Splatterpunk levels is where I start to fade to black for convenience sake, unless that is part of mood (or "player therapy" where they need to vent). But the violence, like the sex, is for the most part there. Fictional life, if I wanted it to be respected and humane, should be rendered as faithfully as I can. If that means squeamish scenes, so be it.

However I understand the comment. Whereas sex bubbles up all these social mores at tables, violence is often vomited forth like a slot machine hitting the jackpot. It is obviously tied to acceptable cultural attitudes in some way, so I strive to keep my games as open to all grit. Often that even-handedness and follow-up consequences ends up with players curbing their bloodthirst. Mourning orphans and screaming widows tends to mollify such excesses of "adventure" and "heroism."

I game with mixed age and mixed comfort level groups so my games tend to be hard PG. For darker games I will pull out all the stops on violence if that is what the group wants.

Curiously our most violent character is a halfling played by my 11 year old daughter who takes great delight in going all stabby-stabby on the goblins with her daggers.

I do not shy from describing the consequences of violence, it should be  anasty business, but I don't see the need to gross out my players.

Quote from: Bren;852746The 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.


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.

IME, gamers as a whole are much more comfortable with violence even extremes of violence than other adult subject matter. I've been gaming for 30 yrs with many groups and I can't recall a single time there's been a call for a "Fade to Black" on violence. The stories I've heard recounted fondly of what would be, well atrocities, in the real world (especially from games like Vampire) are numerous and overall the "Its just imaginary" seems to work much better with violence. Stories of extreme violence are often called epic while stories of, for example, romance can get you weird looks or the creepy label. Of course there are exceptions both ways, extremely graphic gratuitous torture for example.

And more than frequent violence in rpgs, IME, tends to be ridiculously casual. PCs resort to lethal combat over trivial things though some of this is a system artifact since the mechanics sometimes make all violence "to the death" or close to it.

As others have said, it depends on the game and the group. I tend to not go in to graphic detail on sex or violence unless it would have provided something beyond mere spectacle, like an important clue or role-playing opportunity. We currently game in a FLGS which has a regular Pokemon group of kids in the next room over, so we keep it PG-13.

As a Player, I find graphic detail to be annoying. Usually the provider of the graphic detail is the GM and their idea of what is a cool visual for a particular scene often is not my idea would be. I don't need to know if my character has killed the orc in a particularly gruesome manner if my character is concerned with the other 50 orcs still alive and ready to fight, I just want to get on with the game.

How would you do "fade to black" violence?

But all I really want to know is "is that other bugger still trying to kill me or not?"

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;852926How would you do "fade to black" violence?

Blow out all the torches. Followed by blind-fighting.

QuoteBut all I really want to know is "is that other bugger still trying to kill me or not?"

Which sounds like you gloss over the latest violence rather than fleshing it out fully or dwelling on it so as to get on to the next problem.

Fade to black when cannibalism starts on a helpless major character in a game.

Fade to black when an entire family is murdered (see Nicholas II).

Fade to black when someone is thrown into a pit that has teeth.

My group doesn't fade out to black on violence, and how detailed that violence is, depends on the game...

In a typical Dungeons and Dragons game, we go with "Heroic Gore" Monsters get their heads cleaved off, limbs removed and the like...Think Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings...PC's are instead heroically stabbed where they may bleed dramatically but don't end up with spilling entrails...

In my Superhero games, things don't even get that graphic. The most that happens is bloody noses and bruised faces...Unless the Villain is a serial killer type, and even then unless I'm going for a gritty Iron Age Feel, we don't get to graphic..

World of Darkness I go into every loving detail of violence. Limbs breaking, noses crushed, entrails, crying, shitting themselves, pissing themselves, every gory explicit detail as it's a horror game and most of the time the PC's are the monsters...I like them to be able to see what they accomplish. Sometimes this leads to giggling at the table (Like when one of my female players did in fact decide to castrate a gang member who was inappropriate toward her) and other times it leads to "oh god, I didn't mean to do that!" followed by me going "You rolled 8 levels of Damage and they couldn't soak any of it, what did you think was going to happen?"

Most of my sex scenes fade to black...MOST...In Exalted, they never did. It wasn't letters to Penthouse but I made sure we knew what the details of the seduction and romance scenes were in the spirit of Anime...My players made a drinking game based off of accomplishing certain actions in those scenes... One of my favorites was when the bisexual male party Eclipse dressed as a woman and used charms to seduce a straight NPC and make them completely believe it was a woman in order to secure his help...and the female Zenith seducing a getting a fat walrus Lunar, leader of the Guild to cum without ever having to do any form of penetration..

I should note, my player group has been playing together for years and we are very comfortable with one another.

Oh, no, Bren, I don't mind at all you running with my comment for a new thread.  Discussion is what we do here, after all.

By way of clarification, though, I want to expand on my "fade to black" citation.  In a majority of those scenes involving sex, it's at the level of "I take X into the tent, and we come out three hours later."  That's not only nowhere near close to being explicit, there's no overt mention that the characters are having sex at all.  It's all at the implied "yeah, we know what they're doing back there, and it's not discussing the next day's route march, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more" level, and that's the comfort zone for at least the majority of gamers.

I don't know of a single RPG that does this for combat.  No "Okay, we attack them" "Okay, make a roll ... great, you defeat them" level of sanitization.  Even with the simplest of combat systems, you still have to engage an enemy with a weapon, inflict damage upon him, do that often enough to defeat him, and all of that explicitly and on-screen.

That's what I meant.

From the table to the conventions, to the online. So far I have not ever met anyone who wanted to fade to black on anything. They all want to play out every little aspect and that is fine with me.

Sounds like there is some variety in how people describe, or do not describe, the results fo violence in game.

Quote from: Ravenswing;852966That's what I meant.

I knew that I might well be stretching your meaning. But it worked for discussion purposes. Thanks for understanding.

I've seen/used a range for sex. From incredibly euphemistic language like "I take X into the tent, and we come out three hours later" or Monty-Pythonesque juvenile euphemisms a la 'nudge-nudge, wink-wink" where sex is implied but never stated to something where there is a bit of detail, especially of the seduction, a clear statement that yes indeed erotic activities including actual sex are occurring and an indication in general qualitative terms about how the participants felt about the encounter. The latter is, to my mind, pretty close to how a lot of people say they treat the violence. We know who did what in general terms, what the outcome was, but the gritty details are left out or to the imagination of the various participants.

On the violence side, here's a write-up from a bit of our last Honor+Intrigue session. To set the scene the PCs are a group of Cardinal Richelieu's Red Guards who have been ordered to escort three Capuchins to Marseilles. On the way, the stop in Arles to go to mass for Easter and to enjoy the festivities.

QuoteThe Red Guards escorted their Capuchin charges to the Archbishop’s box to watch the Easter Corrida. While standing at attention, Cobweb noticed that one of the bulls in the arena was the black bull that tried to gore him during the Encierro. The group was entertained by the bull dancing of the skillful Arles matadors. But after only a few bulls have appeared, a sudden and storm interrupted the festivities with strong winds and violent thunderstorms—the Mistral had arrived! The Archbishop’s mitre sailed off in the gale as everyone grabbed their hats and hurried inside out of the sudden storm.

During the distraction an assassin leaped out from a side door to and attacked the Archbishop. His efforts were foiled by Jean-Yves who leapt between the assassin and the archbishop and Cobweb, who though he sustained a wound while grappling for the dagger, was able to prevent the assassin from striking. The giant Norbert gang tackled the assassin and his two fellow guards taking everyone to the ground. Norbert grabbed the assassin’s wrist, and angered by the sight of his comrade’s blood, he deliberately broke the assassin’s forearm with a sickening SNAP!

The would-be assassin howled in pain…

I would classify the sickening SNAP and the howl of pain as a moderate level of detail for violence. A few scenes will get more detail, many will get less e.g. 'you wrestle the dagger away from him, breaking his forearm in the process." Which violence gets which treatment varies by system, attack roll/result, player interest/tolerance, tone of the game, and GM whim.

In this case the player said her character was angry; her character is the size of Andre the Giant and is incredibly strong - one of the strongest men in France; and she rolled a Mighty Success (a critical in H+I). The combination called for a stronger description. Since the player has said she is uncomfortable with torture, I stopped at that level of violence rather than talking about compound fractures, shattered bone projecting thru the skin, blood dripping, eyes rolling up into the victim's head, etc.

We allow the player to narrate deaths, so the group tends to adjust itself to the level of violence and gore that works for the day and mood and game.

Ditto for romance and sex, btw.

Quote from: Ravenswing;852966
I don't know of a single RPG that does this for combat.  No "Okay, we attack them" "Okay, make a roll ... great, you defeat them" level of sanitization.  Even with the simplest of combat systems, you still have to engage an enemy with a weapon, inflict damage upon him, do that often enough to defeat him, and all of that explicitly and on-screen.

Actually, Wordplay and FATE can do this, for combats which are a simple contest, as can HeroQuest. All 3 of these don't tend to detail conflict of any kind and leave it to the players/GM to narrate.

Since we narrate more trad rpgs in a similar way we have been known to montage and narrate combats even in D&D when we wanted to move the plot along rather than fighting every single blow.

We do.  Always have.  " You hit, you do six points of damage, he' s dead."

Period.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;853022We do.  Always have.  " You hit, you do six points of damage, he' s dead."

Period.

This is what combat has most often looked like in all the games I've played. Pretty antiseptic. Genre doesn't really matter. Orcs with swords or aliens with blast rifles, it's the same.

Even in games with hit location tables, it's "take 3 hits to your right arm".

It has always amused me that combat, which in real life is pretty exciting/terrifying can be bland and boring in an RPG.