The discussion on the horribly named thread brought a question to mind. But before I get to the question there are three caveats.

   1) Just to be clear, I agree with what the poster, Ravenswing, wrote in several posts and have no substantive disagreement with what he said.

2) I may be attributing more to Ravenswing's comment on violence than he intended. If so, sorry Ravenswing. If it helps, just think of this as me using your post as a handy starter for a different conversation.

3) I'd like this not to turn into a discussion of One Shelf, Censorship, or game materials with "rape" in the title. We already have a couple of those threads. I'm just curious about how violence is dealt with at your table.

So here is the part of the post that caught my interest.

Quote from: Ravenswing;852131Many GMs freely admit "fading to black" for mushy scenes, let alone sexual scenes, but I've yet to see a single gamer advocate "fading to black" when it comes to taking out the enemy in battle.

Is that your game experience? Does your group go into a lot of detail regarding the violence in game?

I ask because it is not mine. Actually fading to black (or red really) for violence is common in my experience. A detailed and clinical discussion of exactly what happens when you kill someone would gross out most gamers I know including me. The violence that I usually see in RPGs falls somewhere between 1960 TV Westerns where people get shot and fall down without any blood and often without even a bullet hole and something like "you cut his head off" with maybe an added, "and it bounces over towards the other orcs who look frightened." The limb removing results in Runequest 2 grossed out some players enough that we never felt the need to add blood sprays or intestines spilling out or other such details. Nor are those things I've often in other people's games either.

We used to play RoleMaster back in the day, and colourful descriptions of injury are common there but not actually gory descriptions in my opinion. Occasionally we might have graphic descriptions of injury in other games, usually accompanying a particularly decisive blow from a 'martial' focussed character.

We also have several martial artists in the group, so violence (thankfully theoretical violence - none have actual street fighting in their past) is something we are mostly familiar and comfortable with. Also factor in that we all come from a war gaming background, so playing combat encounters does double duty for us - tactical gaming as well as RPing.

I would mostly agree with your classification as PG-13 style violence, with occasional dips into R, or however the U.S. system classifies films. We have 12A, 15 and 18 here in the UK. Violence runs the spread with a 40/40/20 split in our group. So some glossed over, some with more detail but no gore, and a smaller part with gruesome detail when it makes sense and adds to the game.

We play RuneQuest, so limbs being smashed or lopped off, heads rolling and people being cut in half is a part of the game. While we do not glory in it, we do enjoy slicing off a hand or a head now and again.

We don't have fountains of blood, unless it is important in the game.

So, yes, we describe the effects of violence, but don't go into more detail than "his leg is crushed" or "Your arm is severed". If important, we roll 1D100 to determine where and how much of a limb is mangled. For a man, a strike to the 09 might be important, depending on what was actually hit ...

It depends on the group and the game of course.

I like horror a lot and I've described some very gory stuff... but generally gore isn't scary and I aim for 'disturbing' instead... though a gory death scene can sometimes give PCs a 'That could have been me!' moment... or, done early on, color expectations of more gore to follow and put images in their heads that don't require further description.

Our DCC gm has the Player whose PC delivers the killing blow describe the death... sometimes it's just 'I cut off his head!' and other times it's much more wet.

The vast majority of the time, though, it's just 'he falls dead' or 'you run him through'... not, I think, to avoid gore so much as to speed things along. A gory description for every death in the average RPG would become redundant pretty fast.
My preference is for using gory descriptions when they serve a purpose and not dwelling on them when they don't.

We have a player who tends to treat the violence his character inflicts in an over-the-top, pulpy/cartoon/comic book manner, and we usually all laugh when he does.

Hearing about somebody being hit so hard that their brain comes flying out their ass tends to draw a round of chuckles, for example.

The rest of us just say "you drop that guy, the next one moves in to hit," etc.

It comes down to the game and group. If I am running Call of Cthulhu, I am going to make things gorier. In a typical Savage Worlds setting, I will go easy on descriptions of gore. RuneQuest lies somewhere in between.

The people in the game and the mood plays a part too. Even if I am running a horror game, I will tone it down if someone present is going to be uncomfortable. Conversely, a game that I don't usually run as violent might end up that way if that is the mood of the group.

Basically, I am flexible on the issue.

Hmmm. Unless it is actually important to the game, I don't describe injuries at all. Usually I say "the target goes down" or something like that, though an extraordinary hit gets "Shot him right in the head, that one is dead." There is a big difference, because most people who go down in my games are not actually dead, though they can bleed out if untended. Usually killing someone is a conscious choice - putting a pistol to the back of the head of a helpless, surrendered prisoner and squeezing the trigger type deliberate - so, murder really. It's actually quite rare except the bleed out thing. Usually the detail comes in as the doctors try to heal the wounded.

-clash

We don't fade to black for violence. How descriptive we get depends on the campaign. I find in my wuxia game a bit of extra detail helps.

After D&D, my next games that were regularly played were Runequest and Warhammer. In both of those lopping off limbs was probably the most fun part in combat. Nowadays I stay away from the most gory descriptions, not that myself or any of my players would be squeamish about those, but because I feel that they have been done to death already. At the moment I GM Warhammer 2nd edition, where the critical injury tables aren't as gross as they were in the 1st ed, and with another group I play HackMaster, where there is a d10,000 table for crit injuries, but anything we have seen so far hasn't been exactly gorefest. I haven't seen the table because it is in GM guide.

As a teenager much of my fun in combat was to imagine and describe the exact moves that were the results of random hit location rolls. Nowadays, not anymore.

I don't like overtly light treatments of violence. With some blatantly obvious exceptions, actual murder and mayhem should be a bit uncomfortable, even in fiction. As a logic consequence, at least for me, I neither like to shy away from violence nor treat as something particularly glorious - some stuff is better left inconvenient than trivialized. Unfortunately, I have met a few people too many who were not able or willing to differentiate between the lack of censorship of the inherent brutality of violence  and glorification on the other hand.

Quote from: Bren;852746Is that your game experience? Does your group go into a lot of detail regarding the violence in game?

I run GURPS at a high-detail level, so yes.  Not so much torture scenes , but only because those don't come up.  I also fade-to-black sexual stuff.

I like to keep violence in the fantasy world and sex in the real one.

It's definitely glossed over or toned down IMCs - "You kill him" is just as abstract as "You have sex with her". Some campaigns might be a bit more visceral but I'd never go for "you are there" realism, real lethal violence is shocking and horrible.

I like Robert E. Howard-level detail in my violence.

Quote from: Bren;852746...
 Originally Posted by Ravenswing View Post
Many GMs freely admit "fading to black" for mushy scenes, let alone sexual scenes, but I've yet to see a single gamer advocate "fading to black" when it comes to taking out the enemy in battle.
Is that your game experience? Does your group go into a lot of detail regarding the violence in game?

Well, we've had sex, but rarely graphic details of any kind. I've seen a GM or two get graphic in some ways, that generally seemed a bad idea and didn't go real well.

For violence, it was pretty violent to start with (using The Fantasy Trip) and got more detailed the more rules were added, because it actually matters in the combat system what's being done, in combat. Not so much out-of-combat torture or details of finishing people off except maybe after-the-fact descriptions, which were either for forensic purposes, establishing what characters were capable of, and/or shock value or moral reasons such as justification or religious themes (e.g. the Monks of Gleeb are non-violent except against people who break Gleeb's commandments...).

To give a taste of why graphic violence matters in TFT and GURPS combat, armor is detailed down to the body part and facing, and the effects of a weapon hit vary by weapon type, armor type, and body part. So you might try to get someone in the back to avoid their steel breastplate, go for particular places with less armor, hit their hand to disarm them, go for neck, eyes, organs, groin, etc., with appropriate effects if you do enough damage. And I prefer to describe the results in English rather than using game numbers, and so it's important to convey how hard someone is hitting, and how badly hurt someone is.

I also find that full descriptions of violence and human reactions to it are both immersive and get people relating to the results of their choices, rather than being morality-free game options. Yeah, it can be pretty horrible, but I find it more horrible when a game is about killing people but we pretend it's all sanitary and positive. It's more disturbing to me to have someone killed with an axe or machinegun and have a cheer and their counter removed, than it is to get a full description and have to step over the body, and/or have it still writhing around making horrible screams for a while.

Totally depends on the game and the PC in question.

I will fade to black on violence when it's going to be *really* bad. Usually in my WoD games. The only times where I really wanted to bring it home in terms of what the PC's were facing in WoD was when they were going up against the Baali - whom I use *very very very* rarely. To this day my players say those encounters/adventures were terrifying.

But normally I try to mirror my descriptions based on the general "style" of the PC in question alongside the genre of the game. If I'm doing one my D&D games and one of my PC's is a swashbuckler, he might run a mook through without me having to go into detail, and do it elegantly and efficiently, the description might pass muster enough to be filmed and shown on network TV - ala A-Team.

OR if the player wants to do the describing for the benefit of his fellow adventurers - I let him have at it.

If it's an over the top gritty D&D game - a swashbuckler might get a rooster-tail of red that hits everyone but him, while the barbarian is splitting fools in half with a  savage popping-noise of each rib as the blade cleaves his enemy in twain - with corresponding ridiculous results.

I play with adults - so sex is not a big deal for us. I'll fade to black just to keep the game moving, but I've certainly used sexual encounters to illustrate cultural differences. My Al-Qadim games have had rulers that have rewarded players, both male and female alike with sexual rewards (Harem access etc.). Do I get into gritty detail? Not really, but if it were on film it would probably be a hard-R rating ala GoT.

Same is true of my violence in my games. But I'll add - violence is not the sole purpose of my games either. It's there - for sure. I'm all about interesting conflict in context of the game. And yes, that means sex and violence are very much on the menu. And 'fading to black" is used equally as appropriate to the needs of pacing and what I think leaves a desired impression on my players by me-myself-and-I.