Verisimilitude & Violence in Tabletop Roleplaying 

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.

Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate the comment, and I'm glad you liked the vid.

Thank you!

"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.

Thanks for the thoughtful note.

That’s the old “morale” check in AD&D applied to PCs.

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.

Thanks!

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

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.

Thank you! I'm happy you like it, and I appreciate the feedback.

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.

Hey, thank you for that comment. I really appreciate it, and I’m glad you liked the video.

Thank you! Glad you liked it.

Represent!

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