting it. An example of this would be various caste systems, whether in medevial europe or India where the high caste 'pacifists' depend on 'lesser honorable' castes for protection and legal enforcement. In any event, the upshot of this is regardless of the focus of the game, if the topics explored in it are serious enough, the game will probably eventually feature a choice between violence and non-violence and most players will probably at some point regardless of their beliefs feel compelled to resort to violence.
My little ones are natural RPers. They'll sit and play informal roleplaying games with each other for hours. Usually what they are playing bores me to tears. I can't play with them for more than 5 or 10 minutes because the scale of the conflict is so petty. They RP 'where they are at' regardless of setting, and so conflict in their games revolves around whether or not a character is using good table manners, whether or not a character is sharing the toys, and who gets to take a turn at some occupation. The extent of the violence being played usually quite appropriately to the scale involves nothing more than scolding the naughty character. They play what ammounts to a rotating GM structure, and after a little coaching quickly grasped proposition/response structure, and the separation that prevents a GM from taking control of another player's primary character (afterwhich the number of metagame conflicts drastically decreased). As far as I can tell they play in an unstructured improvisational sandbox with no metagoals other than absorbing themselves in the moment. It's quite engrossing to them, but not particularly engrossing to me yet (though its getting there).
However, even they don't play a game that is fully without violence and killing. Sometimes naughty characters break the rules and find themselves killed. Sometimes naughty characters commit murder and have to be hunted down and put in jail. Some of the heroes are effectively 'anti-heroes' who are swift to punish naughty characters with instant death. This doesn't serve to make the game any more interesting for me, but does suggest that as there game play evolves into more mature games and as they start to find the need (or at least intellectual ability) for more formal game structures that the resulting games will feature at least some violance and killing.
Last edited:
Give Wraith: the Oblivion a shot.
The titular characters are ghosts trapped in the Underworld. They must struggle against their urge for self-destruction ("Oblivion"), each wraith character has a shadow that impels them towards utter annihilation. If a character engages in acts of destruction, they empower their shadow and spiral downward into Oblivion much more quickly. Not only that, but it's actually sort of difficult to "kill" a ghost--if you discorporate a centurion that's chasing you down, chances are, he'll be back in a few weeks with a much bigger or otherwise more dangerous posse to take you into custody. There's the "stick" to avoid combat. You keep hurting other people, and eventually, your shadow will be strong enough to make you plunge headfirst into Oblivion. In the Underworld setting of the game, "killing" other ghosts gets you socially outcast as well... And in the Underworld, you can't survive long without friends of some sort.
Wraiths also have passions and fetters, which are the purposes and physical things that tie them to the living world. For example, a character may be motivated to care for his wife from beyond the grave. He might have a passion to Care for His Wife (Love) and have her or their wedding bands as fetters. Your passions are the big thing that allows you access to your supernatural powers as a ghost, because in this setting, they survive on emotional energy. Fetters have various benefits, including being a safe place to recover and making it easier to cross the Shroud that separates the worlds of the living and the dead. There's the "carrot" to avoid combat. Characters are rewarded for tying up various story-based elements related directly to the character's background and motivations, not for killing things.
In 20+ years of gaming, I've never seen a game that ties character background and motivation so concretely to the character's abilities in the game. It's absolutely brilliant and quite possibly my favorite RPG ever. I heartily encourage you to give it a look.
I will warn you, however... Wraith isn't terribly popular with many players for many of the reasons above. I've had little luck getting D&D players to try Wraith, partially for the perception that their character has already "lost" on the basis of being dead to begin with. I don't understand that, but I've heard it several times. Many people also don't enjoy actually designing characters (from a narrative standpoint, that is), asking people to describe a character's emotional complexities usually elicits blank stares or derisive statements about "artsy" games. There's also the bleakness and tension of the setting. A character either ties up his loose ends and passes on or is dragged down into utter destruction. Not everyone enjoys powerful drama or the depressing nature of playing a ghost.
Celebrim
Legend
I love the design of WtO as well, but I also consider it basicly unplayable. About the only way to play the game as intended is to play with one player and one DM.
Which raises a point which I should have raised earlier, and that's that the more focused the game is on exploration of character, the more difficult it is to make it a game with equal participation by all involved. In a game that's about overt violent conflict, it's very easy to keep everyone participating equally all the time. But in a game that's about social conflict, exploration, investigation, and exploration of character, there are typically very long stretches where one player is the only one engaged in the scene. It's very hard to have a game that's primarily about internal conflicts within a character that features 4-6 primary characters that share equal time. This is one of the things that distinguishes an RPG from a novel. RPGs are social games. They don't have 'a protagonist'; rather they have a whole team of protagonists who must share screen time and relevance. It's easier to do that with violent conflict than just about anything else. Very deep conversations tends to run towards long monologues being exchanged. Very intimate conversations tend to break up into exchanges between two characters. Investigations tend to become focused on the specialists in a particular skill or area of knowledge, and in diplomatic situations the weak link is better off simply not participating. But everyone - even the weak link - can involve themselves in and contribute to a battle in some fashion especially if you use traditional ablative hit points as markers in the battle.
It's possible to have a game that isn't about violence, but the more players you have the more they have to be willing to intimately RP with each other, the more skilled they have to be at impromtu theater, and the more willing and able they have to be to enjoy watching other people role play rather than actively participating all the time. Intimate exploration tends to make most people uncomfortable when its done face to face. Most people get bored watching some one else play a game. And not everyone is capable of, much less enjoys, a pure theater game.
DrunkonDuty
he/him
Put me in the "you and your group have fundamentally different wants from your gaming experience" camp. It's a shame. But chat with them and see if there's some middle ground you guys can meet on. And do offer suggestions for ways to fix the problem. There's other systems, genres, mission types to be had, as suggested by folks above.
Also, one question. Do you think that as a GM you are giving the players enough of what they want? For instance was that poor old in keeper decapitated because the players just wanted to go find a dungeon and kill stuff there but got fed up waiting?
As to my thoughts on why are so many games orientated around killing (And taking stuff. Don't forget taking stuff.) is because this is the way the game has been played since it's inception and the literature that inspires it. Gaming has developed a culture of it. And yes, it's a "boy thing" too. Boy games usually involve physical conflict on some level. There are games that very deliberately try to break out of this culture, many good ones have already been suggested. But I'd say that the dominant culture is still one of slaying the evil hordes.
Most gamers go through stages of what they want out of a game. In my early days all I wanted was to kill things and take their stuff, usually while emulating a favourite character from a book/movie. I even occasionally had my 'let's just kill everything that moves' moments. Not too many, and usually as a expression of frustration at a game that was moving too slowly/not what I wanted in terms of style. That's why I asked about that above.
I have slowly changed what I want over the years. Nowadays I like a good RP session just as much, maybe more than, a good combat session. I loves me some political intriguing. I'll even do a little romance, not too much.
Re. system. System does not dictate style. But it does inform and encourage certain styles. A system with elaborate rules for car chases will get car chases. Partly because it attracts players who want car chases, partly because it will encourage car chases. But you can still do romance in DnD and murderous combat in Call of Cthulu.* The system may not provide an elegant solution; the style may go against player expectations, but you can do it.
Oh and XP you. It's an interesting question. Given me much thinking fodder.
cheers.
*do not do Romance in Call of Cthulu. Too many tentacles.
Also, one question. Do you think that as a GM you are giving the players enough of what they want? For instance was that poor old in keeper decapitated because the players just wanted to go find a dungeon and kill stuff there but got fed up waiting?
As to my thoughts on why are so many games orientated around killing (And taking stuff. Don't forget taking stuff.) is because this is the way the game has been played since it's inception and the literature that inspires it. Gaming has developed a culture of it. And yes, it's a "boy thing" too. Boy games usually involve physical conflict on some level. There are games that very deliberately try to break out of this culture, many good ones have already been suggested. But I'd say that the dominant culture is still one of slaying the evil hordes.
Most gamers go through stages of what they want out of a game. In my early days all I wanted was to kill things and take their stuff, usually while emulating a favourite character from a book/movie. I even occasionally had my 'let's just kill everything that moves' moments. Not too many, and usually as a expression of frustration at a game that was moving too slowly/not what I wanted in terms of style. That's why I asked about that above.
I have slowly changed what I want over the years. Nowadays I like a good RP session just as much, maybe more than, a good combat session. I loves me some political intriguing. I'll even do a little romance, not too much.
Re. system. System does not dictate style. But it does inform and encourage certain styles. A system with elaborate rules for car chases will get car chases. Partly because it attracts players who want car chases, partly because it will encourage car chases. But you can still do romance in DnD and murderous combat in Call of Cthulu.* The system may not provide an elegant solution; the style may go against player expectations, but you can do it.
Oh and XP you. It's an interesting question. Given me much thinking fodder.
cheers.
*do not do Romance in Call of Cthulu. Too many tentacles.
