OK, so I recently came across some controversy on Vincent's blog, in his post on Paintball and little boy bullshit. This was followed up by Heroes Live, Cowards Die, and apparently stemed from an Adept Press thread on The Forge, Sorcerer Doesn't Scare Me. What's Wrong with Me? -- though that thread is closed.

To bring this to a point about RPGs, I wanted to talk about theoretical approaches toward more non-violent role-playing. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with violence, but I would like to look for ways to encourage non-violent resolution. This is what Emma Wieslander addressed in her article "Positive Power Drama" for Beyond Role and Play. On Vincent's blog, Matt Wilson wrote:

Matt Wilson wrote: RPGs typically set up the rules so that violent acts of aggression are a superior means of resolving situations, and that turning away is failure. There's cool exceptions, though, like Dogs and TSOY.

Are you talking about games that reward non-violence, or simply games that don't give violence preferential treatment in the mechanics?

Because almost any game that was designed with attention paid to Mike's Standard Rant #3 will avoid giving mechanical preference to violence. That includes: DitV, Sorceror, InSpectres, Capes, PrimeTime Adventures and probably many, many others I'm less well-versed in.

TonyLB wrote: Are you talking about games that reward non-violence, or simply games that don't give violence preferential treatment in the mechanics?

Because almost any game that was designed with attention paid to Mike's Standard Rant #3 will avoid giving mechanical preference to violence. That includes: DitV, Sorceror, InSpectres, Capes, PrimeTime Adventures and probably many, many others I'm less well-versed in.

I agree with John about Dogs. I hope it's thoughtfully violent, but either way it's violent as all hell.

Primetime Adventures, on the other hand, is a good example of ... well, I guess it's really violence-neutral, isn't it? Its rules simply don't distinguish between violent conflicts and any other kind. Do Capes'? I don't think they do. Universalis' don't. InSpectres' ... don't, I guess - although I'd argue that in assigning stress roles we will inevitably treat violent stresses differently than non-violent stresses. Sorcerer's do. My Life with Master's do, obviously, what with half the conflicts being named "violence" and all. Trollbabe's sort of do, in distinguishing between physical, social and magical.

It's an interesting question.

Essential, I'd think, would be to make certain that in the game's non-violent conflicts enough is at stake.

-Vincent

Dead Inside encourages positive action, and in a way could say that it rewards non-violence.

John Kim wrote: On Vincent's blog, Matt Wilson wrote:

Matt Wilson wrote: RPGs typically set up the rules so that violent acts of aggression are a superior means of resolving situations, and that turning away is failure. There's cool exceptions, though, like Dogs and TSOY.

I found this peculiar, because Dogs in the Vineyard struck me as a highly violent game.

John Kim wrote: It has to do with providing interesting scenarios which don't involve combat. In particular, I think it's important to downplay interpersonal conflict and competition.

Noon wrote: Using violence will say something about the character. While the game may seem a highly violent one, taking away violence from the game as a designer is saying 'No, your not allowed to say that about your character'. Which is a bit crap.

Justin A Hamilton wrote: Dead Inside encourages positive action, and in a way could say that it rewards non-violence.

I've been working on Regency Park which is modeled after Jane Austen's novels. Physical violence isn't a big part of the genre, and I'm pretty much only looking to work with social conflict. (I think there is ONE duel mentioned in all her novels and that was mentioned only in passing, you weren't even there.)

So I think there will be some genres where at least the expectations will lean towards non-violence.

best

Trevis

One game worth noting here is Wraith: the Oblivion. While it contains violence - or at least the potential for it - the emphasis is meant to be on the ethical ramifications of actions. And the idea of resolving things left undone in life favors exploration of emotional issues both positive and negative. Too bad most people seemed to miss how clever the game actually was in this regard.

-Jiituomas

It might not be the game you're looking for, but you could play Sorcerer with Humanity=Non-violence. Of course this would mean that the demons would be violent as hell, and the setting would probably be very violent, too. But the reward system would strongly encourage the players to look for non-violent solutions.

IME, In most fictional narratives that involve violence it is "organic" to the situation (meant in the sense that it is, for a 'good' narrative, a natural outgrowth of the characters and context). In Resivoir Dogs we know--even when we just see these guys sitting around the table eating breakfast--that they are capable of great violence and are doing things that may very well lead them to that.

Despite this, were it an RPG that depicted only what was shown on screen, it wouldn't be "all that violent" (most of the running-time of the movie doesn't involve or revolve around gun-play).

Even more importantly: in Resivoir Dogs most of the conflict is terminated by violence but is not violent throughout (i.e. Mr. White and Mr. Orange's relationship comes to an end through several gun-shots but, really, the tension is about who trusts whom and not whether one person is a superior killer than the other).

This is an example of why I'm very dubious of the conventional wisdom that, for example, combat-systems encourage violence in games (after all: plenty of fiction 'encourages violence' and there is no "combat mechanic" for writing a book).

I'm hard-pressed to think of games that have, literally, had no violence whatsoever but I have had many games in bog-standard combat systems that might have, literally, 33hrs of play and less than 1hr of "combat activity."

I can also think of several recent games I've been in where combat activity was not the resolving action for the game. I'm not sure when you ask for ideas for interesting, non-violent games if you mean systems or instances of gaming, however.

In my experience, the formula for non-violence has been simple: non-violent characters and non-violent context. Given these, a decision to escalate to violence creates natural consequences.

In my experience the motives for violence have also been straight-forward: it's dramatic, exciting, and decisive in ways that most other things aren't (this is also why it's so tempting in fiction).

-Marco

I disagree with Marco's disbelief in the old chestnut, mainly because in my experience of playing games: rules beg to be used. As such, my answer to the non-violence question is simple: make a game where the mechanics reflect non-violent courses of action that have similarly high, decisive stakes, and similar ability to detail and strategize one's actions.

That is, violence is an easy thing to emulate mechanically, and we do it with a load of interesting detail, round-by-round action, and such. Where's a game that has social interaction mechanics that function just like combat? Or romantic relationship mechanics?

If you put the rules down, if they are interesting and have a sort of palpable texture to them, they'll be used. "Resolve it all with one roll" is not usually a good texture, however, and that is often how games handle non-combat situations or tasks. There's nothing to strategize about, no building of dramatic tension, no resources to play and manipulate.

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

greyorm wrote: Where's a game that has social interaction mechanics that function just like combat? Or romantic relationship mechanics?

greyorm wrote:
That is, violence is an easy thing to emulate mechanically, and we do it with a load of interesting detail, round-by-round action, and such. Where's a game that has social interaction mechanics that function just like combat? Or romantic relationship mechanics?

Brendan wrote:

greyorm wrote: 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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Morris wrote: 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.

John Kim wrote: 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.

Andrew Morris wrote: 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.

Brendan wrote:
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.

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

Marco wrote: 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.

Brendan wrote:

Marco wrote: 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.

Brendan wrote: 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.

Brendan wrote: 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.

Marco wrote: 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.

J B Bell wrote: 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.

John Kim wrote:

Marco wrote: 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 Kim wrote: 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.

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:

Marco wrote: 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.

Nathan P. wrote:

Marco wrote: 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?

pst... Marco...

Nathan said 'instigators', not 'investigators'.

-Eric

Technocrat13 wrote: pst... Marco...

Nathan said 'instigators', not 'investigators'.

-Eric

John Kim wrote:

J B Bell wrote: John, is this ["nonviolence" as used by Gandhi et al.] 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.

Rule to disourage violence:


If your character dies, thats it.

Game over for you.

I think that people in this thread may be using the same words to mean very different things. I'd like to make some distinctions between different ways that games could ``discourage violence.' For these purposes, I will define a scene in a game as being violent if some characters are trying to or threatening to physically injure other charaters. There may also be scenes (equally important) that are potentially violent, i.e., where a violent scene is a forseeable consequence of some decisions characters might make but not inevitable.

I'd like to distinguish between three types of games that do not encourage violence. The first I'll call ``anti-violent''. In an anti-violent game, the PCs are routinely put in potentially violent situations, but the options that defuse violence are ``better'' (strategically or morally) than the options that ratchet up the violence. These could be seen as the equivalent of anti-war war fiction and dramas such as Catch 22 or Platoon, where there is heavy fictional violence, but the point made is that such violence creates problems rather than solves them. From what other posters have said, Dogs in the Vineyard may be such a game (I haven't played it myself). An anti-violence game does not ``encourage'' violence, but it is in a deep sense about violence. An anti-violence game probably has detailed combat rules, even if the conclusion is that combat should be avoided if PCs want to stay alive and well.

What I think John originally meant is something else, what I'll call a ``non-violent'' game. In a non-violent game, the expectation is that under normal play, even potentially violent scenes will be rare or non-existent. Examples would be John's Water Uphill game, Soap, or perhaps the Jane Austen game mentioned. Since a non-violent game is not about violence, even indirectly by being about the costs of violence, a non-violent game needs to be about another form of conflict or tension. In Water Uphill, the tension was that of the social and physical insecurity created by being placed in an alien environment where you don't know any of the rules and don't know who to trust. (Was this intentionally a metaphor for adolescence?) Other possibilities are romantic intrigue, professional rivalry, politics, and moral dillemas.

People also seem to be discussing a third category, violence-agnostic games that treat violence as one of several possible sources of conflict within the game.

Russell

John Kim wrote:

Noon wrote: Using violence will say something about the character. While the game may seem a highly violent one, taking away violence from the game as a designer is saying 'No, your not allowed to say that about your character'. Which is a bit crap.

Well, this topic is about crap, then. Again, I'm not saying anything bad about violent games, I'm just looking for alternatives. Make another thread if you want to discuss whether non-violent games are a bad thing or not.

greyorm wrote: Where's a game that has social interaction mechanics that function just like combat? Or romantic relationship mechanics?

Nathan P. wrote:
However, the reward factor for combat actions tends to be proportionally higher than for non-combat, in my experience.

J B Bell wrote: conflicts would be about, as you say, building respect, learning, communicating, and otherwise meeting human needs in positive ways. "Losing" would happen if one is unable to negotiate around the human stuff of feelings, needs, and communicating clearly, while avoiding the triggers that get implanted by previous experiences of violence (physical or not).

For Noon's point, as I requested, I'm taking it out to a GNS thread: Is non-violence bad for Narrativism.

Russell: I pretty much agree with your categories. The topic is indeed non-violent games -- meaning games which in practice don't have a lot of violence. The method of how that is accomplished is open. As I said, it is fairly trivial to put in penalties for violence, but that doesn't make the game interesting.

Furthermore, simply taking combat mechanics and putting non-violent labels onto it is not very compelling. For example, several games push a model of interpersonal conflict. i.e. One character rolls against another. This may be fitting for cutthroat social climbing, but consider winning someone's respect or love. Who is the conflict against? I am often disturbed to see that such actions are handled as interpersonal conflict. This makes it losing to respect someone or to fall in love.

I would note that Breaking the Ice does model conflict at all per se. You are rolling to increase the level of attraction, but there is no mechanically expressed opposition. So you can fail to be attracted, but you are not 'beaten'.

MatrixGamer wrote:

J B Bell wrote: conflicts would be about, as you say, building respect, learning, communicating, and otherwise meeting human needs in positive ways. "Losing" would happen if one is unable to negotiate around the human stuff of feelings, needs, and communicating clearly, while avoiding the triggers that get implanted by previous experiences of violence (physical or not).

So a game aiming at abstracting behavior closer to the real life process will have to teach the players the steps of this social dance.
[...]
So what I'd ask us to think about is what are the actual stepd of the social dances we want to recreate? Then pick a level of abstraction that doesn't lose too much of the essence of what it is.

Are you looking for a specific solution, now, John? Or do you see that you've already discovered all of the options?

It's pretty easy - a game may

1. eliminate violence - this seems to solve your problem, no? Or do you dislike it for some reason?
2. disincentivize violence - apparently you say this doesn't make the game interesting. Well, probably not in a vaccuum. What's the rest of the game about? It seems that doing this is actually part of establishing some theme or premise in the game.
2. equalize incentive for violence with other incentive - This is standard "getting out of the way." This doesn't make non-violence more likely so much as it makes violence less likely.
4. incentivize non-violence - this is very similar to 2, but there can be cognative differences.

I mean, when it comes down to it, how you get non-violence is to make a game that supports non-violence in some ways. That's tautological, but how to make a game support something is, well, about all we talk about here. So where's the confusion?

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Are you looking for a specific solution, now, John? Or do you see that you've already discovered all of the options?

Mike Holmes wrote: It's pretty easy - a game may
1. eliminate violence - this seems to solve your problem, no? Or do you dislike it for some reason?
2. disincentivize violence - apparently you say this doesn't make the game interesting. Well, probably not in a vaccuum. What's the rest of the game about? It seems that doing this is actually part of establishing some theme or premise in the game.
3. equalize incentive for violence with other incentive - This is standard "getting out of the way." This doesn't make non-violence more likely so much as it makes violence less likely.
4. incentivize non-violence - this is very similar to 2, but there can be cognative differences.

Mike Holmes wrote: I mean, when it comes down to it, how you get non-violence is to make a game that supports non-violence in some ways. That's tautological, but how to make a game support something is, well, about all we talk about here. So where's the confusion?

John Kim wrote: Furthermore, simply taking combat mechanics and putting non-violent labels onto it is not very compelling. For example, several games push a model of interpersonal conflict. i.e. One character rolls against another. This may be fitting for cutthroat social climbing, but consider winning someone's respect or love. Who is the conflict against? I am often disturbed to see that such actions are handled as interpersonal conflict. This makes it losing to respect someone or to fall in love.

Heya John,

There are any number of computer games which are not focused around violence: such as romance/dating simulators, psychological thrillers, text-based adventures, etc. This is where my earlier contention that the rules beg to be played comes from.

When the option is present, chances are greater that it will be utilized. Even moreso when the option is rewarded. If the player gets something out of it, they will tend to do it more often.

Conversely, when the rules fail to cover a situation, that situation tends not to arise. Consider Monopoly: how often do you have the pieces fight each other? (Well, assuming you're a reasonably normal group of people playing Monopoly and not a bunch of twitching D&D geeks)

Hrm, which makes me wonder: is the problem games, or is the problem gamers?

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.

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?