Waiting for Spaghetti, thinking about imaginary folks doing terrible things.
Today I saw @gherhartd working on an anti-violence manifesto for games. He said he intended it for the people he played with or for the imaginary designers of the games he’d like to play.
I am conflicted.
I used to be firmly in the camp of violence is fun precisely because my life and the lives of the people are around me appears practically free of violence.
Sure, there’s pressure to conform, pressure to work, pressure for school, grades and rules and expectations. Perhaps this is why I personally don’t like games about hopeless drudgery. That’s too close to home! I don’t want to play cyberpunk games because some days it seems we’re already half way into the dystopia.
There is hidden violence, too – domestic violence, all of that. I’m lucky, for sure. I haven’t heard or seen any of that in over thirty years.
At the same time, violence and character death are exciting because something real is at stake: the history of the player character, the time spent, the friends made, or if resurrection is always an option: the time we could have used to do something else that we now have to spend finding that holy person, the favours we’ll owe, basically a form of non-freedom, a temporary loss of autonomy at the very least.
Sure, other things can be at stake as well, but when we were younger, we knew that any friends we made would be put in danger in order to lead us into adventure: more non-freedom and loss of autonomy. We weren’t sophisticated enough at the time to have these characters – both our own and of the world – be interesting persons with goals and relations, networks, dreams.
So here then is a way forward: to emphasise the emotional wants. Romance, envy, lust, love, not just greed for gold but a hunger for power. I need to get better at this, too, both as a player and as a referee.
Another thing to consider is the trivialisation of violence. If hitting people with cutting implements takes away some hit-points, that definitely doesn’t feel terrible. Compare that the little death of save-or-die effects, of poison, of level drain, of death saves. That makes the blood boil! Hit-points and hit-point inflation definitely trivialise violence in that the things that would have terrible results in the real world are turned into cartoonish poof! poof! pew! pew! effects. You can argue that away, claiming that “to hit” doesn’t mean making contact and that it’s the “will to live” and not wounds and all of that. You can, but I think it’s a boring argument. We’ve had the discussion many times and the fact that we keep having it is a sign that the explanation isn’t working. It’s not self-evident. It’s a bad model.
So what is a good model? One favourite of mine is Dogs in the Vineyard. If you’re talking, you can switch to exchanging blows. You’ll get more dice! If you’re beating each other up, you can switch to shooting. You’ll get more dice! Of course, if you use more dice, “fallout dice” accumulate and those get rolled at the end. Better to pull those punches and make it out of here alive.
“If you’re losing, you can get more dice by escalating the conflict. Someone’s getting the better of your character in an argument? Pull a gun. That’ll shut ’em up.” – Dogs in the Vineyard, p. 33
This models the enticing quality of escalating violence. You’ll get your way! And it models the terrible fallout. As I used to say when people asked me about the “effectiveness” of martial arts: just run away. I don’t care. Run. If you don’t have a gun, maybe somebody has gun. If you have a gun, maybe the wrong people will get shot. Even if you “win”, you’ll end up in jail, in court, in the hospital – places you don’t want to go. Sure, perhaps if you’re fast, and if you’re equipped, and if you’re skilled, and if you’re lucky, and your opponent is slow, and they’re not equipped, and they’re unskilled, and they have bad luck, maybe it’ll work. But chances are you’ll feel it for the rest of your life. And if there’s a standoff with the Nazis or the criminals, how will you move about the next day? How will you sleep the next night?
Run, if you can.
OK, so a resolution mechanism that models this dreadful escalation can work. But then again, I also haven’t played Dogs in the Vineyard very often. A setup where other people take to violence and I cannot is frustrating, too. Somebody I used to play it with once told me that it didn’t work if you played characters like psychopaths. You need to play them like thinking, feeling humans.
If you grew up on D&D with purchased adventures where creatures like to fight to the death, you might have learned all the wrong lessons. Like I did. It takes effort to unlearn.
And so, finally, at last, we come to the solution I currently favour: Something close to save-or-die. Something I’m taking from Classic Traveller. Fights are short and deadly.
In Classic Traveller you have three physical attributes rolled with 2d6 each. Let’s say you’re absolutely average: Strength-7, Dexterity-7, Endurance-7. You have no armour. Somebody shoots at you with a revolver. Said revolver gives a +1 to hit against unarmed opponents, +2 for short range, and it does 3d6 damage. It does 10½ on average, if you hit. Your target number is 8+. Say your opponent has a skill of +1. They hit on a 4+. Easy!
On your first hit, you determine the physical attribute to take that hit randomly. No matter which attribute you randomly determined, all of the damage goes there. Later in a fight, you can distribute the damage dice as you want. In either case, if there’s damage left, you need to subtract it from another physical attribute. Let’s say you take 10 damage and randomly determined that the first attribute was Strength, which takes 7 damage and goes down to 0, and then you picked Dexterity, which takes 3 damage goes from 7 down to 4.
With one attribute at zero, you fall unconscious for 10min. That’s right. You’re out. When you wake up, you recover half of the values lost, rounded down. So you’re at Strength-3, Dexterity-5, Endurance-7 – ten minutes later.
With two attributes at zero, it takes hours for you to wake up and unless you find a really good medic an appropriate facility, you’ll die anyway.
With three attributes at zero, you’re dead.
If you’re hit by a shotgun, you take 4d6 damage. If you’re hit by a laser rifle, you take 5d6 damage. Even the lowly dagger does 2d6 damage.
The three physical attributes are basically your hit points and you have 2d6 each, so a total of 6d6 hit points (with the proviso that you can only take 2d6 before falling unconscious). Chances for instant death are there. Chances for long stays in the hospital are there.
After the first round, chances are that half the people involved are already out of the fight.
The last time we played Halberts, that “Fantasy Traveller” game, we had one fight at the end of session 4.
I think that’s the right attitude for me, when I get to pick.
When I play D&D style games like Halberds and Helmets, it’s all very cartoonish and I think that works, too. I’m not very excited about H&H combat, but at least it’s comparatively short compared to the D&D 3.5 and D&D 5 games I ran and played.
#RPG #Combat