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Hi Mithras,
 

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On 2001-10-10 15:28, Mithras wrote:

Running with this doomed attitude from the word go, I'm working on a horror in war RPG focussed on the Vietnam War. Characters are going downhill fast, becoming quickly hardened to the terrors and atrocities of the conflict, and turning severe psychological damage (meanwhile) into hidden psychological flaws.

Its going to be nasty. Its going to be tragic. There's not alot you can do about it. Just 'be there' and share the overwhelming horror engulf you...

As I mentioned over in the Sorcerer forum, I was just considering running a Vietnam game, but backed down once I started looking at the source material because of how intense it was.  It seems like in a game that focuses on war you have two options: either brush over the absolute horror of war and run a sort of John Wayne Green Berets kind of deal, or focus on the horror and get some really hardcore play that brings up all sorts of disturbing stuff.  
 Now, the second one is certainly deeper, and the first does overlook the reality of war, but who the heck could handle the second option over an extended period of time?  Is there such a thing as *too intense* in a role-playing game?  You mention that it will "be tragic" and that "overwhelming horror" will engulf you.  This brings up an issue that I think a lot of people are uneasy about dealing with: the difference between the horror found in the Exorcist and that found in Saving Private Ryan.  I think the intention of the first is to entertain, whereas the second is to ... educate on the horror of warfare?  I'm not sure.
-Tor

I think that the problem that I'd have with a concept like this is finding the protagonism in the characters. I like the characters to have victories, and successes, even if they have to fail a lot first. Even if the characters get a little evil themselves its fine as long as they get to be the good guys at some point.

Even in CoC, the players can still try. If they die fighting, well, that's heroic. In the case of Paul's (Mithras) Vietnam game, I don't see where the entertainment is at all; at least not from the brief description. Could I maybe learn from it? I suppose, but having been associated with the military for fifteen years and hearing actual war stories from vietnam that I'd never care to repeat, I think I may have had enough education of that sort. It's not something that I'd feel a need to participate in.

Mike

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but who the heck could handle the second option over an extended period of time?  Is there such a thing as *too intense* in a role-playing game?  You mention that it will "be tragic" and that "overwhelming horror" will engulf you.  This brings up an issue that I think a lot of people are uneasy about dealing with: the difference between the horror found in the Exorcist and that found in Saving Private Ryan.
-Tor

My gut feeling is everyone has a different capacity for "intensity".

This is an issue I'm working with a lot in a Narrativist-oriented system I'm developing that is specifically geared towards drama as a genre.  I don't expect "drama as genre" role-play to have mass market appeal, or even appeal to the majority of experienced role-players.  However, there is a definite niche that "drama as genre" will appeal to.  There are players out there who love to experience a lot of vicarious pain, anguish, and trauma via their characters and who's primary concern is how their characters develop emotionally/ psychologically, as opposed to advancing in power levels or aquiring new powers/skills.  

I think one of the important components to successful "intense" role-play is to ensure that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end.  Characters and players both have breaking points.  Even in epic chronicles that last for years, they need opportunities to recover from emotional crisis and have closure from one episode before the next begins.  If the intense trauma never ends, or its overplayed without other kinds of emotional experiences to compensate, then everything breaks down.

(PS- this is my first post to the Forge.  I'm new to the G/N/S model, but I'm a zealous apprentice.  Be patient with me as I learn the vocabulary and concepts many of you have been developing together for years.  I've been eagerly reading the old posts here and everything else I can find across the Internet on game design topics)

-Laurel

I personally wouldn't go there with ther deliberate intent of exploring horror that viscerally.  I don;t necessarliy think it should be sacharined, but I would think that horror serves better as an adjunct than the central point.  I know enough people with war stories to agree with Mike that I would not choose to repeat them, certainly not for entertainment anyway.  Although I find war gorrifying, I don;t think theres any point to wallowing in it.

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Laurel said:

I think one of the important components to successful "intense" role-play is to ensure that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end.  Characters and players both have breaking points.  Even in epic chronicles that last for years, they need opportunities to recover from emotional crisis and have closure from one episode before the next begins.  If the intense trauma never ends, or its overplayed without other kinds of emotional experiences to compensate, then everything breaks down.

Hi Laurel,
 See, I think this is exactly what I have trouble imagining about a game that centers on the horror of war.  I mean, in order to make it an entertaining story you have to impose a narrative structure on it, and in the process cheapen the impact and the point (war is hell).  Take, for example, Saving Private Ryan.  It has a very strong narrative component: there is a beginning, middle and end, a sense of closure, and highly controlled pacing to build drama.  But this is counterposed against 20 and 30 minute scenes of graphic violence and bloodshed, where the plot stops.  Now, not to start a discussion of Saving Private Ryan, but didn't the movie really lie in those absolutely horrific battle scenes?  Afterwards people weren't talking about its ground-breaking story-line or its 3D characters, but about how terrifying and horrible the movie made combat seem.
 I suppose this all gets back to using narrative as a way to interpret events.  We use it to give order and meaning to parts of life that disturb us.  For the most part, people are pretty comfortable with this use of narrative.  However, I think a fairly modern trend is to reject the imposition of narrative coherency on war; people tend to see it as cheapening the experience and distracting from the true horror of warfare itself (which needs no embellishment).  If you look prior to the Vietnam war, most war films are about gritty heroes, men fighting for country and virtue.  You get a really strong set of values imposed over the actual act of combat.  But in the past 30 years directors and writers are trying harder and harder to represent war as objectively as possible: this is what happens when you're in combat; this is what it looks like when you get hit with a bullet; this is how grown men react to being horribly hurt and maimed.  On the other hand, as in the Saving Private Ryan example, there is still an attempt to throw in some narrative, oftentimes creating a disconcerting mixture with clashing goals.
 As far as this relates to role-playing games, it seems to me that a game could either go the route of attempting to show in all its gory detail what it would be like to be in a war (the modern approach), or it could use war to illustrate the values and ideals of society, and tell the stories of how those play out in warfare (the classical approach), but could run into conflict if it tried to do both (I'm deliberately not making simulationist/narrativist connections here--damn, too late).  
-Tor

The only I problem I can foresee with the concept of a very intense Vietnam RPG is that some gamers if not old enough to have been involved in the war personally are old enough to either remember it or had family members who were overseas fighting in it. WWII is far enough in the past to lose that direct connection for most people. Vietnam isn't.

For example, my wife had an older cousin who went to Vietnam. He came back a very different person but the only person that he ever talked to or mentioned anything about the war to was her. He never talked about it to his family (all of whom had served in previous wars themselves). Up until his death he was never quite right and went through multiple marriages because of it. Though my wife finds the topic interesting I don't think she could ever play anything that intense having "lost" a family member to it.

Just my 2 cents.

Warning: film-geek learned-butthole comment is approaching.

Francois Truffaut, I think, said that one could not make an anti-war film because, bluntly, war was fun to watch and to imagine oneself being there (emphasis on imagine). My personal construction of war stories is that the vast majority of them are coming-of-age stories, placed in a dangerous environment such that the issue is thrown into high stakes. Other issues of war (some might say the "real" or definitional issues) simply don't enter into these stories.

I'm not sure Truffaut was entirely correct, but the very few movies that I consider critical of war, in the sense of addressing IT as an issue, tend to stay away from the battlefield through much of their length (Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July).

To shift gears slightly - what is "horror," anyway? As I said long ago on the Sorcerer mailing list (archived at my site), horror requires comprehension, reflection, and in many cases identification. It is horror not only of "ick poo" or "Oh no, don't get me" but also of "what the hell ARE we." Jason Blair is completely right to state that Little Fears is about childhood TERROR instead.

So what to do with ANY fictional effort involved with Viet Nam or any military action that carries conflicting moral and emotional resonance within one's culture? That's a personal issue and cannot be dictated from any person to another, in artistic terms. Go ye and create if that's where the creative passion is turning.

In case anyone's interested, my own call is to bring those conflicts directly into the emotional foreground, if the purpose is horror. This is a very different outlook from the often-stated view that to role-play horror is all about scaring the players. I have no intention of scaring the players; I want us all to be shaky and reflective rather than startled and a little giggly.

Best,
Ron

Well strangely enough, I think the realist bent in modern film making illustrates some of the, umm, goals, of simulationist play.  The coherency, plausibility, of the environment are valid and "entertaining" without such measures as character development and the like.  If you WANT to tell a story in this context, it is a story IN war not a story ABOUT war.  The ABOUT only needs depiction.  If this is what bakes your biscuit, you don't need a GM to handle anything more than rules adjudication and bit parts; a bit like CounterStrike, say (which incidentally a lot of my sim/gamist ex-players are playing these days).

But isn't all of that, in RPG, just casting your Orcs as Viet Cong, or whoever your enemy-of-choice happens to be?  Thats fairly "neutral", but going out of your way to explore the MOST unpleasant, dehumanising aspects of war is in my opinion not a useful exercise, and I personally cannot experience it as Fun.  I do not shy away from the horrors of war, and can use these, I feel, appropriately in games - but games which are IN war rather than about it.

If such a game were to be written perhaps it should be tackled a bit like 'Puppies - it could be called "Killin' Commies for Capitalism"

Hey Gareth (contracycle),

I see where you're coming from, but it seems to me as if an independent variable is getting mixed in: depiction of specific acts or events.

I'm thinking that role-playing toward a critical view (by which I mean issues-addressing, not negative) of war may or may not include full-screen, detailed atrocity. I'm thinking of the scene in Full Metal Jacket in which we see the tail-gunner firing chattering machine-gun out the bay of the helicopter. We never see what he's shooting at or anything about where the bullets go. A character asks him, "How can you shoot women and children?" He answers, in apparent total lack of reflection about it, "Easy! Just lead them a little less!"

The scene is not graphic in the slightest but I find it horrifying.

So I definitely see your point, but wanted to distinguish between (1) being about-war or in-war, and (2) depicting specific things.

Best,
Ron

I remember Full Metal Jacket quite well.  My favorite (if you can call it that) war films for purposes of underlining the absolute folly of war are Glory and Gallipoli.

Glory is set during the Civil War.  The theme there can be summed up by "Captain, My Captain" rather than "Charge of the Light Brigade," were you to use poetry as a metaphor.  I came out of that viewing with a sick feeling about the waste of young lives, and the futility of the action that led to the protagonists' deaths.  For me, the most intense moment was Matthew Broderick's scene on the beach prior to the final charge against the impregnable rebel fortress.  He let his horse go free rather than throw its life away as he was about to do with his own.

Gallipoli ends on a similar note: you see men reacting to the knowledge that in a few moments their lives will be thrown away for nothing.

Finally, I'll point anyone interested in a fine presentation of moral issues without a combat emphasis to Breaker Morant, which deals with a court martial of Australian soldiers during the Boer War.

(Aside: It occurs to me that designing an RPG focused on courtroom drama could be an interesting challenge.  The players would probably have to be attorneys and investigators rather than clients.  Hmm....  Any other attorney types out there who'd like to comment on this?  For that matter, I'd be interested in hearing what any of the Forge crew has to say.)

Anyway, an excellent source for capturing a broad sense of how war affects society is Studs Terkel's "The Good War," an oral history composed of interviews with World War II veterans.  Lots of good material there, and the descriptions of the Pacific war from the viewpoint of U.S. Marine Corps veterans is truly chilling.  I'd also point people to "Backs to the Wall," a very personal history of the London Blitz that draws heavily on the journals and experiences of everyday laborers and common citizens as well as the politicans and military leaders.

Best,

Blake

Hey All.

contracycle,

QuoteIf such a game were to be written perhaps it should be tackled a bit like 'Puppies - it could be called "Killin' Commies for Capitalism"

First time I've been Invoked!  Nice!

Y'know, I used to talk all the time about this game I was going to run, starting with a USSF unit in Cambodia in 1966 or something and coming on through to the present day.  Weirdly, nobody wanted to play.

And then there's my ill-fated gangster flick campaign, which lasted almost one session before some of the players were in tears and screaming at each other and it just couldn't go on.

Oh, and the game I half-wrote, before puppies, was about assassins from the future, who come back Quantum Leap-style and beat innocent people to death with golf clubs in the name of future world peace.

Some of the people around here were actually relieved that I'd shifted my aggression to sweet cute helpless little puppy dogs.

No, seriously, I'm appalled that you can kill Orcs by the hundreds without it having any effect on your conscience.  Way worse would be treating real live historical human beings like Viet Cong that way.  My ideal war RPG would be like the Thin Red Line, with the enemies specifically humanized at every possible opportunity, and everything just really heartbreakingly sucky all the time.

Well okay, my real ideal war RPG would be like Full Metal Jacket, where the absurdity brings the horror and tragedy into sharp detail, and you laugh because otherwise you'd throw up.  But the Thin Red Line is a good functional minimum.

-lumpley




[ This Message was edited by: lumpley on 2001-10-13 08:25 ]

"If they run, they're VC. If they don't run, they're well disciplined VC." -Full Metal Jacket

Y'know, if I though that I could do it as well as Stanley Kubrick, I might give it a try. But, c'mon, hardly nobody's that good (certainly no role-players I know). And even if they were, I wonder about the sort of mechanics that would propell that sort of story. Hmmm.. How about this. You get a stat called degredation that is doled out like EXP by the GM based on how depraved your character acts. Accumulate a certain number of points, and you get to go home and never have to play again.

I think I'll just rent the movie again...


Mike Holmes

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On 2001-10-12 12:24, Ron Edwards wrote:
My personal construction of war stories is that the vast majority of them are coming-of-age stories, placed in a dangerous environment such that the issue is thrown into high stakes. Other issues of war (some might say the "real" or definitional issues) simply don't enter into these stories.

I'm not sure Truffaut was entirely correct, but the very few movies that I consider critical of war, in the sense of addressing IT as an issue, tend to stay away from the battlefield through much of their length (Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July).

 Point taken.  However, I think my point remains: a narrativist approach to war is going to run up against some particular problems.  I would contend that a lot of people would be uncomfortable using war as the background for a story (be that coming of age or whatever), because of the feeling that such an approach would be a disservice to the TRUTH of war (war is the most dehumanizing, senseless, and traumatic of all human experiences).  Of course, not everybody agrees on this definition of the TRUTH of war, but I think enough people do to make it a pretty strong movement in modern culture (observe the prevalence of post-Vietnam literature that emphasizes first-hand accounts of combat and war, presenting mind-numbing example after example of the terrible things that can happen to people and that people can do; or the shift towards war-movies that strive to out-do each other in their approach towards realism, Saving Private Ryan, for example).
 
 Contrast this with a zombie-narrativist role-playing game.  As Ron and others have pointed out elsewhere, the premise of most zombie movies is not about zombies killing and eating people, it's about seeing what happens when a disparate bunch gets together under a very stressful situation.  I don't think people have any problem with using the back-drop of a zombie flick to explore this kind of premise, because people don't have the sort of strong emotional reaction to zombies killing people as they do to GIs killing Vietnamese (or Vietnamese killing GIs etc.).
 
 I think one historical approach to this has been to use a distant war as a narrativist back-drop, or a fantasy one.  I think a lot of people will feel more comfortable even with WWII being used in this way rather than Vietnam (despite the reality that millions of people died in WWII, compared with hundreds of thousands in Vietnam).  Or people will feel totally comfortable using the Imperial forces vs. the Rebels, or the orcs vs. the elves, because the emotional distance is so great.
 -Tor

I think some excellent points have been raised in this thread. Warfare is something common to roleplaying games.  RPG warfare isn't commonly approached in the way its approached in "Full Metal Jacket" or "Saving Private Ryan", though.  I don't think it has to do with the fact these movies are set in Viet Nam and not in Jerusalem during the Crusade or on an Imperial Battle Cruiser: its not the specific setting, its the specific presentation of "war as physical and psychological hell" that make this kind of movie so chilling and horrific.  I don't know how well I'd like RPGs that presented warfare ala "Full Metal Jacket"...
I would have to play one, first.  I'm very sure many role-players would NOT like it.  

Laurel

Well I've waded in late on this one, I apologise!

Obvously I need to back up the brief description I posted, don't I? When I began writing the game years ago, it was to be a straight 'you are commandos' RPG format. Having digested tons of material on the war in the intervening years, I wanted to do two things in the game.

1) I wanted to include some sense of horror. To make it less like Kelly's Heroes and more like Saving Private Ryan. Not horror as in the PCs commit atrocities, but horror as in they realise some of the futility. They get a taste of real war. In other words - it's serious business.

2) I wanted to educate. I'm sorry but it's true. I wanted to get over in the game some idea of what it was like to be there. I'm a great fan of this kind of explorattive roleplaying. Via RPG I can go anywhere, do anything and be safe. Let's go to Vietnam - and be safe.

I've written a good deal of my Vietnam game. To be honest, the horror is one sided. The VC are portrayed almost as an impersonal force, a rarely seen enemy striking from the jungle or the darkness. A notch up on the horror meter there. Never show your monster.

I've had my troubled moments. I've read the accounts. I want the personalities of the PCs to go through the changes suffered by many soldiers, from the panic of that first 'horror' to the grim determination to'take it' and the slow unravelling later on as the bottled up horror emeges as some psyvchological flaw. But I have been worried about what I want PCs to become. I don't want baby killers and rapists. I've said before I would never let any player in any one of my games commit rape. So how does this gel with a game about horror in war?

So I'm thinking carefully. What I've come up with is a system where PCs try to survive as long as they can (both physically and more important, mentally). When they reach the unacceptable uncontrolled ultra-desensitized stage they are removed from the game (Cthulhu style). Its 'losing' in effect.

So the game is about navigating through mission after mission, learning quickly, trying to keep a lid on your assailed psychology, trying not to let your stresses show. Trying to stay normal.

The firefights are quick and brutal - yes. So are those in many RPGs. They are more frightening, however - because you rarely see the enemy, even after the combat is over.

I see a narrative shape to the missions and betweenmission time, a la Tour of Duty. About the psychological stresses and how they might manifest, and how the players can handle those within the squad.

I hope that's made things a little clearer. Some fine comments here, BTW. You've really given me food for thought.