Always with the killing

[Henry]

I'll put it this way:

I deal with non-violent resolution to problems put before me in my job, every day, without fail. I use my skills and problem-solving acumen as my first and only answer to the day-to-day issues, financial, technical, and ethical, that I face.

I'll be damned if I'm going to do the exact same thing on my day off.

 

[nedjer]

Okay, that's kind of cool, if it is accurate. However, looking at this:

ars ludi » Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games

I think this rather weakens the idea that military role playing roots implies violence in the game:

"He lied, swindled, improvised, and played his character to the hilt. He came to the game with fake CIA ID he’d mocked up, so when another player “captured” and searched him he could whip them out. Other players were still moving pieces around the board and issuing orders like a wargame while Dave Arneson was running circles around them and changing the whole scenario. He was winning the game entirely by roleplaying."

Dave seems to have immediately grasped the idea that you don't need to kill things to succeed in your RPG goals. The whole point seems to be that the military RP was violence-centric, but Dave chose to step away from that!

The guy was legend.

 

[nedjer]

I'll put it this way:

I deal with non-violent resolution to problems put before me in my job, every day, without fail. I use my skills and problem-solving acumen as my first and only answer to the day-to-day issues, financial, technical, and ethical, that I face.

I'll be damned if I'm going to do the exact same thing on my day off.

You sound like one of those rare bosses who gives a flying ?

Anyways round, all are likely to agree there ain't a 'right way', so please enjoy the +2 Battleaxe I'm sending in the post - but don't take it into work

 

[Celebrim]

Good points but Will work!

Ok. Present your argument...

Oh, I guess you did. Not a whole lot there.

There's not a whole hill of beans to support the 'born bad' or 'caveman conflict' primes violence interpretations.

There's a stack of evidence to suggest authoritarian parenting, toxic social environments and custodial governance sponsor conformist expressions of violence.

Errr... that's a red herring. That's easily demonstrated because even if we accept that to be true, it doesn't refute what I said. For example, I never held that the motivations that led one to violent behavior in a real world were exactly the same as those that would lead to violent behavior in a game. Secondly, to the extent that there is an relevant argument buried in there, it sounds political to me and hense I can't address it here.

Doug's points won't stop combat, (which is IMO good), but they can make it more varied, more subtle and more 'meaningful' than monster-bashing.

Moving goal posts. I at no point argued that or with the idea that games could have different, more varied, more subtle, or more meaningful combat and killing.

Boys don't have to be boys; they can, occasionally, have a go at being men

Ad hominem, and you probably know it, because that's the easiest explanation for the 'angel' appending your comment. This implies that people who play games with lot of violence are immature. I was making no such judgment, and don't think that I could make such a blanket judgment.

 

[S'mon]

I'll put it this way:

I deal with non-violent resolution to problems put before me in my job, every day, without fail. I use my skills and problem-solving acumen as my first and only answer to the day-to-day issues, financial, technical, and ethical, that I face.

I'll be damned if I'm going to do the exact same thing on my day off.

I agree, but after umpteen violent encounters I do get a big thrill out of a non-violent resolution to a D&D encounter, whether I'm playing or GMing. I love it when the Cleric PC in my 3.5 game converts the Goblins over to worship of the Unconquered Sun, or negotiates a hostage handover and subsequent peace treaty with the Duergar, or when NPC foes surrender and the PCs subsequently set them free.

 

[nedjer]

Ok. Present your argument...

Oh, I guess you did. Not a whole lot there.


Errr... that's a red herring. That's easily demonstrated because even if we accept that to be true, it doesn't refute what I said. For example, I never held that the motivations that led one to violent behavior in a real world were exactly the same as those that would lead to violent behavior in a game. Secondly, to the extent that there is an relevant argument buried in there, it sounds political to me and hense I can't address it here.


Moving goal posts. I at no point argued that or with the idea that games could have different, more varied, more subtle, or more meaningful combat and killing.


Ad hominem, and you probably know it, because that's the easiest explanation for the 'angel' appending your comment. This implies that people who play games with lot of violence are immature. I was making no such judgment, and don't think that I could make such a blanket judgment.

My case is Milgram's classic studies of conformity and the follow-ups, which is science; so that'd be devaluing my case and bodyswerving the issue by categorising it as political, with the aid of some nifty multi-quoting.

And the angel says I'm not taking this too seriously, please don't take it that way

 

[Stormonu]

Conflict forces things to happen in the game (including ignoring it). The ultimate expression of this is combat, and the ultimate expression of combat is to kill your opponent thus permanently removing any obstacles to your own success (well, though fantasy does introduce coming back via being raised from the dead...).

Roleplaying games tend to be about overcoming obstacles in your path to success. D&D has decided (over the years) that the primary method of dealing with foes is to kill them - though it could very easily be changed to a wide variety of options of removing opposition besides killing. As a matter of fact, the game punished you for finding other ways to defeat foes other than "killing" them - penalties to attacks for subduing instead of killing, less or no XP for "easy" encounters or bypassing encounters, etc. - though, slowly, with each edition it's been getting better about using alternate means to defeat opposition and still getting full rewards.

As a side note, I found myself corrected after commenting to my son how he'd killed the enemy Pokemon in his game, that the enemy had fainted.

 

[frankthedm]

I've has about three different groups so far in my DMing time. All of them had the same thing in common: they loved killing things. It wasn't just, "let kill the monsters and take the loot." It really became killing just to kill things.

Maybe I'm just a little crazy. I've considered this many times. And i know the game isn't real, but I still don't like having the things that I create be brutally murdered just because, even if they are imaginary, and i do make the NPC's of my world...and all the other stuff.

Sounds like the groups would have been been happy starting at the dungeon entrance. With trips to town being summarized as "You return to town, selling any loot for half its value. Deduct 1 gp per day spent in town to rest and heal. You then arrive back at the dungeon entrance."

 

[Banshee16]

I suspect part of it has to do with a certain level of wish fulfillment.

I had read an article talking about the falling crime rate in Canada. One of the things the article mentioned is that with an aging population, it means we have fewer young males between 15 and 25. As such, crime rates drop, as that demographic is supposedly responsible for the majority of crime.

The chief demographic of customers for RPGs is males, I believe. That's not to say that females don't play RPGs. They do....but I don't think in the same kinds of numbers.

It's entirely possible that RPGs give vent to the kind of action, violence, and hero culture type fantasies that might entertain males. Look at many D&D games, and when it comes down to it, many of the games involve adventurers behaving badly. Sure, they're serving the side of good...but they do so as vigilantes in many cases, and in means which would be completely unacceptable in modern society.

What if RPGs deal with topics like violence and action and war etc. because that's what the chief demographic likes? And the chief demographic likes it because it's an interesting way to do thing which we're just not permitted to in reality. It could be a form of catharsis. Most of the gamers I've known have been pretty harmless, and not interested in getting into trouble in real life. Frankly, I know that gaming helped keep me out of trouble when I was younger. Or, that I was the kind of person unlikely to get into trouble, and as such, gaming provided a safe outlet for my time. Take your pick, I guess.

All that having been said, I'm by no means claiming that violence in RPGs dictates violence in reality. But I think sometimes, the fact that you *can* have a violent resolution to a problem, and kick the bully's (orc's) butt without anyone actually getting hurt, has a certain appeal. In real life, I'm nonviolent. The closest I've come to a fight was like 15 years ago, where several guys in a bar decided they wanted to use my girlfriend as their toy for the evening. When I said something about it, they decided they wanted to flatten me into a pancake and take her. I got her out of there, I put myself in the way, and got us to safety via a passing cab. The alternative, when it was 3 to 1 odds, and each of them was larger than I, was a nasty fight that could have the real consequences of my ending up dead or severely injured in a hospital, and my girlfriend undergoing a pretty horrendous assault. I also had an acquaintance who claimed to have been attacked by a guy with a knife. My acquaintance was a black belt in Tae Kwan Do or Jiu Jitsu, and broke the man's arm in self-defense. Yet from what I remember he ended up in trouble with the police over it. In a fantasy RPG, you can show monsters the error of their ways in a manner in which nobody is hurt, and there's a certain amount of fun in that.

The final thing I'd say is that every group of gamers differs. I suspect that for some, the violence aspect is their main interest. For others, they like the personal interaction. I've had some players who were only really *into* the game when it involved killing things. When the action scenes were over, they'd walk away from the table and go play WoW on their laptop. And I've had other players who didn't mind sessions where there was no killing. They liked dealing with mysteries, politics, environmental challenges (rescuing NPCs from burning buildings...) etc.

Banshee

 

[Aldarc]

IME, this doesn't work well. There's always a clever player who knows how to cover up. It just teaches players to be stealthy.

In fact, as a d20 Modern GM, I read up a bunch of homicide books to learn to trip them up (but only when they "misbehaved", as I didn't want to stop them from killing mafiosi, etc), but if I were a PC, I'd use what I'd learn there to hide the violence.

I guess I'm saying, there's little consequence if the authorities don't know the PCs did it. Even worse in DnD than in Modern; they don't have CSI and there's no bodies to use Speak with Dead on due to immolation of enemy corpses.

I somehow doubt that Clarabell will have a similar problem when her players parade the slain innkeeper's head on a stick around town. I would say that if the players continue with similar evil acts, then they will likely be attracting the attention of evil powers. Acts have consequences. And while they may believe themselves to be the "good guys," Clarabell could send the message to the players that their actions are aligning closer with those of evil. Suddenly the players find themselves as the pawns of tyrannical warlords, who help protect them from the town guards, or even a devil in disguise.