Very interesting. I think deciding how brutal and realistic you want a campaign to be is in important question for session zero. There are some people there who just want to kill goblins while some players may in interested in the psychological effects of killing them.
Great callout. While the genre and game can really influence expectations in that regard, it's very useful to nail down how violence and death are to be treated at the table.
Even in a fantasy game like a D&D campaign, I try to present consequences. The humans in the community have been pushing into areas where goblins used to dwell, and when the goblins push back by attacking farmsteads or stealing livestock, the locals cry out for adventurers to come solve "the problem". The adventurers waltz in, wipe out some goblins, loot whatever trinkets they can find, and leave. While the adventurers go off to drink and celebrate the victory, the goblins start looking for ways to pay them back. After all, escalation calls for the same. Next thing you know, the nearby town experiences a quick raid and the local inn where the adventurers were staying is burned to the ground. The guards that showed up to fight off the goblin strike team were slain by what could only have been a troll.
"While the adventurers go off to drink and celebrate the victory, the goblins start looking for ways to pay them back." - I love it. Just as in our world, nothing happens in a vacuum.
Love this! Something I'm grappling with right now -- what do I want out of my violent conflict? Especially as I do more solo gaming, I'm further asking myself "To what extent do I want violence to change my relationships and interiority?" I think there's a corollary here with war: More and more, we're seeing the emergence of "war" as a theme in games, but not "How can we build a big badass army to defeat the enemy army?" -- rather, "How does war change culture, landscape, relationship?"
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. “What do I want out of my violent conflict” is one of those questions that really makes you think. In tabletop RPGs it’s like asking ducks to examine their feelings about ponds. We’re not used to thinking about it. I also appreciate your point about the effects of war. That gave me an idea for another video - war has a way of accelerating social, political, and economic changes in the broader context, and of course it changes individuals and their relationships with each other.
I'm going to have to check out Mutant: Year Zero. I've got a campaign I'm about ready to launch that heavily leans on the idea that our fantasy heroes, the PCs, can only play that role with the support of people around them. The common person can't face the perils of toppling oppressive governments, but they can fight in their own way through supporting the people who can. Additionally, as someone who loves combat as a sport, I also had to contend with the question of violence in my game. The current answer is that bringing a person down to 0HP puts them in a dying state, but after the battle is over, the PCs have to choose whether to ensure the person's survival, Kill them, or leave their life to fate (they will likely live with some form of debilitating injury). I found in many games that Killing is simply a consequence of getting into combat. And because combat is the most fun part of the game and because it is often a necessary part of the game, it really dulls the players aversion to violence within the game. My rule makes every kill a decision. I think it's a good start. But this video does have me considering if I want to include a sort of sacrificial mechanic - something you have to give up about your character (similar to Misspent Youth's Sell Out mechanics) - in order to really sell the damage that killing does to a person's psyche. Thanks for the video.
Great video! Too much game design energy goes into the technical physical detail of stuff like combat, but neglects that we, as humans, don't experience it that way. The scientific view of reality, with it's clouds of sub-atomic particles, physical constants and energy transference might be more 'accurate,' than the way our senses perceive it, but it will never be as _real_ to us. Realism in design might actually end up being less real in the way it feels, and become self-defeating. I look now for games that _feel_ real, not games that model reality better.
Thank you for the comment! Your point about the subjective experience of reality brings to mind the old saying, "It's your world, I'm just living in it." I find it almost humorous that sometimes games that are more "realistic" than others work for me, but others just don't. It depends on the genre and what sort of activity the game is supposed to support, but so much of it for me is also about how "accuracy" modeled one way just doesn't work as well as another approach.
This is one of the tenets of modern philosophy / psychoanalysis. Reality is something we build through symbols and images, (essentially narratives about our lives), but the REAL, is only ever experienced through earth shaking events (trauma, psychedelics, etc etc). We evolved a system to ignore the Real universe in order to get on with our lives. RPGs need to do the same
Is that from the Free League first edition, because I don’t remember that from the GDW first edition of Twilight 2000. That was a fantastic game, but the other players didn’t see it as a survival and rebuilding game like I did. I approached it from a tired old soldier perspective, while they went murder-hobo. It was like pulling teeth to get them not to attack every village or settlement they came across, while my Warsaw Pact officer was trying to build civilization back up, separate from Warsaw Pact or NATO command. That game ended because of it, never to be picked up again.
The Coolness Under Fire rules were there from the start in 1st edition, but the version of CUF I showed was from the Free League edition. That’s too bad that your group didn’t get into the rebuilding possibilities the way you did, but I suspect that was rather common. I actually wrote a post last year that touches on this: settingfirst.com/games/2023/07/03/the-once-and-future-twilight-2000.html
@@SettingFirstRPG It seems to be common in a lot of roleplaying games, even though the designers of the settings work so hard to fill in just enough for DMs and players fill in the rest. The players want to be the ranger Aragorn without ever actually wanting to be the king Aragorn, if that makes sense. They don’t realize that heroic adventures will come to them if all they want to do is settle down on their farm. It’s a type of storytelling that has been lost since the Odyssey and Beowulf were replaced by action movies. They don’t see the retired hero being reluctantly forced to strap on his armor again in those. Some of the best adventures come from going down the road to check on your neighbor because you saw smoke rising from his farm. You have skin in the game at that point.
Your point about giving PCs skin in the game is well taken. This is one of the things I like most about RuneQuest - it positions PCs in the world rather than assuming that they’re rootless wanderers. Those roots in community constrain the range of options, but I’m a big believer in the power of constraints in encouraging creativity. They also, as you noted, help to bring adventure to the PCs.
@@SettingFirstRPG There was a page in one of the old AD&D Forgotten Realms books that really hit home for me. I can’t remember if it was for Daggerdale or Daggerford, but it listed off the names of all of the local farmers and said whether they were given a spear, dagger or some other armor or weapon. It was a militia list for the local farms, because at the end of every entry it said “Oath taken”. That was the point where I started asking about the weapons the orcs were carrying, not their coins. Anything that could be salvaged, refurbished or resized got loaded onto the pack horses. The DM caught on quick when I started using my coins I couldn’t carry to build up the local blacksmith and bowyer’s shops and houses. Over the course of about four years of game time, the other players never caught on. They saw the frontier village getting bigger, but it all hit them when they finally had to ask the DM who was the leader of the village because an orc horde was coming that we couldn’t handle on our own and he just pointed at me and said “him.” That’s when it hit them that I never erased coins when I bought horses, arrows or stayed in the inn. They thought I was trading the old crap we were taking off the orcs for those things. The DM and I did a lot outside of the sessions, so they never caught on that when I “bought” gear, I was collecting taxes. They never caught on that when we accompanied a caravan to the next town, those goods we were protecting were mine. They never saw the local lord was sitting there at the table with them, not in some faraway castle. Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny. I did almost the exact same thing a couple campaigns later in 3e playing a goblin fighter/rogue that I called a “merchant” when they asked what class I was playing. They never caught on that I was pocketing the choicest gems out of every stash and I bought the inn that had that cellar chock full of rats that were so tasty. The DM and I played up the wretched conditions in that cellar, because to a goblin, that was a presidential suite, underground and full of tasty foods, with a back entrance that opened out into a sewer tunnel. It was the same group, the same DM and I tricked them almost the exact same way, but they liked that I let them have most of my share of the coins. None of it is dependent on the system. It’s all on the player. You can do it with any game system in any world. For Shadowrun, I convinced the GM to let me extend the lifetime lifestyle rules as a stock portfolio of sorts. Every 100 Nguyen I stuck in paid out 1 per month. Every time we made a big score, I stuck money away as a “retirement fund”. Every month when I got money out of it, I stuck more into it. I was playing the face character and the money man of the group on top of being the magical support. It never dawned on them until I got caught by Lone Star and all my permits were in order, so they released me.
@@almitrahopkins1873 "Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny." Amen to that. I'll bet your GMs appreciated you putting those long-term plans in-motion, too, because it demonstrates that you're really thinking about your character's place in the game world rather than just waiting for things to come along.
I had some trouble understanding the video. Are you advocating for trauma and psychological consequences to combat, or to throw it out in keeping with fantasy? I'm sorry for not getting it, I'd like to be able to grasp what the intention was here to better myself.
I'm not advocating for anything per se, but in my experience if the intention of a game is to present a "realistic" treatment of combat (e.g., Twilight: 2000), then psychological factors should play a part. In a fantasy setting in which realism isn't a primary factor (e.g., Star Wars), exploring the psychological consequences of combat could actually get in the way.
I concur to most of your conclusions here, I just think you miss a little piece regarding Star Wars and Andor in particular. Killing seems to become easier if you other the opposition, and stormtroopers who are by the nature of the uniformity of their appearances are intrinsically dehumanised and thus reduce the threshold to rationalise them as the other away. Sure, that often is also done like you said by cults, especially targeting adolescent males like you said, but with fiction that has intrinsically evil entities that transfer to any other outgroup becomes easy. Which is why I find that trope of evil orcs in fantasy so pernicious, since it teaches young readers and gamers that if something is different then it is okay to kill it.
Agreed. Dehumanizing the enemy is a necessary ingredient in getting your side to kill that enemy. It’s also certainly easier when you don’t see the enemy’s faces. And to your point, once you make an opponent intrinsically evil, it’s far easier to kill them and feel OK about it. That’s why in the canon Star Wars galaxy I don’t think we’ll ever see any Rebels bemoaning all the Imperial infantry they just killed, even those who weren’t hidden behind masks.
Very interesting. I think deciding how brutal and realistic you want a campaign to be is in important question for session zero. There are some people there who just want to kill goblins while some players may in interested in the psychological effects of killing them.
Great callout. While the genre and game can really influence expectations in that regard, it's very useful to nail down how violence and death are to be treated at the table.
I'm glad to see more people adding nuance to their tables in these kinds of ways. Adding more texture and deliberate thought to some games.
Really appreciate the comment. Thank you.
Even in a fantasy game like a D&D campaign, I try to present consequences. The humans in the community have been pushing into areas where goblins used to dwell, and when the goblins push back by attacking farmsteads or stealing livestock, the locals cry out for adventurers to come solve "the problem". The adventurers waltz in, wipe out some goblins, loot whatever trinkets they can find, and leave. While the adventurers go off to drink and celebrate the victory, the goblins start looking for ways to pay them back. After all, escalation calls for the same. Next thing you know, the nearby town experiences a quick raid and the local inn where the adventurers were staying is burned to the ground. The guards that showed up to fight off the goblin strike team were slain by what could only have been a troll.
"While the adventurers go off to drink and celebrate the victory, the goblins start looking for ways to pay them back." - I love it. Just as in our world, nothing happens in a vacuum.
Coolness Under Fire was the most amazing statistic ever!
That’s the old “morale” check in AD&D applied to PCs.
I could not love this more. You put names and history to game mechanics I have created or endeavored to create for years. Absolutely kick ass.
Hey, thank you for that comment. I really appreciate it, and I’m glad you liked the video.
This is a very enjoyable video essay. I am glad I found it, and thanks for making it~
Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate the comment, and I'm glad you liked the vid.
Very thoughtful video. Good job!
Thank you!
Love your stuff so far! I love the philosophical approach to these things! Keep doing what you're doing
🤘
Thank you! I'm happy you like it, and I appreciate the feedback.
Love this! Something I'm grappling with right now -- what do I want out of my violent conflict? Especially as I do more solo gaming, I'm further asking myself "To what extent do I want violence to change my relationships and interiority?"
I think there's a corollary here with war: More and more, we're seeing the emergence of "war" as a theme in games, but not "How can we build a big badass army to defeat the enemy army?" -- rather, "How does war change culture, landscape, relationship?"
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. “What do I want out of my violent conflict” is one of those questions that really makes you think. In tabletop RPGs it’s like asking ducks to examine their feelings about ponds. We’re not used to thinking about it. I also appreciate your point about the effects of war. That gave me an idea for another video - war has a way of accelerating social, political, and economic changes in the broader context, and of course it changes individuals and their relationships with each other.
Lots of good points! I am glad I found your video in my feed.
Thank you! Glad you liked it.
I'm going to have to check out Mutant: Year Zero. I've got a campaign I'm about ready to launch that heavily leans on the idea that our fantasy heroes, the PCs, can only play that role with the support of people around them. The common person can't face the perils of toppling oppressive governments, but they can fight in their own way through supporting the people who can. Additionally, as someone who loves combat as a sport, I also had to contend with the question of violence in my game. The current answer is that bringing a person down to 0HP puts them in a dying state, but after the battle is over, the PCs have to choose whether to ensure the person's survival, Kill them, or leave their life to fate (they will likely live with some form of debilitating injury). I found in many games that Killing is simply a consequence of getting into combat. And because combat is the most fun part of the game and because it is often a necessary part of the game, it really dulls the players aversion to violence within the game. My rule makes every kill a decision. I think it's a good start. But this video does have me considering if I want to include a sort of sacrificial mechanic - something you have to give up about your character (similar to Misspent Youth's Sell Out mechanics) - in order to really sell the damage that killing does to a person's psyche. Thanks for the video.
Thanks for the thoughtful note.
Great video! Too much game design energy goes into the technical physical detail of stuff like combat, but neglects that we, as humans, don't experience it that way. The scientific view of reality, with it's clouds of sub-atomic particles, physical constants and energy transference might be more 'accurate,' than the way our senses perceive it, but it will never be as _real_ to us. Realism in design might actually end up being less real in the way it feels, and become self-defeating. I look now for games that _feel_ real, not games that model reality better.
Thank you for the comment! Your point about the subjective experience of reality brings to mind the old saying, "It's your world, I'm just living in it."
I find it almost humorous that sometimes games that are more "realistic" than others work for me, but others just don't. It depends on the genre and what sort of activity the game is supposed to support, but so much of it for me is also about how "accuracy" modeled one way just doesn't work as well as another approach.
This is one of the tenets of modern philosophy / psychoanalysis. Reality is something we build through symbols and images, (essentially narratives about our lives), but the REAL, is only ever experienced through earth shaking events (trauma, psychedelics, etc etc). We evolved a system to ignore the Real universe in order to get on with our lives. RPGs need to do the same
Nice talk. Too many people throw out all logic and even retcon history just because its a game about gnomes and magic.
Is that from the Free League first edition, because I don’t remember that from the GDW first edition of Twilight 2000.
That was a fantastic game, but the other players didn’t see it as a survival and rebuilding game like I did. I approached it from a tired old soldier perspective, while they went murder-hobo. It was like pulling teeth to get them not to attack every village or settlement they came across, while my Warsaw Pact officer was trying to build civilization back up, separate from Warsaw Pact or NATO command. That game ended because of it, never to be picked up again.
The Coolness Under Fire rules were there from the start in 1st edition, but the version of CUF I showed was from the Free League edition. That’s too bad that your group didn’t get into the rebuilding possibilities the way you did, but I suspect that was rather common. I actually wrote a post last year that touches on this: settingfirst.com/games/2023/07/03/the-once-and-future-twilight-2000.html
@@SettingFirstRPG It seems to be common in a lot of roleplaying games, even though the designers of the settings work so hard to fill in just enough for DMs and players fill in the rest. The players want to be the ranger Aragorn without ever actually wanting to be the king Aragorn, if that makes sense.
They don’t realize that heroic adventures will come to them if all they want to do is settle down on their farm. It’s a type of storytelling that has been lost since the Odyssey and Beowulf were replaced by action movies. They don’t see the retired hero being reluctantly forced to strap on his armor again in those. Some of the best adventures come from going down the road to check on your neighbor because you saw smoke rising from his farm. You have skin in the game at that point.
Your point about giving PCs skin in the game is well taken. This is one of the things I like most about RuneQuest - it positions PCs in the world rather than assuming that they’re rootless wanderers. Those roots in community constrain the range of options, but I’m a big believer in the power of constraints in encouraging creativity. They also, as you noted, help to bring adventure to the PCs.
@@SettingFirstRPG There was a page in one of the old AD&D Forgotten Realms books that really hit home for me. I can’t remember if it was for Daggerdale or Daggerford, but it listed off the names of all of the local farmers and said whether they were given a spear, dagger or some other armor or weapon. It was a militia list for the local farms, because at the end of every entry it said “Oath taken”.
That was the point where I started asking about the weapons the orcs were carrying, not their coins. Anything that could be salvaged, refurbished or resized got loaded onto the pack horses. The DM caught on quick when I started using my coins I couldn’t carry to build up the local blacksmith and bowyer’s shops and houses. Over the course of about four years of game time, the other players never caught on. They saw the frontier village getting bigger, but it all hit them when they finally had to ask the DM who was the leader of the village because an orc horde was coming that we couldn’t handle on our own and he just pointed at me and said “him.”
That’s when it hit them that I never erased coins when I bought horses, arrows or stayed in the inn. They thought I was trading the old crap we were taking off the orcs for those things. The DM and I did a lot outside of the sessions, so they never caught on that when I “bought” gear, I was collecting taxes. They never caught on that when we accompanied a caravan to the next town, those goods we were protecting were mine. They never saw the local lord was sitting there at the table with them, not in some faraway castle.
Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny.
I did almost the exact same thing a couple campaigns later in 3e playing a goblin fighter/rogue that I called a “merchant” when they asked what class I was playing. They never caught on that I was pocketing the choicest gems out of every stash and I bought the inn that had that cellar chock full of rats that were so tasty. The DM and I played up the wretched conditions in that cellar, because to a goblin, that was a presidential suite, underground and full of tasty foods, with a back entrance that opened out into a sewer tunnel. It was the same group, the same DM and I tricked them almost the exact same way, but they liked that I let them have most of my share of the coins.
None of it is dependent on the system. It’s all on the player. You can do it with any game system in any world.
For Shadowrun, I convinced the GM to let me extend the lifetime lifestyle rules as a stock portfolio of sorts. Every 100 Nguyen I stuck in paid out 1 per month. Every time we made a big score, I stuck money away as a “retirement fund”. Every month when I got money out of it, I stuck more into it. I was playing the face character and the money man of the group on top of being the magical support. It never dawned on them until I got caught by Lone Star and all my permits were in order, so they released me.
@@almitrahopkins1873 "Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny." Amen to that. I'll bet your GMs appreciated you putting those long-term plans in-motion, too, because it demonstrates that you're really thinking about your character's place in the game world rather than just waiting for things to come along.
Woah a fellow Santa Cruzian!
Represent!
I expected your viewer count to have a couple more zeroes on the end of it.
Thanks!
I had some trouble understanding the video. Are you advocating for trauma and psychological consequences to combat, or to throw it out in keeping with fantasy? I'm sorry for not getting it, I'd like to be able to grasp what the intention was here to better myself.
I'm not advocating for anything per se, but in my experience if the intention of a game is to present a "realistic" treatment of combat (e.g., Twilight: 2000), then psychological factors should play a part. In a fantasy setting in which realism isn't a primary factor (e.g., Star Wars), exploring the psychological consequences of combat could actually get in the way.
I concur to most of your conclusions here, I just think you miss a little piece regarding Star Wars and Andor in particular. Killing seems to become easier if you other the opposition, and stormtroopers who are by the nature of the uniformity of their appearances are intrinsically dehumanised and thus reduce the threshold to rationalise them as the other away. Sure, that often is also done like you said by cults, especially targeting adolescent males like you said, but with fiction that has intrinsically evil entities that transfer to any other outgroup becomes easy. Which is why I find that trope of evil orcs in fantasy so pernicious, since it teaches young readers and gamers that if something is different then it is okay to kill it.
Agreed. Dehumanizing the enemy is a necessary ingredient in getting your side to kill that enemy. It’s also certainly easier when you don’t see the enemy’s faces. And to your point, once you make an opponent intrinsically evil, it’s far easier to kill them and feel OK about it. That’s why in the canon Star Wars galaxy I don’t think we’ll ever see any Rebels bemoaning all the Imperial infantry they just killed, even those who weren’t hidden behind masks.
@@SettingFirstRPG Like the TMNT where the foot were robots