Tales from the Rocket House
I’m assuming that we’re all starting from the same basic place, that we all believe that violence is an ugly and destructive thing that should not be glorified or encouraged. Some may be pacifists, while others may hold to a “just war” theory. Some may refuse to fight to defend themselves, while others may even carry concealed weapons, and follow the “never start trouble, never escalate trouble,” ethic associated with that practice. But the point is, I’m assuming all of us take violence seriously, and see it as a negative thing. If you still think getting drunk and punching some guy’s face in is cool, you probably need to read something other than this post.
So, how does this (presumably shared) ethical stance carry over into gaming? Some may say that it doesn’t, that the violence in a game is pretend, and thus irrelevant to real-life attitudes. To some degree I understand and agree. After all, I’ve known plenty of people who were personally nonviolent, but who would take your head off in any first-person-shooter, wreck your army in a war game, shred a million orcs in a dungeon crawl, or even play unashamedly evil characters - and be just as personally nonviolent and ethical after doing so as they were before.
That said, I feel like there is a level of intimacy between the player and the character in a pen & paper role-playing game that’s absent in most other games. As I discovered in the discussion of my Simulationist-Immersive Roleplaying columns, many simulationist and dramatist roleplaying games don’t even meet the broadly-accepted definitions of “games.” But the point is, the connection between the character and the player is pretty tight, most of the time, to the point that there is the possibility of the character’s actions raising ethical concerns in the player.
And violence is one of, if not the, biggest ways this comes about. So how do we address violence (and ethics in general) in roleplaying games?
1) The Ends Justify ... Or Do They? Dive deep into ethically questionable territory, allowing players to use their characters to challenge their own ethical assumptions. This is especially effective if the characters are good-intentioned, and find themselves struggling with just how far their good intentions and good ends justify their means. This works with other things than just violence, of course, but requires a high degree of trust between players and GM, and a high degree of skill to do effectively. You also need a game system with at least a moderately high lethality.
It undercuts the situation if you have to spend twenty minutes whittling down someone’s hit points (or worse, their “hero points” or “karma points” before you can actually GET TO their hit points) in order to even have any chance of lethality. If characters can go into combat, knowing their risking their lives, and can end up dead or mortally wounded pretty quickly if they mess up, that’s good. If characters can start out not really meaning to hurt anyone, but have things escalate until someone ends up dead, and have it happen so quickly it can’t easily be prevented, that’s even better.
2) War is Hell: The combat system is made ugly, with the chance of one-shot death or permanent disability. It helps if the wounds are at least somewhat descriptive (as opposed to something totally abstract, like hit points). It also helps if there is a bleeding out mechanic that is not trivially easy to stop. The idea is that any time the characters enter combat, they risk their characters’ lives and well-being. Though the Tarafore System is not perfect, I think it illustrates this option pretty well. In addition to the possibility of instant death, there’s also the possibility that a horribly wounded person could shrug off the wound and keep fighting, while bleeding out. Stopping the bleeding requires First Aid rolls, with very limited time. For the worst wound level, the difficulty level is “Ridiculous (19)” and the person bleeds to death in 5 minutes, and to unconsciousness in under 2. Each First Aid attempt takes 1 full minute, but it’s unlikely that treatment could begin until after the fight is won, so often only four attempts are actually possible.
It’s entirely possible that a character who fought on, and even turned the tide of the fight, could go unconscious from bleeding, and bleed to death in front of all her friends and comrades despite the other characters’ best efforts.
That’s heavy. And it’s supposed to be.
3) Sanitized for Your Protection: The third option goes in the opposite direction from the second, taking the violence into the realm of comic book super heroes. And I don’t mean comic books written by Frank Miller. I mean Silver Age-style, with heroes who don’t kill (or torture), who are proud of it, and whose powers back them up. “Realistically,” Superman should have a lot of trouble not killing any mortal he gets into a fight with, but then, Superman’s greatest power is probably his superhuman self-control. He could rescue a kitten from a tree with one hand, punch Solomon Grundy into next Sunday with the other hand, and not even bruise the kitten’s ribs. That’s part of the style. That’s part of the point.
In this case, the ethical dilemma is dialed back from violence (which is nonlethal, with no real lasting effects like long-term injury or disability) to killing. The difference is between those who believe in chivalry versus those who believe in carpet bombing and waterboarding, those who believe in the rule of law and fair trials versus those who believe in playing judge, jury, and executioner. It’s not Ghandi versus the British, it’s Superman versus Manchester Black or Wesley versus Humperdink.
In a way, this is the language of fairy-tales. The hero may slay a dragon, but not other people. Think of "Sir Gareth and the Red Knight", from Le Morte D’Artur (or the slightly different version from Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King). Gareth fights several knights (five in Mallory, four in Tennyson), and spares each one’s life, despite their previous crimes and the possibility that they would return to fight him again. It would be more realistic if at least one of them had ended up maimed or mortally wounded in all that swordplay, but it wouldn’t fit the story. Gareth wasn’t the most glorious or most skillful knight, but he was the knight with the greatest heart. He didn’t sleep with his best friend’s wife like Lancelot, scheme against his friend and comrade like his brother Gawain, nor consider himself above his peers like Galahad. Gareth tolerated a great deal of crap from a number of people and still did the right thing, time after time. He was, in my mind, the greatest of Arthur’s knights.
4) Action, not Violence: this is what I wrote about last month. It requires the players to be on board, and it requires a bit of GM planning to get them into situations where they can have great non-violent action scenes. It also helps to have a game system that resolves chases and other complex action sequences in a “gamey” way, rather than just a couple of opposed skill tests. It’s not easy, and it’s not right for every group or every campaign, but I think it has real potential.
So, what do you think? Have I missed anything?
