Men’s Rights Redditor: Beware the stealth Sarkeesians infiltrating our industries!

Re: violence and RPGs.

I’m strictly analog when it come to role-playing games, so I don’t have much direct experience with vids.

However, I once conducted an experiment to see if it was possible to run a completely pacifist player character through an entire D&D campaign. I built him in the 3.5 edition rules set using the Book Of Exalted Deeds supplement. “Suvartha” began as a rogue with the Vow Of Poverty, Vow Of Nonviolence, and Vow Of Peace feats, and eventually multi-classed a bit in sorcerer, but chose nothing but charm-type magic (this was meant to represent the use of satyagraha in a fantasy setting; his “soul-force” could influence others to do good, as well).

The other players were baffled at first (not least because his nickname was “Su,” followed by a lot snickering Johnny Cash jokes), but he wound up becoming one of the most effective members of the party, and was often the face of the group in social and political situations. Eventually, I began to notice the players looking for non- or less violent solutions to challenges all on their own.

Sadly, the campaign never reached its end-point, but it was fun and interesting while it lasted. I think it got some players to think twice, at least in the moment, about the value of violence as a means of conflict resolution. One of them even went out and learned more about Gandhi. 🙂

@Robert

My personal favorite was when I’d get my Culture rating so high, cities on my borders would revolt and request to join my civ.

I love when that happens!

I wasn’t aware that you could turn combat off. I often end up losing a city or two if Tokugawa or Montezuma are on the map, because they always declare war on me and I’m usually too busy building culture buildings to have a decent army.

kiki, I’ve played the new tomb raider, you get there after you find the climbing axe. Then it’s a lot of that.

I personally loved the new tomb raider. I liked that she freaked out after the first person she kills, I loved that I could play it without having to be super good at gaming (I’m terrible at gaming, even though I do it often), and I was actually continuously interested in it throughout and finished the game. It’s one of the few games I’ve finished. I find I get disinterested in games really quickly if I get from one plot point to another plot point and I’ve forgotten why I was getting there because there was too much grinding or combat along the way. It also wasn’t too tense for me, and no real “BOO” moments I can think of so that was super nice. It is super um… gory? though, it’s really odd actually. It’s not awful because it’s game graphics but I’d be squicked out by it if it was any better rendered and I was like wtf a couple times when I actually spent time looking around in some places. Mostly it’s not, but there are moments where I’m like ew… (I don’t do gore well, I don’t do horror well)

Whomever was talking about exploring games: this kickstarter looks like it’s going to be interesting. Although I might have learned about it here so it might have been posted already. (I forget where people link me things.)

I’ve experimented with trying to write less combat-oriented RPG campaigns, but it’s difficult. It’s not hard to write situations where noncombat solutions are possible and preferable, but the noncombat rules tend to be so weak.

And it’s hard to come up with any kind of ruleset where the noncombat rules are really fun. Combat skills are complex; noncombat skills are a single die roll and you succeed or fail. It’s hard to write, or even think of, a way to handle social situations that’s neither just a die roll nor just talking the whole thing out. (The latter, of course, can be fun, but it’s straying away from being a proper RPG at that point into plain cooperative storytelling, and it’s hard on players who aren’t as good at playing a character.)

So I just end up doing puzzlers if I want to do less combat, usually.

*and some of zir friends

I need coffee.

I love puzzle games. I play those all the time. I found that the game mechanics of Tomb Raider were really good, in that, even if there was combat (and sometimes a lot of combat) it was all in the goal of getting somewhere, it wasn’t random? So it meant I remembered *why* I was fighting these people in the first place. The plot points between combats were close together so I knew what I was doing, and why I was doing it, and there were NPCs having convos that reinforced that even if I could have killed them before they finished talking or whatever. I thought it was a really clever way of doing combat, just reinforcing the objective through non-obvious ways.

@katz,

One way around that would be to use the “combat” rules for non-combat conflicts. To use a D&D example, one could give characters a Base Debate Bonus (or something) modified by Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma, and specific tasks could have a Resistance Class threshold that acts just like Armor Class.

One could encourage players to use combat-flavored skills and feats to model similar things in non-combat situations. Cleave, for instance, could be used to devastate a particular opponent’s logic, leaving them with no real convincing rebuttal. Or Combat Finesse could be used to modify a character’s personal charm in social or political gatherings, making them seem like a wit to their audience.

The up-side is that players who aren’t good at playing a character can just describe what they want to accomplish in a given situation, then have all the fun and complexity of the combat rules at their disposal without actually killing or maiming any foes.

@Falconer — that’s great! I’ve actually run entire campaigns with few enough combats to count on one hand, but those are usually not D&D games. I once played a protocol droid in a classic, d6-based Star Wars game where one player portrayed a Wookiee by never actually speaking, but just gesturing and making Chewbacca noises. She would then hand a scrap of paper or index card translating what she had said to the only player whose character understood the Wookiee language. That player would then respond in English. It was a lot of fun to watch them model the Han & Chewbacca dynamic.

I prefer TTRPGs to vids or MMPORPGs because of the face-to-face social interactions of the players, and the greater flexibility the format allows for co-operative storytelling.

Right now, I am for the first time in a majority-female RPG group, and it is a refreshing change from the usual male-dominated gamer culture. The particular women I play with are far more interested in character development and design than they are in fighting, and really enjoy things like keeping journals in their character’s voices or making props to hold when speaking as their character. They always want to try and talk out conflicts first, and if a fight becomes unavoidable, they try to inflict as little damage as possible, hoping not to have to kill anything. It’s a lot more immersive and egalitarian than the usual male gamer pattern of “hulk smash!” approaches to problems.

I don’t know if these approaches can be generalized to female gamers as a group. I feel lucky, though, to be in a group that’s not just about fighting and leveling up.

One way around that would be to use the “combat” rules for non-combat conflicts. To use a D&D example, one could give characters a Base Debate Bonus (or something) modified by Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma, and specific tasks could have a Resistance Class threshold that acts just like Armor Class.

One could encourage players to use combat-flavored skills and feats to model similar things in non-combat situations. Cleave, for instance, could be used to devastate a particular opponent’s logic, leaving them with no real convincing rebuttal. Or Combat Finesse could be used to modify a character’s personal charm in social or political gatherings, making them seem like a wit to their audience.

The up-side is that players who aren’t good at playing a character can just describe what they want to accomplish in a given situation, then have all the fun and complexity of the combat rules at their disposal without actually killing or maiming any foes.

That’s how I’d love it to work, but when you get down to it, social skills are fundamentally different and the rules just don’t translate very well because unlike combat, social interactions are not strictly about winning and losing. There was a system–Legend, I think–that handled social skills transactionally, where you have tokens and you spend them to win people over and such.

But while that sort of thing works OK if you’re actually lying or taking advantage of someone, what about when you’re just interacting in a nice way? If you convince someone to be your friend, you don’t have less social capital left over, you have more. And there’s a similar difficulty with modeling it after combat. “Ha, I have totally defeated you! Now you have to be my friend!” Doesn’t make sense.

I wonder if one could adapt True20’s “damage save” mechanic into confrontational social situations.

I’ll have to think about Just Making Friends.

Somehow I’ve gotten into GMing a sci fi game for two evangelical Christians and one not-so-evangelical Christian. One of them has an evangelical Christian alien (a weren, a 7 to 9 foot tall basically Wookiee with tusks), but he hasn’t tried Convicting People of Their Sins yet.

Fibs plays:

Computer

Hammerwatch: It’s 2d gauntlet style game that I play because I love rogue likes and I keep… not winning and I dislike quitting.

Available here, if you’re interested.

http://www.hammerwatch.com/

Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl
Same deal, but turn based and with RPG mechanics. Also a rogue like. Also, keep dying.
also free!

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

Dominons 3: The Pretender Gods
Think Civilization, but with dragons, fireballs and blood sacrifice, battles and a *silly* amount of cultures and histories and mythical creatures with neat descriptions.

The game itself is so-so and drags on very quickly after the initial resources grab, but it’s great for creating stories and giving me ideas (Seriously, there is such an astounding amount of fiddly details it’s frightening. )

TeleGlitch

Again, a top down rogue like but this time played in real time, and in a sci-fi setting gone wrong. With an interesting background story I’d love to know more about, assuming I had time to play and didn’t constantly die.

Demo’s pretty lovely.

BioShock Infinite

I have a MSI gaming laptop with more processors than I can count, and the only actual game that requires it is the fifth one on this list.

… Huh.

shooty shooter. Prefer Bioshock 1 for story integration, but this is a neat game.

Total War (Rome and Shogun)

Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum europe vincendarum

FTL

Roguelike. But this time you control a starship!

AI War: Fleet Command

Strategy game. You control lots of Starships. As in, on the scale of thousands.

X-Com: Apocalypse

It’s the retro-pop future of 19…something something, and you have to fend off an alien invasion. Of biological entities from beyond the ken of man. The budget is low, everyone hates you and all your fellow corporations (this is the future, after all) are going to be taken over by alien mind eaters a few days from now.

Good luck!

Prototype

Sometimes, you just want to drop kick a helicopter out of the sky and watch the unfolding spectacle.

Metro: The Last Light

For when I think the world is far too lovely and great. Then I play this game. Then everything once again feels properly bleak and terrible.

Other than, I’m a fan of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights and I’m quite fond of Singularity, for pulling off a tremendous time travel plot. Oh, and!

Call of Chtulhu: Dark Corners of The Earth

Wonderfully flawed game. First Person.

I would highly suggest playing Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicks Obscura, if you have a fondness for old-timey RPGs with steampunk, fantasy and magic elements. Bonus: You can talk and walk through a very, very significant chunk of this game (I’d almost say all of it, but I haven’t managed to be quite that lucky yet. Bandits always jump me). Also Fallout 1-2, although I never did play the third one.

Oh, oh, and Max Payne 1 and 2. Very violent, but joyously stylish (Collecting evidence got old a hundred bullets ago).
—

P&PRPGs:

A Sea of Glass

Heavily modified Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, where I added rules from Fantasy Craft, 13rd Age, , Iron Heroes, Thieves World, Pathfinder and a few others. I run a hapless team of adventures who try to avoid killing anything through a dark tale of monsters, magic and greed in a desert full of cranky dwarves and undead.

Oh, and the shattered form of a slumbering god. That detail is important.

Pathfinder

Wherein I play a sleuth. A fast-talking private detective who just so happens to have an ever hungering monstrosity in his head and has to roll will saves not to break into tentacles, mouths and terror.

Warhammer Fantasy, RPG, 2d Edition

Wanted a game of people going up against the supernatural and not succeeding too well. Using the rules from here.

So far it’s been a slog, everyone’s dying from dysentry, losing their fingers and they’re being hunted by things most foul in the night.

Great fun.

Riddle of Steel

d10 based system with very detailed combat, integrated story telling mechanics (You get bonus dice for working towards things related to your character concept and personality and goals, you can only really “Level up” by doing that sufficiently). Magic is interesting and strange, and combat ever so bloody and deadly and very, very quick. Which tends to make people very wary about actually fighting, because it showcases how well it can wrong. Sure, trained fighters win more often, but it only takes one lucky swipe to gut you… Which tends to make players both careful, and very invested in their characters.

A group of mercenaries meet in an inn, and before they can draw weapons and be paranoid of the obvious cliched, set up nature of the situation, someone asks them for a favor…

They need to go kill a king.

Who is dead these last ten years.
—

Arcanis and Witch hunter both seem very interesting. Thank you for mentioning them, freemage.

And have fun with Ripper. That game is enjoyable. Ah, if only I could make someone play that with me. I guess I’ll have to settle for hunting my players with werewolves.

Specifically, they didn’t like the chase rules and how some side might not get to act because they drew the low card.

I bought the Slipstream book because it looked like awesome pulp fun, but something about the kill-the-evil-queen campaign didn’t sit well with me. I guess I was thinking too much of Stargate SG-1 and how they finally beat the Goa’uld … so here’s this other group of aliens posing as gods, let’s squeeze three more seasons out of this show.

(Of course some part of it was how the evil queen was an evil genetically engineered immortal sex vampire queen. Gotta fear the female sex drive, donchano.)

Most of the games I like are old-school. In particular, I’m very fond of Sega Genesis games, such as Phantasy Star II-IV, Strider, and all the Sonic games. I also like the Metroid series and the Castlevania series (the latter especially because of that fantastic Castlevania music).

My favorite game is probably the original Deus Ex. I love that game to death, even though it’s cheesy in some parts. (I’ll be elated if someone else here remembers all of JC Denton’s silly lines.)