Rambling about Violence
Disclaimer: It's 5am. Need to get this out of my head and into text, but not necessarily my best attempt at explaining train of thought. Nonetheless, share thoughts in comments <3.
I've been thinking about my rapidly degrading mental health and my loved ones', and about the escalating violence surrounding us, and read a bunch (EDIT: here's the latest cause I keep forgetting to bookmark things) of blog posts about mental health in trpgs, and another bundle on combat mechanic, and it got me thinking about the mechanization of violence in trpgs, and agency.
In short: mental health is a difficult topic that is not (may not?) be depicted in a game in a way that is both comfortable (ie: fun as in ludism, engaging through player choice and agency) and realistic (respectful, empathtic to the reality upon which the tropes are based). You can't have your cake and eat it too. I don't mind Call of Cthulhu's mechanics in themselves but I remember feeling othered when I read a random personality quirk I could get in Mork Borg was "Bipolar". I think it would suck if I rolled randomly for PTSD in a horror game. Even though I would potentially be OK with channeling my own experience of mental illness in my characters or NPCs, it's still only one specific experience and you cannot have a unified system for representing that at a table with multiple players, let alone a codified ruleset to sell to a larger audience.
I got this easy solution, I like the Stress Dice form Orbital Decay, cause it only worries about short-term stress reaction and gives a prompt that takes away agency from players in an interesting way that they still portray themselves and by-the-book they only roll the Stress Dice when they think it would help in a fight-or-flight situation.
With combat, I think it's the same issue, but it's less obvious to a lot of us that it represents a set of potential issues? Or maybe it is very obvious but people don't talk about it, or if they do, I haven't seen a lot of discourse on it, compared to the mental illness articles.
Violence in tRPGs can be about the Outcome of violence (wargames, combat as fail-state, "unengaging" combat mechanics, etc) or about the Moment-to-Moment spectacle thereof (modern trad games, mostly). How you reach the Outcome, or what the Moment-to-Moment decision-making both focus on agency still ; in OSR/NSR/FKR we posit that nature of the adventure game is players making interesting choices. It could be "do you risk this fight" in OD&D, or "do we risk fighting another round" in Into the Odd, or treating an encounter as a puzzle like in Skorne, asking rather "how do we win, knowing our current parameters mean loss in X rounds".
All questions you can ask yourself and worry about on a ring, in a fight with rules, one on one, with a sparring partner or fellow competitor.
None of which you have the luxury of thinking about when someone comes at you with a knife.
I've only experienced a few real life fights and they don't feel like competition at all, at the risk of sounding really obvious, but who knows. The line between victim and survivor is also fairly blurry, even when coming out on top, whatever that means; over time, I've grown to gracefully accept and even embrace disengaging entirely and just getting the hell out even when I thought I could take on someone, because of a sense of responsibility towards myself, others, and the people that count on me, and being mostly worried about the Outcome of a potential fight - but even the choice of "do I fight or not" (rather than how) does not feel like much of a choice in reality. On a worse day I would have taken the bait and jumped that one guy, knowing his friend would beat the shit out of me still. In worse luck they would have cornered me in the first place and I wouldn't have had the choice.
So, the Surprise rule from Classic Traveller is excellent, and I think it works for civilians and apparently it works for military since I'm pretty sure the author drew from that too. It's like this:
Each party rolls d6, with +s on the advantaged side (smaller group, camouflage, noise control etc). Beating the roll by 3+ means you can decide whether to engage or avoid the encounter, and if ambushing them, you keep surprise until it is lost (ie: not just one free round but as many as you can get away with without someone alerting their friends).
But that's for handling one-sided decision-making before the actual engagement.
Cause during a fight, it's pretty much a mess. I imagine soldiers learn to operate under the threat of death with keener instincts and protocols to keep them more efficient, but even then it's not super interesting simulating the nitty-gritty of that, mainly it's the outcome we're interested in, and no matter how trained or skilled one is, there are external variables much more brutal than "are you scared" or "what kind of rifle do you have", anyone can get a lucky shot, and I think I read at various points that in both CQC (cops, gangs, or soldiers) and long distance like, insurgency type shit, people just get incapacitated or die seemingly at random. Same in a brawl. You stumble forward but your fist lands in their jaw in just the right angle. Or you have intentionality but they also got distracted at the perfect moment. Only on a ring are fights fair enough that this is an exception, rather than the rule.
So then mechanizing combat, rules-wise, if it is not going to be glorification or focused on engagement but rather on a form of simulation (one that focuses on the decision making happening before and after a fight), you might want to actively ignore or remove agency.
d6 / Outcome
1-2 = Casualties (if one-on-one, you die)
3-4 = Incapacitation (if one-on-one, you're maimed)
5-6 = Safe (if one-on-one, you're unscathed)
I'm not even certain there's a strict correlation between that and a theoritical "did you successfully do the bad thing to your enemy", I think there's that module out there, fighting and why it is horrible (EDIT: Thanks!) that gives you one roll to look at your state after the fight and one for the enemy?
I think we can't have both an engaging and fun and exciting set of rules for violence, even if it's Decisive like Into the Odd or minimal like OD&D, AND have it preserve agency.
I'm not keen on this much grain, and in Macabre I distilled OD&D alternative combat onto 2d6.
Going further we can do:
d6 / Result
1 / Miss
2 / Hit Unarmored Foe
3 / Hit Lightly Armored Foe
4 / Hit Armored Foe
5 / Hit Heavily Armored Foe
6 / Hit Near-Impervious Foe
If one-on-one, give 2d6 keep highest for advantage, 2d6 keep lowest for disadvantage, d6 othewise.
And then we have a second dice specifically for outcome type, because the binary "dead/alive" is not that interesting.
d6 / Casualty Type
1 / Stunned
2 / KO
4 / Wounded
5 / Maimed
6 / Killed
You can get fancy with it by having +heavy or +sharp weapons add to the casualty type roll.
I would only roll Casualty Type for relevant entities like named NPCs or PCs.
This leaves space for ad-hoc rulings for clever tactics and the likes, while keeping that sense that there are no Protagonists during combat that OD&D has.
hugely enjoying reading all this thinking here
ReplyDeleteI'm using something like this for my cowboys game and it's super fun. With guns involved I wanted to re-introduce the concept of to-hit rolls, to my Skorne/ItO spoiled table, but w/o HP it's insanely brutal (and fun).
DeleteI first wanted to say, this is a pretty interesting topic to be broached. Bringing up the scrutiny around "sanity mechanics" and then juxtaposing it against combat mechanics reminds me of a lot of other discussions about how so-and-so is justly or unjustly put under the microscope but violence is either unscathed or glorified. And like all those other discussions it really asks some fundamental questions about how we interact with media/RPGs are a type of media right?
ReplyDeleteThe talk about "removing agency" does make me a bit nervous though. In comparison to "trad" games, OSR/NSR/FKR games with more dangerous combat "remove agency" in the sense that permanent death is more of a threat, the average character is less durable, and they aren't particularly strong either. But agency is still preserved through stuff like Skorne's combat-as-puzzle or ItO's "hesitation period". They're concessions to the game from reality, as you point out, but they're here for the purpose of the game because it is a game. Like what you said about "dying seemingly at random". People die in car crashes all the time, but "it's a normal day with normal traffic, make a saving throw vs. driving, if you fail 1d6 characters in the car die" reads like a joke or arbitrary attempt to kill some PCs (even if it's a really really unlikely roll to fail), and most people would instead go by the standard "if you can do something, you do it unless there's adverse conditions (like severe weather or a sabotaged engine)". The rules for violence in Macabre and on this post are certainly more dangerous than Skorne and ItO (where dying in one hit is only possible in truly unusual circumstances as opposed to one hit being able to do it), but doesn't really read as "not preserving/removing agency" the same way Fighting And Why It Is Horrible does. I might just be missing something through.
And this is the less substantive comment on this post but there's no result #3 on the "Casualty Type" table.
First, nice catch about the table. It should read as:
Deleted6 / Casualty Type
1 / Stunned
2 / KO
3 / Wounded (Standing)
4 / Wounded (KO)
5 / Maimed
6 / Killed
I think this post can be taken as part of an informal series following my post on horror and disempowerment fantasy; or at least, it ought to make more sense if you look at that one before this one. Maybe?
Re-reading, I'm not entirely sure I used the right language to convey my meaning in the article. I think at that time I was sort of trying to leverage "agency preserving" as a substitute to a broader notion of combat as a fun interactive scene within an adventure game, and wanted to essentially put into question not the morality of that approach, but what I perceive as a potential dissonance between the practically very fun but perhaps "too fair" Skorne/ItO and say OD&D or Chainmail or Macabre.
ItO and Skorne feel like the combat itself can be exciting without being horrifying because you have so much power over the outcome.
In OD&D or Chainmail or the outlined system, the choice is "do I put myself in the situation where combat can happen", but past that it's mostly preparation and on the fly thinking that might influence the outcome, with luck possibly stating much more permanent results (ie: "you died" is as likely as "you're fine"). These are certainly also fun, IMO, otherwise we would not play B/X or 3LBB D&D or Classic Traveller. But they're a different vibe. It's not (to me) about whether one way is more "mature" or "responsible" or whatnot, but the older systems certainly feel to me more accepting of unjust death of PCs or whoever else as a regular feature that leads to people avoiding fights/treating them as a terrible prospect. I feel like I'm rambling and better posts on the topic exist, I'd recommend "Boot Hill and the fear of dice" for example. I hope I made somewhat more sense with the comment.
Funnily enough I think I read Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice about a week before I made this comment. A good read. And I've also read your posts on disempowerment and such. The point is, I'm definitely picking up what you're putting down now.
DeleteIn my mind when I read "removal of agency" the first time around, I was envisioning some sort of Nightmare Hell World scenario like a couple of systems I've seen where you can only define your approach and everything after that is a crapshoot-type cutscene. I understand now that it's more like a raising of the stakes or a removal of "padding", so the risks in combat are more "I might die" instead of "I might get hurt". Which in addition to being the particular accusation being levied at ItO & Skorne, is also pretty pertinent for a survival horror game, like Macabre, or a more brutal than average adventure game, like Macabre.
Definitely sparks some more thoughts in me, but it's beyond the scope of this comment section or post. I do appreciate the elaboration though, good discussion.
I don't know if I'd call them "accusations", as these are two really well designed games that work really well at what they're trying to do; but yeah it's the lack of padding I was thinking of, better wording
Delete