Sunday 4 January 2015

In Defence of Violence

"[T]he younger Haldane found the First World War 'a very enjoyable experience' and freely admitted that he 'enjoyed the opportunity of killing people'."
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

"I think for those who are in combat, it very swiftly can become an addiction. In every conflict that I have covered, you reach a point — and I think I reached this point in,certainly in El Salvador — where you feel that it’s better to live for one intoxicating, empowering moment than ever to go back to that kind of dull routine of daily life. And if your own death is the cost of that, then that’s a cost you are willing to accept."
-Chris Hedges

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
-Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War 

"'I think typical [Japanese applicants to the French Foreign Legion] are those who, like Saito, had experience in the (GSDF) airborne unit and wanted to experience a real battlefield,' Hatanaka said.
Asked what his reason was for joining the legion, Hatanaka said he wanted stimulation in his life. 'I probably wanted to experience something like a war,' he said."
-"Saito just one of many in Japanese in French Foreign Legion", Japan Times, May 12, 2005


I am not a violent person, and I don't generally believe that violence is a good thing - I even moreso don't believe that war is a good thing. However, as somebody with a little bit of experience of full-contact bare-fisted sparring, I can personally attest that being hit very hard is fun, the feeling of euphoria afterwards is addictive, and having a body covered in bruises makes you feel fantastic. So while it would be pretty embarrassing to mention myself in the same sentence as a professional boxer, say, let alone a soldier who has fought in a war, I can stretch my imagination sufficiently to envisage how somebody could come to enjoy and even crave violence. Not because of sadism, but rather the opposite: the sheer rush you get from putting your personal safety on the line. I find the thought fascinating.

And I also believe that violence and war in RPGs are good things, because they are enjoyable, challenging, exhilerating, and never fail to expedite something interesting. They're one of the only occasions in any game where the players actually feel that slight rush of adrenaline because their character may die, combined with an opportunity to think tactically and carefully about their environment. It's a combination of mental challenge and excitement that is hard to beat. When lives are on the line, even fictional ones, things matter.

In the last couple of days I've come across a few comments here and there on blogs and G+ arguing that violence in RPGs is a bad thing or to be discouraged. I wish I could remember where; at the moment I only have this post bookmarked:

"The problem is that real violence usually creates more problems than it solves. Even if a person or group of people seems evil, using violence against them is rarely a good option. There’s a little thing called the cycle of violence, showing that when two groups are in conflict, violence from one side always leads to violence from the other."

I tend to take the view that all the usual arguments - violence causes more problems, it is rarely the best option, it perpetuates a cycle of violence, it is often morally repugnant, it has bad and unforeseen consequences - are absolutely correct, but that's why it's so interesting. Isn't that what any RPG campaign should aspire to? The DM thinking carefully about the consequences of fights, making sure they come back to bite the PCs in a believable way, playing out foreseeable cycles of violence, providing other options and having the players make difficult choices? Isn't that one of the things that makes a D&D campaign good? The way to deal correctly with violence in an RPG is to try as closely as possible to make it like real life, to make it matter, so that sweet spot of challenge and excitement is hit right on the nose. Not to try to jury rig things to avoid it.

27 comments:

  1. I would suggest that what you are discussing in the above article could be better described as "combat", the abstract rules required to lift an RPG session above the level of "lets pretend", instals a social contract between the participants and providing the DM/GM with an in-game disclaimer: "I didn't kill your PC. We followed the combat rules properly and the orcs killed him fair and square"

    .....violence on the other hand, the deliberate application of pain and suffering in circumstances (albeit fictional, pretend circumstances) where it is only one of many choices (as befits an RPG) , is something I always find disturbing and challange the player to reconsider.

    I really don't want people that unimaginative or to encourage a level of casual cruelty in play at my table.

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    1. That presupposes the motive for engaging in violence is cruelty. What I was trying to suggest in the first half of the article is that the motive for engaging in violence may be more like masochism, or something related to it. The excitement that comes from danger of pain, suffering, and death.

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    2. Oh, I'm not suggesting that in-game combat isn't or shouldn't be exciting but I am of the opinion that the the level of excitment in an RPG combat session doesn't come from a desire to inflict or suffer violence.

      I believe it comes from the level of investment in the characters/game/world that the players bring to the table COMBINED with the anticipation that simulated combat, through a mixture of choice and chance (not unlike gambling), will either end in success and reward OR loss and ruin.

      PS - I'm the 05:44 Anon guy, not the 05:55 guy!

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    3. Well then, we're of the same mind!

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    4. Although I'll also add that there's another layer - the challenge of pitting your wits against somebody else, which is the main enjoyment of war games as well as, well, any game you care to mention, really.

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  2. Sex and violence are the only two things mankind finds the slightest bit interesting. (A cursory glance at art and entertainment will tell you that.)

    The halfwits who are arguing for non-violent RPGs should put their money where their mouth is and write a non-violent module as proof of concept. (Lemonade? ...Please!)

    I expect their "action free" style will get its face stomped in by "action packed".

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    1. Pretty much. Although there is quite a large subcurrent of people in the nerdosphere who seem hell-bent on making everything completely anodyne, so who knows? Such a game might find its audience.

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    2. Now there's an irony. That the creation of "non-violent" RPGS are a THREAT to the hobby. :)

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    3. Well, there are specifically non-violent RPGs out there. Golden Sky Stories is an example. However, the settings and genres represented in the game are stuff like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, not medieval sword and sorcery.

      I don't think all RPGs should be non-violent, but I like when RPGs branch out into other genres besides medieval or sci-fi action. Making a non-violent medieval fantasy game seems stupid though, because it ignores the conflicts inherent in those types of settings. Genres shouldn't be sanitized for political correctness. You can't really examine new ideas if you are only ever allowed to look through one lens.

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    4. Sure - I don't disagree with that at all. I think if you are making a horror game all about combat, for example, you are probably making a category error. Shooting star-spawn of Cthulhu with shotguns is undoubtedly fun, but a bit like using a tractor to commute to work. The tool could be put to so much better use.

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  3. Just another example of how a "good" outcome is often the direct opposite of an "interesting, fun, and exciting" outcome.

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  4. Any suggestions on how to deal with the purely moral / psychological consequences in a game without an alignment system?

    To take the example from the linked article, in a Shadowrun game where a job gone wrong results in bystander casualties, the direct in-game consequences might be that the people who hired you aren't happy because of the heat that your stuff-up caused, never mind any impact from law enforcement, etc., but what about the "actually, you're a becoming a sociopath" side of things, without being heavy handed about it?

    I agree with your points about why violence in rpgs is a good thing but I also agree with the linked article that, setting aside the direct in-game consequences, the death of the dead security goons (i.e. those that are "in the way", but not dismissable as "other") from a moral / psychological angle tends to not get much focus.

    I know this isn't really about that linked article, but also I think it's an important point that one difference between rpgs and real life is there is often a genuine "other" - I'm not talking about orc babies here but zombies, manticores or whatever - the PCs may suffer trauma from the actual fight there's no moral angle to their violence.

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    1. I think a key sentence in this article is the Churchill quote, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.", since it should be quite clear even to someone like myself who's never been shot that nothing is possibly LESS exhilarating as having a high velocity object penetrate my body.

      Also, you describe both the thrill of bare knuckle sparing (which I don't doubt) and the need "to deal correctly with violence in an RPG is to try as closely as possible to make it like real life, to make it matter," The difference being that both an RPG and boxing are refereed events were (properly managed) no harm (or at least no serious harm) is inflicted. An intertest in "real life" violence usually ends when someone is on the receiving end of a good bashing.

      I would suggest that anyone who seriously thinks that a non-violent RPG game is a fun killer, should run a session were any act of direct violence by the PCs ends the session as a test to player ingenuity. So who do you end a bar fight without smashing heads with a bar stool? Get the blood and tears of a virgin child for the wizard's potion? Chase away a tribe of orcs on their way to the village?

      AND it wouldn't have to be all PC or kid friendly either. A murder inquiry? A stake out? A criminal investigation? A game of Cthulhu Dark were "If you fight any creature you meet, you will die."

      05:44

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    2. The point I believe he was making about trying to "make it like real life, to make it matter" was that violence in RPGs should have consequences. If you are a good GM, most everything your player characters do should have consequences, but certainly something as impactful as violent conflict should have fallout. Like in real life, violence may leave lasting wounds, break bonds, destroy alliances, invite retaliation, etc. By applying reasonable consequences, the players are more invested in the choices they make in the game, including when to fight and when to choose other alternatives.

      While there may be some PC police, I think the thing most people are bothered about when they say there is too much combat in an RPG is that the game is boring. Either the game is reduced to just a combat simulation, in which case you might as well be playing a video game. If your whole game is just moving pieces, rolling to hit, rolling for damage, what is the point of playing with other people. A computer game can do all those things better and with cool graphics. Or, the GM is just bad at setting building and scene structure, so all of the scenes are combat and none of it is meaningful. Oh look, more kobolds. What are they doing here? Why are we fighting them? Whatever, just kill them and take your XP. What is there to explore? It's another empty and this time there are goblins.

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    3. What warlock69 said. A good DM is going to run combat so there are consequences. The consequences shouldn't be contrived simply to fuck the players over, but nor should the DM simply let the players off the hook for doing things that would clearly have real-world effects. As Paul suggested, this will often simply be - well, what do the police say about all this?

      But to answer Paul's point about the sociopathy, I'm not a great believer in creating rules to model that. I think often the realisation that your character is behaving like a sociopath, and guilt associated with it, will emerge through play. I've seen that phenomenon happen fairly regularly. One example that leaps to mind was in a fairly long-running Cyberpunk 2020 campaign I ran. In it, the players were hired to kidnap a female escort from a night club and deliver her to a certain "contact". They made a plan in intricate detail and spent a considerable amount of time and money setting everything up just right. The abduction went off without a hitch and they were able to get the target out of the club and into the clutches of their employers. Later on in the game, the woman's body turned up dead. And the players felt genuinely guilty about this. One of them even blogged about it - I wish I had the link - in which he mused about how his PC had done something genuinely immoral in a game.

      That's exactly the kind of thing I want players to be thinking about when I run a game. I think you can engender it by making things as realistic as you possibly can, not by creating some sort of system to model it.

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    4. That 2020 game rings a bell. Was it fellow blogger False Machine?

      0544

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    5. I think it was; I was in that game too, and we planned and planned and planned and everything came off without a hitch. We were properly ecstatic when it all worked up. It was the first time that had happened.

      And when the body turned up we really did think, "What have we done?"

      It was a great game.

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  5. I think part of the problem with games like Dungeons and Dragons is that violence tends to be the majority, if not the ONLY form of conflict. There are all manners of ways in which conflict can be put on the table and violence, because it has the most rules, is often the FIRST way that things get resolved. Now that's okay in most situations as well, goblins gotta be killed and all that, but in looking at bigger scenarios, violence should be the last method taken up, one that's taken up when everything else has failed because it's going to lead to a lot of people getting killed.

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    1. I agree, but that goes back to this idea of making sure that violence has reasonable consequences. If the players know that you're not just putting combat into the game for a chance for them to show off their PCs' skills, but it's simply a consequence of their actions with consequences of its own, they'll learn quickly enough that it's not the only solution.

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  6. Violence in D&D is so much fun for many becasue it isn't like real life, characters do not face the same consequences real people do from violence. I've never seen anyone play out PTSD for their character. No one worries about spending the rest of their life limping, or unable to chew their dinner; almost no one worries about the imaginary orphans of imaginary foes imaginarily dispatched. D&D combat will never be like real.combat and remain a fun game.

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    1. Yes, but getting it as close as possible to real combat combines interest and excitement with none of the downside.

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  7. There's also Moorcock's argument in "The Condition of Muzak" that fictional violence should be encouraged because it's preferable to real violence.

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    1. I haven't read it - I'm not a huge Moorcock fan. Something to do with working out one's urges in an imaginary format being preferable to doing it in reality?

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  8. Another heavy influence on how I have seen violent encounters perceived by players is through the chosen medium of Character Class.

    Broadly in the absence of alignment, Fighters approach violence as a measuring of skill with bragging rights and honour implicit rewards and this influences *when* they fight and can move them to fight for a lost cause.

    Ranger/Thief/Assassin types tend to view violence as a means to an end, and as a result have been seen to be more indifferent, callous and even wicked in their attitude to the violent encounter.

    The Magic user of course prefers to commit violence increasingly by indirection as he grows in stature, remotely if possible, and tends to be as morally isolated from the consequences as a Lancaster Bomber pilot.

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    1. Yes, I've noticed broadly the same things. Although you also get the reverse archetypes - the foolhardy magic-user always charging into a fight, etc.

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