D&D General Violent Solutions to Peaceful Problems

[Ruin Explorer]

The important thing is ruining the game, possibly the campaign and friendships to 'teach' grow folks a lesson.

Seriously though right? I will never understand this "teach people a lesson" nonsense. Aren't people here to chew bubblegum and kick ass? Or some rearrangement of those words?

As for players choosing violence, my experience is it's rarely them "choosing Evil", more often then choosing to act in a way that would be "socially inappropriate" but is still broadly Good/Neutral, and as others have said, if people were as super-powered as D&D PCs are, this would happen all the time. Yeah, there can be consequences, but just trying to turn everything into a giant downer because the PCs decided to kick their way into the prison holding the prince rather than choosing subtlety and socially-acceptable negotiation isn't really likely to be fun or particularly interesting.

Do you imagine there's some kind of range between "realistic facsimile of people" and "nondimensional cardboard cutouts" or "dumb action beer and pretzels game" and a game with "emotionally realistic human characters?"

I feel like a lot of action movies and so on are kind of all this at once. Die Hard being a prime example. There are characters who are cardboard cutouts (sleazy cocaine guy), there are characters who are two-dimensional (Hans Gruber), there are characters who surprisingly plausible humans (McClaine in the first movie only), and it's both a dumb action movie and features some emotional realism not seen in action movies/thrillers popularly regarded as less dumb (like, say, Zero Dark Thirty).

Likewise I think tabletop RPGs often contain all of this at once.

 

[Lanefan]

As for players choosing violence, my experience is it's rarely them "choosing Evil", more often then choosing to act in a way that would be "socially inappropriate" but is still broadly Good/Neutral, and as others have said, if people were as super-powered as D&D PCs are, this would happen all the time.

Look no further than the MCU and the reasons behind Civil War for an example of how this can affect a team (and also lead to some interesting plot and good roleplay).

Yeah, there can be consequences, but just trying to turn everything into a giant downer because the PCs decided to kick their way into the prison holding the prince rather than choosing subtlety and socially-acceptable negotiation isn't really likely to be fun or particularly interesting.

Agreed.