Non-violent Roleplaying

[contracycle]

Games.

I'm not convinced the Sims is not anything more than a large-scale Tamagochi.  Its really a kinda resource management game, the human aspect of it merely serving to make it accessible.

I agree, though, that thre routes offered by system will be priorised by players as indicating "what the game is about".  Homicide is not a default problem solving activity on Casualty, and a game of Casualty may need no mechanisms for physical conflict at all.

However, I do think that such games will have to provide different materials to fill the gap left by the removal of combat as the tacit subject of play.  I think these have to be other complex disciplines like medicine or law, so that no player EVER thinks "this is a THAC0 with the serial numbers filed off", but instead engages with the intracacies of the discipline.  To do that, you need to be able to decide where you need to go, and to be able to measure your progress toward that goal.  Even when an opponents hit points are concealed, in RPG combat you have confidence that a process liken hit point attrition is occurring in line with your actions.  IMO the problem for non-combat games is that they need to establish both what the pursuable goals are, and how to measure the attainment of those goals, in a manner that is not the body count.

[Picador]

For the past few years, I've been grappling with this problem and trying to implement some kind of "karma" system in a game to make non-violent play more interestnig, and to make a playable system out of the challenge of non-violence. I wrote a short essay a while back about doing this with video games, but I've mostly been focused on RPGs. I was intrigued by the mental-health systems in Kult and Unknown Armies, both of which have the germ of a non-violent system embedded in them; but both of them fall into the "preponderance-with-simulating-combat" trap, even though Kult (like Call of Cthulhu) doesn't lend itself to interesting combat encounters, which fact would have made those pages of the rulebook better devoted to elaborate rules for investigation, exploration, etc.

I wrote a rant on the Unknown Armies mailing list about this a while back, and I proposed that the community try to put together some more granular rules for things like computer hacking and research. I really do think that this is the key to making a non-violent game playable, as many have pointed out: make non-confrontational activities into mini-games that can hold the attention of the gamists in the group. (Either that, or make all the rules Narrativist and make combat no more granular than anything else, e.g. Heroquest et al).

The "computer hacking" example, of course, springs from Cyberpunk-style games (although I favored the "realistic" rules from GURPS Cyberpunk), which turn Netrunning into a kind of faux-combat. But at least the ends are usually distinct: the hacker's victory usually results in combat or infiltration support, or in investigation, rather than direct defeat of an adversary. But insofar as it's just a proxy for combat, it doesn't meet the goals stated earlier in this thread, which is also the goal I had in mind for a karma system and which I have yet to articulate in this long, meandering post.

So: karma. I thought it would be interesting to play a game where violence came back to haunt a character in consistent, rule-governed ways. System matters, and players should be able to make in-game choices about using violence with some knowledge of the ways in which it will rebound upon their characters. I wanted a system that modeled a pseudo-Hindu/Buddhist philosophy of karmic action. Kult does this to a certain extent: as a character is exposed to more violence (his own or others'), his Mental Balance drops and he becomes more exposed to horrific elements of the setting; he also becomes more prone to violence. But the rules modeling it are sparse, and it uses a Manichean, dualistic metric for Mental Balance rather than allowing for multiple flavors of karma. Unknown Armies, on the other hand, uses multiple Madness Meters to model psychological deterioration, but the consequences of violence (other than mental disturbance) are again handled mostly by GM discretion. I want something more mechanical, but also non-judgmental: the players should have violence open as an option and make their own choices about when it might be an ethical choice regardless of its consequences.

I don't have a solution. My Life With Master uses The Horror Revealed to achieve this effect somewhat, although there the players often can't control their implication in violence, and the whole game is premised on violence being against the PCs' self-interest. Has anyone else encountered a Karma-style system for bringing out the theme of violence and its consequences, particularly outside of the pure-Narrativist domain?