Non-violent Roleplaying

[John Kim]

I disagree with Marco's disbelief in the old chestnut, mainly because in my experience of playing games: rules beg to be used.

One might even say that system does matter.

Hold on.  I agree that system matters, but that doesn't mean that any rule will automatically be used.  For example, if I include "suicide" in the list of combat maneuvers, that doesn't mean that characters are necessarily going to kill themselves.  In my experience, many games have options which will sit unused.  More specifically, let me consider three cases:
1) I have a generic resolution mechanic which is used for both violent and non-violent action.  (Example: The Pool)
2) I have separate combat and non-combat systems.  (Example: Masterbook)  
3) I have only a non-combat system, and disallow combat.  (Example: Breaking the Ice)

So clearly #3 works to discourage violence.  I don't see that #1 is inherently better than #2.  I can include a short bit of combat rules, but they are painful and unrewarding.  Within #2, if non-violent action is more interesting and/or rewarding, then I can successfully encourage non-violent resolution.

[komradebob]

Would adding hard rules that deal with the after effects of violence help? I've seen a number of games ( Jorune comes to mind) that discuss the fact that violence, especially extreme violence, is looked down upon culturally, but there aren't any hard rules to go along with that.

[TonyLB]

John:  #3 doesn't discourage violence.  It simply removes it from the possibilities of the game.  If you want to give people a game where the choice of being violent is discouraged then that choice must be present.

[Andrew Morris]

I'm really into Breaking the Ice right now, John, but can you point out where it disallows combat? I must have missed that on my first read. Certainly, it doesn't have a combat section, or even mention combat. However, it seems that you could easily have violence or combat. The first thing that comes to mind is violence as a result of a Conflict such as "Insanely jealous" or something along those lines. The system doesn't specifically go into anything like this, but I could see it happening.

[Marco]

I'm really into Breaking the Ice right now, John, but can you point out where it disallows combat? I must have missed that on my first read. Certainly, it doesn't have a combat section, or even mention combat. However, it seems that you could easily have violence or combat. The first thing that comes to mind is violence as a result of a Conflict such as "Insanely jealous" or something along those lines. The system doesn't specifically go into anything like this, but I could see it happening.

And I think I could (and maybe would) run an ultra-violent game of Nicotine Girls. Sure system matters. Saying how it matters is ... another matter altogether.

-Marco

[Brendan]

Hold on.  I agree that system matters, but that doesn't mean that any rule will automatically be used.  For example, if I include "suicide" in the list of combat maneuvers, that doesn't mean that characters are necessarily going to kill themselves.  In my experience, many games have options which will sit unused.

Agreed.  But I didn't understand Marco to be talking about a list-item "option" within some greater context of conflict resolution; his choice of words--"bog-standard combat systems"--suggests to me initiative, damage, endurance, weapons lists, and so on, everything against which Standard Rant #3 rails.

Every RPG I played pre-Forge (D&D, Palladium, Shadowrun, Marvel, GURPS, multiple Fantasy Heartbreakers) had dozens or hundreds of pages and multiple splatbooks devoted to combat.  That's how I understand "bog-standard combat system."  What if, to twist John's example and Marco's anecdotal evidence, my hypothetical Game Of Despair devoted a similar amount of space to suicide?  What if my group's thirty-three-hour campaign involved only one hour of it?  I think everyone here would conclude that we were playing the wrong game.

[Brendan]

I'm really into Breaking the Ice right now, John, but can you point out where it disallows combat? I must have missed that on my first read. Certainly, it doesn't have a combat section, or even mention combat. However, it seems that you could easily have violence or combat.

Agreed again.  John, your list items #1 and #3 are mechanically interchangeable for the purposes of this conversation.  The color of Breaking the Ice certainly works to discourage combat, but the mechanics don't.

[Marco]

Every RPG I played pre-Forge (D&D, Palladium, Shadowrun, Marvel, GURPS, multiple Fantasy Heartbreakers) had dozens or hundreds of pages and multiple splatbooks devoted to combat.  That's how I understand "bog-standard combat system."  What if, to twist John's example and Marco's anecdotal evidence, my hypothetical Game Of Despair devoted a similar amount of space to suicide?  What if my group's thirty-three-hour campaign involved only one hour of it?  I think everyone here would conclude that we were playing the wrong game.

Not everyone here, no. I wouldn't.

I'd start the analysis of game-choice by asking if the game's actual play was successful and enjoyable. The idea that you'd start the analysis of the game by looking at the page-count devoted to various rule-systems compared to their use during play is exactly typical of the weakness of rigorous text-based game analysis applied to actual play as opposed to game-design (if you are runing a specific play-test group you have, defacto, different conditions than many actual groups will, recognizing the difference is, I think, key).*

TROS has a combat system that will either encourage or discourage casual violence in direct porportion to how the participants approach the game rules from a situational standpoint (most naively: are my SA's firing in the direction I wish to fight, less naively, what is the player/GM's level of comfort with losing characters or out-playing each other in edge-condition situations where victory isn't assured by weight of dice-pool).

Traditional games put the non-mechanical consequence mechanism of violence (or anything else, usually) at the situational layer (that is, although you may die in combat--but whether you are hunted down by the police will depend on the circumstances of the combat--something most systems will not determine for you in a mechanical fashion).

This is why I think that for most games if non-violent play is wanted, the place to address it is at the situational layer, not (so much) the mechanical one.

-Marco
* One major difference is that non-playtest groups (i.e. people you don't present the game to in an attempt to learn something from its use) may select the game based on factors that you, as a designer, cannot possibly anticipate (and this is more true the less tightly focused a game design is). They may, in fact, be the "wrong reasons" and the result may be a well designed game from your perspective that still fails to produce fun, functional play.

Even when a segment of play is fun, it may, for example, have more to do with the setting than the mechanics or be due to the expertise of the participants rather than their interaction with the rules. In none of these cases does anyone have the standing to say the group is playing the wrong game if they, themselves, don't agree.

[J B Bell]

I haven't seen a clear definition of "violence" yet here.  Many posts seem to be equating it with physical injury and death, and that's certainly a common notion.  However, if you use the word "nonviolence," you're tapping into an interesting area that is often not very well understood.

I'm not sure if this was the original poster's intent, but I'd like to mention that "nonviolence" is understood by its advocates to mean, not merely the absence of violence, but an active force that can enter into situations of violent conflict (whether they are physical, emotional, systemic, or whatever) and prove a superior force. Gandhi got frustrated with the press of the time's equating "nonviolence" and "pacifism" in the sense of "just lie down and take it and hope your aggressor starts to feel bad."  That motivated him to change his usage to "soul force," which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also adopted.

I agree with the critique that a game "about nonviolence" must include violence as an option, especially if it's in this sense.

John, is this what you had in mind?  Or do you mean simply "less physically violent"?  At any rate, I think understanding nonviolence in the way I've described above could help to build a credible game that has both violence and nonviolence in it, where nonviolence could be built in as mechanically more advantageous for players.

--JB

[Brendan]

Even when a segment of play is fun, it may, for example, have more to do with the setting than the mechanics or be due to the expertise of the participants rather than their interaction with the rules. In none of these cases does anyone have the standing to say the group is playing the wrong game if they, themselves, don't agree.

I didn't mean to imply that I somehow knew your game was dysfunctional when you didn't, Marco; I apologize if I came off that way.  I set my example in the first person in order to separate it from your actual play. You're absolutely right to say that if your game is fun and rewarding, you should keep playing it.

I still don't see how you can reconcile your first sentence in the quote above with the opening thesis of System Does Matter.  But that's off-topic, and if you're interested in discussing it further we should take it to a new thread.

[Marco]

Even when a segment of play is fun, it may, for example, have more to do with the setting than the mechanics or be due to the expertise of the participants rather than their interaction with the rules. In none of these cases does anyone have the standing to say the group is playing the wrong game if they, themselves, don't agree.

I didn't mean to imply that I somehow knew your game was dysfunctional when you didn't, Marco; I apologize if I came off that way.  I set my example in the first person in order to separate it from your actual play. You're absolutely right to say that if your game is fun and rewarding, you should keep playing it.

I still don't see how you can reconcile your first sentence in the quote above with the opening thesis of System Does Matter.  But that's off-topic, and if you're interested in discussing it further we should take it to a new thread.

That was how it came off to me, yes. Especially since it wasn't yourself in the situation that decided you were playing the wrong game (but rather "everyone here"). That's cool though--I get what you are saying.

As to the second: if you start a thread on it and provide a more specific question, I'll be happy to go into detail.

-Marco

[John Kim]

Agreed again.  John, your list items #1 and #3 are mechanically interchangeable for the purposes of this conversation.  The color of Breaking the Ice certainly works to discourage combat, but the mechanics don't.

I don't agree.  I should clarify -- Breaking the Ice does not explicitly disallow violence, but it provides absolutely no support for it.  You can have violence in the game, but it has the same level of support that, say, politics has in The Fantasy Trip.  For example, if I have my character get in a fight my date's abusive ex-boyfriend, the rules don't tell me who wins.  The only thing the rules resolve is whether our level of attraction goes up.  Moreover, it is working uphill to get violence in the first place, since the mechanics specify that the game is about a date between two characters.  

This directly discourages combat in a way that, say, Primetime Adventures does not.  Put another way.  Having only a rewarding combat system, specifying combat-relevant character traits, and supporting combat scenarios encourages combat.  Yes?  OK, so presumably the opposite can also be true.  i.e. Providing support for non-violent actions discourages combat.  

Agreed. But I didn't understand Marco to be talking about a list-item "option" within some greater context of conflict resolution; his choice of words--"bog-standard combat systems"--suggests to me initiative, damage, endurance, weapons lists, and so on, everything against which Standard Rant #3 rails.

Every RPG I played pre-Forge (D&D, Palladium, Shadowrun, Marvel, GURPS, multiple Fantasy Heartbreakers) had dozens or hundreds of pages and multiple splatbooks devoted to combat.  That's how I understand "bog-standard combat system."  What if, to twist John's example and Marco's anecdotal evidence, my hypothetical Game Of Despair devoted a similar amount of space to suicide?  What if my group's thirty-three-hour campaign involved only one hour of it?  I think everyone here would conclude that we were playing the wrong game.

Well, I would certainly agree that the games you list encourage violence.  This goes beyond page count, though.  For example, there is considerable support in GURPS for vehicle action and combat (including multiple books) -- but I never felt that I was playing the wrong game just because I didn't use vehicle combat.  (I felt that I was playing the wrong game because I didn't like the rules I did use.)  

To pick another example: first edition Vampire: The Masquerade is one of the few commercial games which had relatively short combat mechanics compared to other activities.  There was roughly 1 page for melee combat, 1 page to ranged combat, and a little more for damage.  There were also maybe 1.5 pages for social mechanics.  The example scenario was a social event, not a mission.  While it was a noteworthy effort, I don't think it succeeded in discouraging violence.  

Traditional games put the non-mechanical consequence mechanism of violence (or anything else, usually) at the situational layer (that is, although you may die in combat--but whether you are hunted down by the police will depend on the circumstances of the combat--something most systems will not determine for you in a mechanical fashion).

This is why I think that for most games if non-violent play is wanted, the place to address it is at the situational layer, not (so much) the mechanical one.

I think that both the situational layer and the mechanical layer are important.  On the mechanical level, you need for the mechanics of the game to matter.  If the game is non-violent, then there has to be support for making non-violent interactions playable, consistent and interesting.  It's trivial to, say, take any game and add a rule that you lose 5 XP (or whatever) any time you take a violent action.  But this doesn't make the non-violent part interesting.  

John, is this what you had in mind?  Or do you mean simply "less physically violent"?  At any rate, I think understanding nonviolence in the way I've described above could help to build a credible game that has both violence and nonviolence in it, where nonviolence could be built in as mechanically more advantageous for players.

No, I meant less physically violent primarily, though violence can be more than physical.  For example, I'm not interested in substituting a non-physical damage meter instead of hit points.  That is, I could make a game about wandering around the countryside, having social encounters with people and then forcing them to run out of "status points", and then taking their stuff.  This would be a sort of word substitution on a violent game.  

I would prefer games which are not about winning interpersonal conflict.  i.e. Who beats who.  There are other sorts of action:  resolving internal conflict, winning the respect of others, learning, communicating, etc.

[Marco]

Traditional games put the non-mechanical consequence mechanism of violence (or anything else, usually) at the situational layer (that is, although you may die in combat--but whether you are hunted down by the police will depend on the circumstances of the combat--something most systems will not determine for you in a mechanical fashion).

This is why I think that for most games if non-violent play is wanted, the place to address it is at the situational layer, not (so much) the mechanical one.

I think that both the situational layer and the mechanical layer are important.  On the mechanical level, you need for the mechanics of the game to matter.  If the game is non-violent, then there has to be support for making non-violent interactions playable, consistent and interesting.  It's trivial to, say, take any game and add a rule that you lose 5 XP (or whatever) any time you take a violent action.  But this doesn't make the non-violent part interesting.  

No question. I may have overstated the case if I came off as saying that the mechanical layer wasn't important--it's very important--but in a game like, say, GURPS, you can have boring combats as well as boring social stuff: the presence of mechanics alone doesn't make things any more interesting to me.

I think mechanics are very important in terms of play--but I do not think that they "demand use" across a broad spectrum of people as has been stated here (I think that meme's tacit acceptance here is somewhat a product of analyzing games from the POV of game-designers rather than as game-players).

As I've noted before, the sections of game design that get all the focus tend to be the ones that the designers feel will be exciting (Car chases in Bond, net-running in cyberpunk games, etc.) The idea that this is the other way around (the exciting parts of Bond are car-chases, not because it's in the fiction, but rather because there are rules for it, seems, well, reversed to me).

A great deal of RPG-play is in the action-adventure end of the spectrum and it's no surprise that violence is pretty integrated to that. In games I've run that were not especially action-adventure-y (several of which have been written up here) non-violent play was achieved by manipulating the situational layer so that solutions to things happened in spectrums other than the physical one (the Salga Del Mundo game is a good example, I think--the only combat was basically color and happened midway through rather than as a climax).

The presence of the combat system did serve to make that segment nicely dramatic--however it didn't lead the characters (two non-combat characters) to try to solve problems with their fists.

-Marco

[MatrixGamer]

I would prefer games which are not about winning interpersonal conflict.  i.e. Who beats who.  There are other sorts of action:  resolving internal conflict, winning the respect of others, learning, communicating, etc.

The old joke "An armed society is a polite society" comes to mind.

Violence is always a potential in all situations. The fact that we refrain from it is due to it being a VERY ineffective strategy. This isn't just situational - it has also to do with unspoken but agreed upon rules of society. Hobbes' description of the state of nature being "nasty brutish and short" is right on the money. It's social contract in the 17th century meaning of the term. We passed our power to kill to the state.

An example: I ran a spy game that included gangsters. Players could pursue their spying goals "non-violently" by intrigue, seduction, inflitration, etc. or go in guns blazing. One player opted to recruit all the gangsters. This game used a sculpted terrain board of London and 25mm figures. The player had a huge number of armed men in one place. He felt like he could do anything. When he tried though he found himself surrounded by police. "Ha! I'm better armed." The next turn he was surrounded by the army. If he had not folded, they could have rolled in tanks, planes, bombs, etc. The rules of society put a limit on how violent you can get - the implied threat is always there - do it and you will lose.

I like the idea of not rewarding violence. I also like the idea of setting games in places where violence is not the norm. This doesn't mean giving up conflict - because conflict is not synonymous with violence.

System helps in this goal if non-violent (often indirect route) actions are rewarded with increased chance of reaching the goal. The dice pool idea that I see tossed about here often does this. "Nice politeness, have a cookie." In Matrix Games successful arguments become part of the matrix of the world. So by a series of indirect actions the way can be cleared for any number of actions.

Beyond rules though I think the Taoist idea is the meta rule that thorns appear in the way of armies. Superior power can always be trumped, so why bother going there?

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Nathan P.]

My main point, and then two thoughts.

Main Point: It seems to me that how a designer treats violence in their games is an important indicator towards the importance they want violence to have in the game world (once the designer is consciously thinking about it, that is). How violence is structured in DitV implies a number of things: that it's everpresent in the Kingdom, that it's always a possibility, but that a Dog can make the conscious choice to avoid its use (not escalate). Making that choice says something about the Dog - violence is meaningful.

Just disallowing violence a'tall sends the message that it's a non-issue, or that theres something unbreachable keeping people in the game world from using it, depending on the context.

So, when speaking about non-violence in an RPG, what do you want that to mean in the context of the game world? It seems to me that the easiest thing to do is just disallow it, right? But say you want it to be present, but always be the worse option to solving a problem - a last resort. Or say you want it to be present, but an option only to be avoided. Or say that you want to limit violence to a certain subset of interactions. All of these scenarios call for different kinds of mechanical re-inforcement.

My point here is that, when considering the question of violence in your design process, you need to decide what you want to say about its use, or its role in your game. There's a number of shades between "violent" and "non-violent," after all.

Thought One:

Someone who wants to play with violence isn't gonna pick up Pacifist: the RPG in the first place, so it seems to me that the agenda of kind of forcing  the player to avoid violence is moot, to a degree. Hence, my focus on making a statement with your treatment of violence.

Thought Two:

Combat is, in fact, usually the highest mechanically-driven negative-consequence creation subsystem in any traditional RPG. The risk-factor of non-combat skill rolls is usually far, far lower than combat rolls.

However, the reward factor for combat actions tends to be proportionally higher than for non-combat, in my experience. I mean, if combat in a game always resulted in the instigators death, then few players would want to start a fight, now would they?