Playing With Words

An Exercise In Emphasis Redirection In Tabletop

People are deeply reluctant to introduce relationships, romance and so on into tabletop games, yet they are perfectly happy with handing out games to kids where murderous combat is the game’s core raison d’etre.

Recently, I opened a book titled How To Use Romance In Your Game. Interesting book, but something caught my attention.

The book set out a long, stern preamble on ensuring the players’ permission and consent to use romances in your game, focusing on the ethics of romance. It posited that romance was a heavy theme, not to be lightly introduced into your game unless it were somehow lighthearted, a diversion from the usual tabletop themes of slaughtering and murder.

SO

I decided to copy the preamble into this article, and swap out most of the romantic terms with ones relating to combat, bloodshed, and violence.

Preamble, Revised

Before introducing combat into your play group’s campaigns, there are some essentials.

1. Make sure your players are comfortable with combat being in the game. If you are thinking about putting the player characters in any sort of violent scene, you’ll want to know how comfortable they are with the situation. See below for more information on PC massacres.

2. Make sure your players are okay hearing about anything related to violence. In most cases, no one wants to hear details about the violent act and not many GMs want to describe it seriously. Bloodshed as an act should be one of those things that get skipped over. However, some of your players may not want to even think about implied murder. Just because their characters are in an era where killing or casual slaughter may be acceptable, it doesn’t mean the players have to be comfortable with it.

3. Combat is a lighthearted event until it gets ruined. As long as the combat is ongoing, it will be often treated with humor. Fighting is another area often reverted to comedy. If the players or you as the GM do not want people to make light of a situation due to combat or homicide, then you probably shouldn’t introduce it at that time.

4. Stay away from BAD combat or homicidal situations. Obviously, the history of the world is filled with incidences of massacres and genocides. While forced bloodshed can make a good plot for an adventure or two, we’re certain you can figure out how to create it by yourself without us telling you how. No child soldiers, and no kidnappings or forced participation in death squads to ensure a relationship. Not here.

5. Consensual bloodshed without boundaries. Obviously if we were to follow real-world settings as our sole example, there would be religious rules against relationships involving same-sex combat situations starting in the medieval period. This is not the real world and we can rework history as we see fit. Although human society will consider heterosexual combat and bloodshed to be the best way to proliferate, alternative measures and systems of fighting battles in a fantasy world can be introduced without questioning its acceptance. Of course, the GM will decide what to allow or not allow in the privacy of their own game sessions.

6. Above all, have fun. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Get the players’ feedback as to what they want to do and abide by it. If someone’s not having fun, then try something else.

Player-Character Involvement In Combat

Make sure everyone accepts his or her character being involved in a combat or bloodshed before play begins. Some players will totally work their characters’ bloodshed like they have the taste for carnage of the gods, but if you get them “involved in hand-to-hand combat” with someone, they will freak like it is real.

Never force combat; it’s like forcing sex and that’s just icky. If none of the players wants to be directly involved, just use the information in this supplement to develop plots among the non-player characters or, at most, with a relative of one of the player characters. You can always try again later.