Play Violence

"Audiences are much more willing to accept violence in a movie when it's justified.  Audiences actually accept that violence on a different level ... than they do violence that is seen as sadistic, perverse, for the sake of suffering, rather than an 'act of justice.'

"One thing that [keeping the violence off-screen] does, is that it builds up the initial victims as being more worthy.  They're deaths are so significant that we don't get to witness their deaths, because in a way, to show us the violence would cheapen the experience."

— Dr. Lisa Coulthard, Professor of Film Studies, U of BC

"The violence in your mind is far more powerful than violence that's actually on screen."

— Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Director

Both quotes come from the second episode of Voir, a film documentary on Netflix.  Watch it, it's worth the effort, though it suffers from the usual difficulties of even experts inventing lies about things in order to make them palatable.  For example.  No.  Most people cannot remotely imagine violence on any level, including many who have personally experienced it — because having experienced it, they can't make their minds invent it.  But this is fine; because to do the opposite, to put real violence actually on the screen, is unthinkable.

The same CGI that has revisioned the limitations on things film can depict, we're quite capable of producing real violence in a movie on levels that would turn Saving Private Ryan into a children's film.  We don't do it.  Not for the reasons given above, but for what real violence does to mental equilibrium, sanity and security.  We keep the deaths off the screen because we're pushing the boundaries of what an audience can stomach.  But that does not make the violence of our minds more "powerful" — what an amazing piece of horseshit is that pronouncement.

Spoiler alert: human beings don't like violence.  Perhaps as a species we liked it more when finding a large mammal, killing it and then spending a day hacking apart it's flesh using stone tools, because it meant food and we were trained to handle the experience at a young age ... but we're civilised now and except for a minority personally experiencing the slaughter of animals, most of us just can't.  And in fact, evidence shows that most who work in the filthiest of industries come from cultures that breed a stronger stomach than North America.

And so, here's the post kicker:  D&D is a game of violence.  The argument continues that it isn't any more, and even that it never was, and in any case it doesn't have to be played that way, and certainly decent people don't play it that way.  Which is mostly a pack of lies.  True, no party has to participate in violence.  True, steps have been taken to remove the game from it's roots.  True, many, many D&D players, and players of all RPGs, deeply resent the inherent violence that combat represents and strive with all their might to reskin the game so that it represents something higher.  Something redeeming.  Something that a well-intentioned human being can look upon with pride, and without shame.

That is, "heroism."

Heroes aren't fiendish butchers, invaders, pillagers and various other villainous titles that would accurately describe what the party's expected to be in most early D&D adventures.   NO, a hero pursues a just violence.  A violence on a different level.  A violence that's an act of justice.  A violence for the sake of victims whose suffering and pain makes exceptionally brutal violence more worthy.  The sort of victims that ensure that the use of spells and special powers that incinerates an enemy doesn't cheapen the experience.

My etymological dictionary defines "hero" as a 14th century word meaning, "a man" of superhuman strength or physical courage; from the Latin meaning a demi-god and illustrious man.  Note, no women, thank you; and nothing about morality or empathy.

By 1660, "hero" did mean a "man who exhibits great bravery."  Bravery, for those who are unclear on the meaning of that term, means fearlessness and daring.  Not goodness, not virtue.

"Hero-worship" becomes a term in the early 1700s, but still, rather, it's kind of a toxic masculinity thing.

It's a case of "You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means."

But ... it's the word we're saddled with, so let's use it in the 21st century D&D sense: "a murder-hobo with a virtue distinguished by the DM's manipulation of circumstances."

Very different from other murder hobos.

Earlier, I was watching my daughter's Let's Play of the video game Hades (2018), thinking how different D&D combat (DDC) is from video game combat (VGC).  It kind of reminds me of the old Carlin bit about baseball vs. football.  VGC is flamboyant, fun, full of running around and firepower.  DDC is methodical, tactical, conceptual.  VGC demands high concentration and there's no time to think while it's happening.  DDC gives plenty of time to think.  In VGC, the enemy blips out of existence, goes up in smoke or becomes a pile of dehumanized but occasionally artistically rendered pixels.  DDC allows the DM time to describe in marvelous detail the dead bodies laying about, with descriptions of blood and a coppery smell.

Not all DMs do this, of course; a lot of DMs whisk the miniature from the table with nary a word, like a video game monster disappearing.  But somehow, with the time to throw dice, and missing, and monsters being very lucky before they die, they all develop a personality somehow that VGC doesn't offer.  VGC is hit hit hit hit until enough hits kill.  Especially after playing the game for a few months; we just stop missing.  But DDC is full of misses, even after forty years of play.  There just isn't any way that a truly experienced player can make a 1st level fighter hit any better than that fighter hit in 1982.  There's just something ... tactile and frustratingly real about that.  Like, it doesn't obey the fantasy law of cool that VGC satisfies so majestically.

DDC is unforgiving.  It requires swing after swing, too many of these fruitless.  Anyone can potentially kill anyone.  It isn't like VGC, where we run into a room with 6 or 9 monsters and run around in circles easily avoiding hits until every monster dies.  In DDC, the player has to stand there, and let the monster have its turn.  There's no way around it.  We have to ... stand there.  Motionless.  Like leaning forward onto an executioner's block.  While the DM picks up a die and holds it, waiting, before letting go and having everyone watch the die bounce on the table, the final number cold and immutable.  It's as if the die doesn't care who is and who isn't a hero.

The Netflix Voir episode leaves out one pertinent but obvious matter, because it's about film.  In a revenge story, we expect the revenge to happen.  Sooner or later, whatever twists and turns take place, the "good" guy will get the "bad" guy.  The good guy might die while getting the bad guy, but the bad guy gets gotten.

While D&D just doesn't give a shit.  It doesn't.  Which is what makes it so wrong for some people.  Because if you're not guaranteed as the good guy to get the bad guy, then you're just an asshole hacking away at other assholes.  There's no "higher justice."  There's no special worthiness.  You are just like what it would be like to be you, a real person, deciding to ignore the police and kill someone on your own.  Which you wouldn't do, because unlike a movie, you're pretty sure that if you took on the mob, you'd get killed.

Whereas D&D non-heroes have nothing like your problems.  They don't fight big strong professional organisations.  They pack up their swords and go hunting for weaker creatures with treasure.  They don't care about being heroes.  They care about not dying.

For you to be a hero, and for it to work like it does in the movies, your D&D "game" has to work like the movies.  It has to have a script.  And a director that makes sure you're where you need to be in scene 35, with the weapon you need to have, and the camera angle that's necessary to make you look cool when the sword goes into the bad guy's throat.

None of which works if this is a game.  Sensible, really, since a movie isn't a game.  Which means, all in all, you have no idea what the fuck you're really playing at, do you?