Always with the killing

[nedjer]

The recent thread Bloodthirsty PCs covers a related topic.

I think it's the system, expectations and the game world setup making the players violent. In the real world, most people aren't violent because they like it, they are violent because they think it will get results. It will achieve their ends faster and better than any other means.

To get them to stop being violent, one the best methods would be to stop letting it work. Essentially, every time the PCs start a fight, they lose. However this could cause a lot of friction if the players have already been 'trained' to think otherwise.

The reasons, in D&D, are imo:
1) Extensive rules for combat, making it seem like an expected activity.
2) It's all, or mostly, what the PCs are good at.
3) XP for killing.
4) Violence works. The PCs kill something and they get everything they want - xp, gold and magic items.
5) Lawless setting, like the Old West.

Change some, or all, of these factors, as Call of Cthulhu does and one will see less violence.

There's a post that does what it says on the tin Reward missions/ challenges/ subtlety instead of violence; add consequences and, if it's 4e, move the roleplaying section in DMG 2 to the front of DMG 1

 

[Celebrim]

There's a post that does what it says on the tin Reward missions/ challenges/ subtlety instead of violence; add consequences and, if it's 4e, move the roleplaying section in DMG 2 to the front of DMG 1

Won't work.

Of McRae's 4 points, only one is necessary to make the case, and it's the one you can't do anything about.

1) "Extensive rules for combat, making it seem like an expected activity.":

This may be true, but even if it was false, it wouldn't be sufficient to change anything. Besides, its exactly backwards. RPG's tend to have extensive rules for combat because it is an expected activity. RPG's don't have combat as the expected activity merely because there are extensive rules. This is a subtle distinction, but its an important one. Combat is the expected activity because the precursors to formal RPG's feature combat. I'm not talking about merely the war games that were the formal precursors of D&D, but the entire attitude of role-playing and of play in general is about combat. Before RPG's, I played cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, spacemen and aliens, and pirates. When I wasn't shooting something, I was whacking at it with a stick or cane pole that stood in for a sword. The sword games were easy. You knew who was dead by who got whacked with the stick. On the other hand, they weren't safe. The shooting games were much safer, but you couldn't tell who was winning and there were often frequent metagame arguments like, "BANG! I shot you! No you didn't, you missed. BANG! I shot you again. No, I dodged. BANG! I shot you." RPG's formalize a structure for resolving the typical conflicts of role-playing. The reason you have extensive rules for combat is that its only at combat that you really need extensive rules. For non-combat roleplaying, consensus and sense of the individual players is generally enough to resolve conflict. You don't need rules for talking. It's acceptable and possibly even highly desirable to simply allow each player to decide how they respond.

2) "It's all, or mostly, what the PCs are good at."

But even if this isn't true, it doesn't mean that the game won't be about killing. Besides which, it's not even true. Quite arguably, even in 1e, the general sense you would have about the starting characters were you not expecting combat is that if it did happen only the fighter is any good at it and even he's not that good as a single hit is likely to leave him dead. The vast majority of the characters abilities and assumptions about those abilities would not be about combat, and a person without a combat assumption bias would look at the 1st level spell list and see that the combat spells were quite weak but that the non-combat spells have apparantly extraordinary and indeed world changing utility. Clearly, this is not a combat game.

Likewise, without the bias in favor of combat, a player looking at the rules of 3e would see that gain skill at combat is hard, but that its quite possible to have extraordinary even supernatural skill outside of combat at relatively low levels. Clearly this isn't a combat game either, as combat is discouraged by the rules!

And this is to say nothing of games like GURPs or others where the list of non-combat abilities vastly exceeds the list of combat abilities. Yet, these game remain largely about the killing and the vast majority of rules concern combat.

3) "XP for killing."

But in every edition of the game, you've got XP for other things as well. In 1e, the XP you got for killing was for most campaigns a tiny fraction of that recieved for hauling off valuables. Quite obviously, by this logic then, 1e was an archeology game and killing things was intended to be a minor part of it. Likewise, in 3e you don't get XP for killing things - you get XP for overcoming obstacles. If there was a bias toward killing things, it therefore had to be introduced because you could just as easily set up adventures where every obstacle was diplomatic or social and you could have given out just as much XP.

Moreover, this doesn't address the large number of games that don't give XP for killing, and yet which still manage to be about killing things.

5) "Lawless setting, like the Old West."

But this is certainly not universally true. And more importantly, even when it isn't true, the fact that it isnt' true doesn't make the game less about killing. You can play in a setting that is the opposite of lawless - some tightly regimented police state - and yet don't be surprised if killing of some sort breaks out in short order.

4) "Violence works."

This is in and of itself sufficient to explain the presence of violence regardless of setting or system. The problem here is inescable. Violence solves everything. This is the reason humans resort to it. Violence is the cutter of gordian knots. Violence is the hammer in the tool chest. The only way to prevent violence in a game session is to present the characters with difficulties that can't be solved through acts of destruction, and inherently this cannot be done in a setting that features as its primary content conflict with monsters, villains, foils, and antagonists. In such a setting, destruction works. Sooner or latter, with enough destruction, the problem just goes away.

The problem that you are going to run into here is that its not merely, as Umbran intelligently and perceptively expounds, the desire to have conflicts that are different from those commonly experienced, but precisely this desire to confront problems that can be solved through acts of destruction that is the primary motivating force in interest in the setting. If you present people with a game setting that requires laborous acts of creation to resolve problems, most people are going to be terribly uninterested both with the concept and with the resulting gameplay. It's precisely this difference between the sorts of problems we normally encounter and the sorts of stresses that we normally experience that explains the attraction of violence in our games.

 

[Otterscrubber]

This has been bugging me for years not. It seems every game is focused around one thing: killing things. Every RPG that I can think either revolves around war and killing, or at least involves killing. In D&D its pretty much the same way. Always going around killing monsters and stuff and stealing their loot. Most fantasy books are the same way. It usually revolves around a war.

I’m just curious what your thoughts are on this. As I began to notice this, I thought, I'll build a campaign where they don't have to do that. Still give them the option if they want, but the story can be done doing skill checks, building things. Something other than just combat. Tried it many times now and it always ends up in them killing stuff. They'll just walk down a street and stab hobo's or something.

I think some games like Warhammerr 40k definitely revolve around killing, but D&D it's up to the DM and the players. My group has been moving away from dungeon crawls where all we do is fight after fight, and I've noticed we've been dong a lot more role playing. For the first time last week we actually had a whole session with not a single fight and it was a great gaming session.

This happened not so much from a big effort on our part, but our DM made a pretty cool plotline and there was so much planning and NPC interaction that we actually just didn't have time to get to the fights, which was fine by us. He actually had several fights in store for us, but our group decided to tackle the problems a little differently and he did a brilliant job of rolling along with our decisions and making a very fun session of us working out a political war and trying to stop it and at the same time make us look like good guys while we still made a lot of $$ and reputation by playing both sides of the conflict. None of it was planned but it worked out well.

Part of this was that our group made PCs with some background and long term campaign goals, the DM was aware of them, and also fleshed out a lot of NPC and NPC organizations for us to work with who also had their own goals. We spent the whole session trying to line up those goals so we all got what we wanted and was quite fun.

In another session, our DM (same one actually) bought a book of riddles and thought games. We spent the whole session trying to get past a guardian who would only let us pass if we were able to solve the puzzles. They were challenging and took us a couple of hours. We could have fought the guardian, but it was very tough and the outcome was far from certain. Classic choose your own adventure and we took the roleplay path rather then the roll-dice path. Don't get me wrong, there are times when we all agree that the next session is a fight fest cuz we need to use our shiny powers and we have done enough talking, but whether we fight or not is not necessarily dictated by the system itself.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

In terms of designing the campaign, I would recommend looking at the effects of killing someone. What sort of repercussions or punishments would the individual or party faced if they just killed someone? Arrest? Trial before a court or magistrate?

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.

 

[howandwhy99]

The early versions RPGs are probably more aptly named situational puzzle games (mostly cooperative) with the situation being a fictional or fantasy universe. In the 70s, what is commonly referred to now as roleplay simulation was understood as "real" roleplaying, which meant the performance and recognition of behavioral patterns used in fulfilling social roles. It was all about role theory.

As the military was the first institution in the U.S. to adopt this form of role playing and the RPG hobby branched out of wargaming the social role available in almost every game included a warrior role of some type. Add into this that most self-identifying gamers enjoy strategy (pattern finding) and winning (knowing enough of the underlying game pattern to puzzle solve it faster than others) and the desire to win combat may become clearer for you.

As others have probably said, if you want a game to be about something not being satisfied by your current system, then change systems. Desires competition and winning by including win/loss conditions are unlikely to go away soon as long as most people view patterns and games as such as real. For example, viewing olympic wrestling as "something different" than pro wrestling rather than the mostly unscripted theater both are.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

In the end most RPGs boil down to the desire to play a hero. The most basic way heroism is displayed is by challenging and defeating enemies.

Defeating virtual enemies in a game setting using a rule system can evoke very real feelings of success and accomplishment.

Compare that to the feeling you would get if you were presented with a virtual challenge to build a bridge across a river to rescue somebody. If the challenge were associated with real activities such as using straws, paper and tape to build a scale model of the bridge, you would likely walk away with similar feelings of success and accomplishment. On the other hand if you were presented with a list of skills to choose from and rolled dice to determine if you successfully built a bridge, most people would feel very little sense of accomplishment.

I believe that the difference is access to the activity. Most of us will never really challenge an enemy and defeat them in combat. Most of us will never really put ourselves in that kind of mortal danger. As a result our imagination takes over and allows us to accept the game system as a safe way to experience a tiny bit of something dangerous and thrilling without any real risk. By contrast, simulating safe, "routine" activities doesn't evoke much emotional response because we can more easily experience the true sense of accomplishment that comes with the actual activity.

The end result is that, when people play their games, they tend to want to do things they never, ever would be able to do in real life. Combat usually is pretty high on that list.

 

[Umbran]

As the military was the first institution in the U.S. to adopt this form of role playing and the RPG hobby branched out of wargaming the social role available in almost every game included a warrior role of some type.

I think the chain "the US military used something they called role-playing" to "minis wargaming" to RPGs as we know them today... seems pretty weak to me. I've never seen anyone demonstrate clear linkage between the role-adoption training and psychological exploration tool role-playing and Gygax and his crew, other than the name of the activity, so I am a bit skeptical.

Humans have been playing, "lets' pretend", Cops and Robbers type stuff for a lot longer than the US military has. Our RPGs would seem to have more of their roots in the child's activity than the soldier's, and the child's game is generally about violent resolution of conflicts.

 

[Nadaka]

One way to reduce killing but not necessarily conflict or even combat in a game is to have an effective law enforcement system in your game setting and make it very clear that they are competent.

In a modern game, there may be a focus on combat. But fighting it out in the city streets is a really bad idea when the cops can be on scene in minutes and can make use of modern forensic and surveillance techniques to identify and track down anyone involved in a violent crime. Sure, the PC's could "handle" a couple of beat cops, but then the All Points Bulletin gets issued for cop killers and the FBI/INTERPOL gets involved.

In such a setting, by necessity a focus on avoiding violence, or at least keeping it from escalating to lethality would become more viable options.

 

[MortonStromgal]

This has been bugging me for years not. It seems every game is focused around one thing: killing things. Every RPG that I can think either revolves around war and killing, or at least involves killing. In D&D its pretty much the same way. Always going around killing monsters and stuff and stealing their loot. Most fantasy books are the same way. It usually revolves around a war.

What RPGs have you played? I can see D&D (XP for killing stuff) maybe something like Shadowrun (it can happen but the cops will be on your bum) but Vampire, in the words of smiling jack "its the politics that will kill you" Once you get into indie games there are even more options. Unknown Armies even has a page dedicated to how not to get in a fight.

One time, it was an NPC i had a story for. He had a wife and a daughter, who was key to the story i had in mind. Players go in and I, speaking as the innkeeper, say something that pisses off the player. So he cuts his head off, mounts it on a stick and parades around town scaring everyone off. The rest of the player thought it was funny. I was very sad. I rather liked that innkeeper...

Sounds like you dont have real world consequences for their actions. The innkeeper may be a relative of a powerful underworld boss. Having the occasional thief follow and steal their stuff while leaving notes like "This is for my uncle you murdering pig dogs, I will make you pay and suffer a fate worse than death" is a good way to start. Just don't have it happen all the time, let them even kill a thief or two who was going to take their stuff, then bring in the whole thieves guild who wants to take them alive. You have the changes at a reoccurring BBEG here as they escape the theives dungeon only to then be houned by the law (the underworld boss turned politician) etc etc

 

[GregChristopher]

In the end most RPGs boil down to the desire to play a hero. The most basic way heroism is displayed is by challenging and defeating enemies.

Actually, thoughts like this are precisely the problem the OP struggles with.

Heroism is not about defeating enemies, it is about helping people.

Now you can make lots of things to threaten others, then call the people who destroy those things heroes. But the heroism lies in destroying the threat, not in the act of killing itself or the monty haul of loot you get as a result. Conflating the two issues is part of the problem the OP has.

Heroism (and his little brother Courage) is not about killing, but helping and doing the right thing. It is about overcoming your fears and living up to a higher purpose. Turning to your friend and saying, "no, you are being a racist/sexist/etc and that is wrong": that is Heroism right there. Doing the right thing when it would be soooo easy to do the wrong thing: that is heroism.

The game I designed actually has a Heroism attribute in it. It represents the degree of selflessness a person has. Not the amount of killing they do.