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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7619052" data-attributes="member: 4937">Briefly, combat has a unique combination of elements that makes it a suitable focus for social gaming.1) It's a team activity where all participants can make meaningful decisions.2) It is a conflict that has a clear problem to solve.3) Progress toward that problem can be easily observed and measured.4) The progress toward that problem is uniquely dynamic, giving all participants an opportunity to imagine something visceral and exciting.  Almost nothing else shares these features.  Even sports are simply attempts to codify combat in ways that reduce the chance the parties hurt each other.  One could imagine an RPG revolving around a team sport in the same way that movies can revolve around a team sport, but then the conflicts involved don't clearly mean anything or resolve anything and it's notable that almost all sports movies aren't actually team movies, but movies about the Great Coach or the Underdog Player and everyone else is pretty much an NPC.  The conflict is generally over how a single individual proves himself through sports, and it's that inspiring figures choices that really matter.There are other sorts of conflicts that can be fun, but they have a tendency to not involve equal cooperation from all party members unless they are carefully contrived.   In fact, most of them involve only a central core character that is being helped by at most a supporting cast in a non-dynamic way.  I've really just never seen a table top RPG do non-combat puzzles involving collective effort in a consistently interesting manner, because the choices involved in the participants are too granular to effectively run in an RPG.   You can do it in a cRPG, but cRPG's allow for more visceral action - think about how a 'match three' type game always involves choices and immediate sensory feedback.   Too many RPGs that want to have as a focus of play something other than combat, really only work with two or at most three participants because they lack a way to really share spotlight.   They also tend to have fortune checks that resolve conflicts without meaningful choices, leaving the player mostly an observer of the game and with little role but to take stage direction from the dice and the story-teller.  And you can't really do internal exploration of character with six or eight or twelve players huddled at a table (although you might could split them up among 3 or 4 tables each doing their separate RP).  In short, while I get bored with a game that has nothing but combat in it, and especially if the combat seems to be just a linear sequence of on the rails staged set pieces, I suspect that if it was more than just a couple of players I'd get bored without it as well.So now that I've answered, "Why combat?", I think the answer to "Why violence?" is pretty obvious.   As for the particular thing that is triggering you, well, good.   We hit that trigger at age 15 in a homebrew module where the PC's got to the back of the cave after slaughtering the hobgoblin bandits, and found hobgoblin women and children huddled in the back of the cave.   Now what?  Things got real.   We suffered our actual first moral dilemma.  That realization marked one of the most salient points where I can remember my approach to the game becoming more mature.   It would have worked exactly the same with human bandits I think, only if anything the question got sharper and more pointed with apparent monsters, because there really was no hope that my players could see at the time of assimilating the survivors (and had they tried, that in itself would have been a moral dilemma).   So, yeah, I don't play up the violence and revel in it, but I learned then not to play it down either.   It's more grown up to really think about the violence as consequential.  Even so, my 13 and 14 year old players when going through B2 didn't slaughter noncombatants.  They generally let anything that didn't attack them flee.  At the time, none of us really thought about the consequences of it. The closest I can remember in my young play getting 'murder hobo-y' was playing Gamma World.  I had this mutant gorilla named Koko, and we were for some reason in this village of bat people.  There was this plaster statue in the town square and I decided that the plaster must be hiding some sort of treasure, and broke a piece off to check (also I was bored, the young GM wan't that great).  The bat folk, who I suppose weren't a bad sort, decided I'd committed sacrilege and proceeded to attack us.  A mass slaughter of many of the otherwise innocent bat folk followed.  We were clearly in the wrong and we knew it even then.  But, what are you going to do after, "I'm sorry."  doesn't cut it? None of the bat people represented any sort of real world ethnic group.  Nor was my choice of playing a mutant gorilla meant to represent some sort of real world ethnic group.   Nor was the conflict that arose between the party and the bat people any sort of colonialist narrative.  I'm sure you could create some sort of interpretation in that direction, but to be quite frank, it would be BS and any sort of scholarly method that was that divorced from the intentions and thoughts of the participants would be anti-intellectual to the point of insanity because you would learn less than you started out knowing to engage in such analysis.  Some times a pen is just a pen.   Sometimes a sword is just a sword.  And sometimes an orc is just an orc.  Persistently seeing a sword or a pen as a symbol, or persistently seeing minority groups in every monstrous alien thing you meet tells me more about you than it does about anything else.</blockquote>

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