Is killing not a big deal in tabletop games? Not in the sense of possible ressurection spells...

If you're playing a game set in a medieval-ish setting, then it's no big deal. Back then being effective at killing made you a cool guy, and a lot of disputes were settled that way. As long as you do it on the level, not being a sneaky murderer guy.

Depends on the game / character / setting.

You are still killing plenty of recruited farmers, who probably have families to support.

Look, tabletop game players are immature edgelords with no conception of how real people act. They get their ideas of socialization and human behavior from animu, fantasy novels, and comic book movies. Pretty much any question involving, "Do tabletop games show nuance on this topic?" can be answered with a flat, "No."*

*And don't whine to me about your narrative games that nobody fucking plays, people.

Well, you're either playing a Hero or Psycho anyway, so it doesn't matter. Also life used to be really cheap.
It's a bit more expensive now when we're tax cattle, and we're raised to believe that killing other people is the ultimate sin. Someone today would be a lot more fucked up if they killed a human than like 200 years ago.

I'm a softie, I dislike blood IRL and when I accidentally stepped on a little bird it haunted me for half an hour. I doubt I could kill anyone in cold blood, heck harm anyone.

Tabletop heroes are made of sterner stuff, they don't mind, they live in harsh horrible times and do what's expected of them.

D&D and PF do have afterlives that can be proven to exist so if you kill someone, they'll go to where they belong.

If they were good then they'll end up in Heaven or wherever they're most attuned to going.If they weren't good but not evil then it kind of sucks for them but they aren't going to suffer in the Abyss. And if they were evil then it's not a problem because you probably killed them before they could ruin any more lives.

I am planning to homebrew up a campaign that is Undertale-themed (in the sense that the party is playing a trio of children stuck in a world of monsters). Obviously, a pacifistic playstyle is completely do-able, but we agreed that resolving every conflict peacefully may not be possible in the mindset of the characters and may vary depending on their foes.

At least one player character is assuming this is all just some funky dream and ultimately just wants to get home. Time will tell though how willing they are to commit to that goal and how they will treat the inhabitants (whom definitely are not all cuddly or very nice) in their attempts to do so.

Not like I've ever seen their village or their families.

>peasants
>mattering
pic one and only one
especially if they aren't your peasants , why would you care?

You didn't notice because the majority of them will have been mooks, who have no narrative weight. In fiction that's the next best thing to not existing at all.

It isn't because it's the primary reward mechanic of the game.

Many people have historically not given a fat shit when ordered to kill people from "not-my-village"

In one game I play an evil character and I still end up more reluctant to kill enemies than the other players.

I know that feeling.

I tried to make a pacifist with the idea of there being a kinda pull between him maintaining his pacifistic principles or succumbing to his darker urges and letting himself give in to slaughtering his enemies.

It led to PvP with a murderhobo in the party and I decided to have him be less averse to killing after the fact, with the justification being that he suffered a blow to the head and his personality was rewritten so that his bloodthirsty nature was at the forefront, while his pacifistic nature being the voice in his head telling him not to murder everything he comes across unless they attack him first, which is a bit more in line with the standard party dynamic.

It's hard to avoid killing in most games and most GM's will punish you for trying to spare most enemies.

Then they get mad at you if you decide to be a murderhobo who treats every NPC with about as much respect as a farmer to a turkey on Thanksgiving.

Go figure.

It's hard to say. In a good game with a good DM it should have some impact but most games are going one combat encounter to the next without any consequences.

On the other hand our society is completely over sensitized to death and killing and accordingly we can't deal with it. People including myself even getting guilt from killing insects. Other cultures and people of other time periods are not and were not nearly as effected by death and killing and many people within living memory have killed lots of people without a second thought.

I don't think every single NPC should be cried over and killing is often justified but characters who consider themselves solely heroic and good even though their characters are seasoned killers aren't really my kinda players.

This is definitely the impression Veeky Forums has given me.

Honestly, in real life there were a lot of very militaristic cultures, and you were taught from youth that killing enemies was basically a good deed. I don't think a lot Roman legionaires felt bad about the people they killed. Vikings straight up murdered innocent people and bragged about it. The samurai used to bully lower class people when they weren't training or killing each other. Modern Muslims think murdering innocent people is a good thing. Different cultures and subcultures view things like killing one's enemies differently. If you're raised by a culture or group that tells you killing enemies is good, you probably don't think otherwise. Also, most adventurers are basically mercenaries. If you go into that line of work, you already know you're the type of person who won't be wracked with guilt over offing enemies and possibly the odd villager.

>recruited farmers
How many times do we have to go through this. Most medieval combatants weren't peasants, they were upper or middle class levies with training and equipment, or mercenaries.

>your typical medieval fantasy
>death and murder having big effects on your character
I mean shit, nigger, my latest PC is a professional merc, his job literally consists out of killing people.

Exactly. PCs aren't conscripted into traveling around fighting monsters and shit for money. They're fucking mercenaries. They likely trained for years to reach "level 1" specifically because they wanted to kill people, steal shit, etc for a living.

They're fiction people quite literally invented so you can roll some dice and use the skills you've built against them, you seriously think the GM is going to come up with an elaborate backstory and a massive web graph of everyone who knows each other for every single trash mob he makes?

I put some thought into the backstory of every NPC that appears regardless of importance. It's easy if you're not bad at GMing :^)

>you seriously think the GM is going to come up with an elaborate backstory and a massive web graph of everyone who knows each other for every single trash mob he makes?
This, every single person you fight in a random encounter is a person that was made for you to kill at some point in the campaign.

Sparing enemies in D&D is just asking for the DM to shit on you later on when the person you spared just-so-happens to be a double-triple-double-agent who stabs you in the back when it becomes convenient for the sake of "drama."

Reminder that nobody on Veeky Forums actually plays games; we're so goddamn dysfunctional that we can't get along with real people long enough to play, so we lurk here and pretend that we know what the fuck we're talking about.

Depends on system.

Trail of Cthulhu has a big sanity hit if you kill a dude

tbqh I'm only here because Veeky Forums is the only board on Veeky Forums with constant fantasy content and I just like the fantasy genre.

Only very few enemies in my setting fight to the death. Most will surrender or flee earlier, sometimes begging for deals and bargaining.

Our first kill is also always a pretty huge rp moment. Our elve vomited when we killed a human once, the mage panicked, the cat didn't understand the concept of death until then. And the mercenary silently tries to keep everyone from freaking out.

It's pretty great.

Well they were trying to bring about the end times so really it's their own fault.

In a roundabout way you could say I gave them what they ultimately wanted.

Your problem is you're going too slow, you let it get quiet. Didn't you feel better acting out of fear for your life, kicking bodies for scaring you afterward, and always having another immediate problem?

I was thinking the same thing actually. In almost all forms of entertainment the 'good guys' end up with a body count in the hundreds. Of course it's always in self-defence or because the enemies are evil or whatever but at the end of the day that's just a convenient excuse. It's not that there is anything wrong with that but I don't find it as fun as I used to.

It's all part of the glorification of violence.

I was playing WoW the other day and leveling in Goldshire under the free account. I was killing kobolds that were mining and hoarding candles. After I did it, I was actually slightly sickened with the ideology and quit playing. Deleted the game. Reading philosophy has really opened my eyes to stuff, a bit.

Unless that blood is from innocents, you have committed no sin.

>The hard part only really comes when you're a dipshit that humanizes and gets attached, like a kid who keeps crying about how the fish feels when you go fishing.
I’m struggling to understand why it’s a bad idea to humanize humans.

>Being a crybaby about it won't absolve you of your sins, so you just keep moving, you keep killing and killing and killing until you drown in the blood of innocents.
Or you could, um... not do that?

This is the most common answer, I think: “it’s realistic!”

This is probably the most accurate answer, though. It’s a matter of the architecture of the game you’re playing. Some of them treat violence, including death, lightly, and expect the PCs to spend a lot of time killing cardboard (or pulpy, at least) Bad Guys. Other games have little in the way of built-in expectations regarding the level of violence expected from the player characters.

Fa/tg/uys scare me sometimes, though.

This is going to sound very faggy but I agree with that. I have less of a problem with games that are violent but also obviously over-the-top and silly. It's the ones that take themselves seriously that sicken me a bit, especially when they use high ideals to justify and glorify the mass slaughter.

Play another system. A system which main focus isn't set on fighting.

Not very "faggy" at all, honestly. I completely understand that they're just pixels but I feel like it's the underlying thoughts that continue to influence everything to me.

Play a superhero game.
I'm involved in a Mutants and Masterminds game and not only do we not kill, the GM introduced a Punisher-esque npc hero to help us out on a mission and when we learned he was killing a bunch of mooks, we ended up coming to the mooks defence and took down the Not! Punisher together.
This is now having all sorts of fallout as we are being branded rogue capes by Not! Fox News, being congratulated by the town for keeping the more violent 'American-style heroics' out and even having the local villains realise we are rather approachable heroes.

Meanwhile, last time I played Pathfinder, my Cleric was directly responsible for over a hundred deaths by her own actions and she couldn't give a fuck.

Narrative convenience.

>they sicken you
>they don't empower your will for what humanity could become

>I’m struggling to understand why it’s a bad idea to humanize humans.
Often people see it like that because those humans try to dehumanize themselves before you can, and by the time they're trying to kill you they've done that. That's what making yourself wicked and evil is: it's taking that part of you that's worth something and potentially wonderful and trying to dirty it.

The problem is, to dehumanize them still not right since that bit of them isn't something they can dirty, break, or remove, merely hide, and since the dehumanizing usually constitutes a judgement on your part, but at the same time any broad tolerance of them destroying a chance for the rest of society is a greater evil on the whole, since it means you're not loving all those people who would suffer or die if their deeds were permitted.

One should at once lament that they fell so low and humanize them again, and even love them, but may still find little alternative but to kill them to end their wicked deeds and protect what is good from what they made of them self. This isn't a condemnation or approval of that, it's the reality of this fallen world, and a reality that must be overcome in each mans heart. The soldier Saints weren't saints for conquering their enemies and killing them, they were saints for conquering the madness of warfare, washing their hands of the blood in the end, overcoming their own limitations and facing death willingly with a prayer for their enemies. Peace is the end goal. Killing is the last means. Anything that ambiguous won't be justified. You can still keep growing towards your fullness despite that.

They're fucking computer code, not living creatures you faggy pussy. You need to separate fiction from reality.

That depends on a tabletop game. It's pretty big deal in game I play, for example.

Yea, this. It's not like every form of media exists to make you feel things.

Most people, even those in war and raised in military cultures, didn't and don't actually kill people though. It's about 1 in 8 that seem to actually be willing to aim in or kill the enemy.

I play Delta Green(which I GM) and Legend of the 5 Rings(in which I just play) alternating every week.

Simo Hayha, the sniper with the highest kill count to date at over 500 confirmed kills, was asked in an interview how he felt about having killed all those people. His response was "I was asked to serve my country and to fulfill my duties to the best of my abilities. I did." Killing those who are trying to kill you doesn't affect a person as much as one might think it does. When it does, we call it PTSD, and it usually comes about from witnessing the deaths of your comrades, rather than the enemy. As mentioned previously in this thread, dehumanizing your enemy is fairly common for soldiers, so seeing the humans on your side of the trench fall over without half their head or whatever is generally more traumatizing than seeing the same thing happen to the guys on the other side.

That hasn't always been true. Young Spartan kids used to try to murder slaves and get away with it as a training exercise. The samurai used to kill criminals basically for practice and just because. Native American tribes considered killing enemies not only to be a good thing, but to be normal behavior. Celtic warriors would display the heads of slain enemies in their houses. It's a safe bet none of these groups felt bad about killing those that society approved of killing. The Scandinavians would simply be fined for openly murdering somebody (though trying to do so deceitfully got you banished or executed).

Okay, so I served a tour in the Army and I’m going to tell you some really ugly shit; killing another human being in itself isn’t actually a very big deal, it’s the situation that you kill him in that affects you.
Violence, when you are trained and prepared for it, is shocking the first time it happens, but in actual life-threatening combat you don’t even think about the individual value of a life. Adrenaline and fear and training literally just override and of that and you just REACT and you’re mostly thinking “thank god it’s him and not me”, assuming you think anything at all. If you freeze up and think too much even with training, it is in my opinion that you probably shouldn’t have chosen a profession of violence in the first place.
Now, that’s in a situation where you KNOW combat is going to happen against an enemy you were already aware of. Your brain is prepared for that. Taking life out in the “real world” so to speak carries a completely different set of consequences, and when you do it or think you do it the realization that you are about to suffer those consequences mixed with the shock of employing lethal violence in a situation where you did not intend to or weren’t ready to do so can hit you a lot harder, especially after it’s all done and the adrenaline wears off.

tl;dr: Fight or Flight reactions pretty much bypasses any moral compunctions we have against taking human lives, especially if Fight or Flight has training to fall back on.

Actually probably not.
Short version; the idea that all armies were made of levies is a complete myth until much, much later in history then periods that D&D portrays.

Like, try 500 years later.

Is your character human ? I mean really human, not "vampire" or "wizard"

And yet these examples weren't EVERYONE doing it, were they? Samurai didn't make up most of Japan and I'm honestly don't know that much about Sparta, but aren't a lot of those stories bullshit? There's a fairly deep ingrained aversion to killing other people in most people, though it is possible to suppress it and/or increase the likelihood of engagement.

As someone who suffers from it, the actual taking of life isn’t what usually causes PTSD. It’s literally stress, hence the name.
In Ye Olden Times combat was less sudden, less abrupt, more organized in nature due to the technology limitations of warfare. There were long periods of doing nothing and battles and skirmishes happened in situations where you pretty much expected them to already happen.
Nowadays there is absolutely zero distinguishing moments between safety and combat due to the unfortunate realities of maneuver warfare, especially in modern asymmetrical warfare. Safety isn’t safety anymore, it’s just “not being shot at yet”. Targets and threats can come from potentially any angle and any source. The stress is low-level and quite literally UNENDING, like being at a rough day at work 24/7 for months on end. One of the reasons we try to rotate troops in and out of direct combat situations is because we are realizing just how badly this stuff fucks you psychologically over time.

The human mind cannot exist in a state of near-constant low-level or high-level stress and remain healthy, it’s as simple as that.

What you are seeing isn’t actually a deep ingrained thing; it’s just that we’re taught that human life has value from a very early age. Check that; it’s something you are TAUGHT, not something you KNOW. It’s not like learning how to walk, already in there for you and you’re just trying to access it.
You can be taught and learn other things to, and Fight or Flight reflexes are EXTREMELY strong impulses that boil the entire moral quandary down to “better him then me” real fucking fast.

I'm very aware of flight or fight responses, I was in the Marine Corps and have experienced them very much first hand, but if you don't think there's some aversion to a species killing it's own ingrained to an extent, how do you think we're still around? And as the rate of the US military personnels rate of willingness to engage has gone up, so too has the rates of other issues. While obviously correlation doesn't equal causation, there's a relationship there.

And PCs don't represent ALL of the populations they exist among. Nobody is role-playing Jeff the stockboy and rolling to see if they stock the Mac and cheese correctly.

Most characters are specifically adventurers. You don't train to be a thief or assassin if you're hung up about stealing shit or killing people.

My campaigns are rarely set against other humanoids so fighting monsters and beasts likely makes their role-playing easier.
I have a character that's always trying to bring things to justice in handcuffs, but most often that bites him in the ass. He'll try forever though. In all he's maybe kept alive 1 out of every 6 BBEG

Yeah, which is why I don't take much issue with PCs being willing to engage in killing. But the whole "it's completely natural to do, it's no big deal when you're in war" isn't always exactly true.

It depends on the game. In D&D you're typically expected to fight to the death unless you get clues that these people might not be easy.

In, say, World of Darkness, *every single time your character kills* they have to roll to not become more mentally unstable, at a pretty hefty penalty.

Let me rephrase. I think that we’re adverse to killing each other because we’re social animals and we would prefer to not kill our prinary external socialization units, but I think we do not attach moral value to killing one way or another until later.
It’s more of a “I would rather keep myself well-fed then be hungry” impulse at best; we don’t like it at first because we sort of need other to socialize with and help each other survive, and the deprivation of that from us, especially if we have grown attached to the other person in question, is ALWAYS disturbing to us. It’s why little kids cry when left alone, because on a very instinctive level they are totally aware of how vulnerable they are.
However, the less a person actually matters to us and the more social callouses we grow over time the easier it is to bear that whole being alone thing, and combat training and especially combat experience is really just adding another set of psychological calluses.

As a civilian, can I ask what is that thing I hear about military life being really different and that causing PTSD too?

Simo Hayha was also a sniper. It's probably easier to be unaffected by killing people if they're nowhere near you when they die.

Do you mean like, how some people have issues transitioning from military to civilian life?

I don't think valuing human life has to be taught, or any life really. My young niece was recently exposed to a puppy, and her natural reaction was pure joy. Nobody said "be happy it's a puppy."
On the other hand I think restraint needs to be taught. If some guy's being a dickhead, you wanna deck him across his stupid face. You were more likely taught to "not hit" than you were to "go hug."

>I'm literally shaking because of the needless genocide of 6 trillion lines of code
I could understand feeling a little uneasy about a game designed from the ground up to make you uncomfortable but fucking WoW? No, you aren't becoming desensitized to violence, if anything humanity has become more pussified in recent years, a few years back no one would take any issue killing and skinning a deer and now a days we have faggots like you who cry themselves to sleep because they slapped a mosquito

>but I think we do not attach moral value to killing one way or another until later.
I disagree, I think that there's an aversion to killing another human even when we don't know that human and it's possible to gain resources if they were dead, albeit it's severely weakened(the aversion that is), and there are certainly ways to suppress it further. Because you don't just have fight or flight options when it comes to adversaries, especially when you're of the same species, you also have posturing.

This reminds me of the main character from Drakengard. The guy who made the game said that no matter what, he would consider the main character a villain regardless of which ending you get. He said that because Caim kills a lot of people in the game most of them enemy soldiers trying to kill him or others, but that he didn't think a person could be a hero if they've killed a lot of people regardless of how evil the people were.

Do you guys think a hero can be a hero even with 1000 deaths under their belt?

It’s not PTSD unless your shrink is a shitty one, but for me it boils down to this; military life is organized as fuck. There is a place for everything and everything has it’s place. There are manuals and instructions and training for practically every situation. Everything become rote memorization and drill, again like that job comparison I made up here , only not always with the threat of horrible death. You stop really thinking about it, you just do it. I STILL get up way early in the morning most days because that’s when I got up back when I served.
Civilian life by contrast is just TOTALLY disorganized. When you turn 18 society just kind of cuts you loose and you are tossed out into the wolves and left to figure out how to live life on your own. Now most people eventually do so, but at least in our country the military tends to...well for lack of a better word, pray on the rudderless and aimless young men of this particular age group well before they had time to really develop real-life directional skills. I think being cut free from the rigidity and discipline of military life and then tossed into civilian life can be disorienting to a lot of people, especially if you never developed those life skills on your own and you signed up when you were 18.
Guns depersonalize violence to a degree you cannot even comprehend until you are forced to use one on somebody.
I think you’re right on both counts, but for the puppy thing it had to be admitted that for pet animals and stuff like that most scientists think that evolution has gradually made them cute because the cuter they were the more likely they were to survive, mainly because we liked ‘em cute. I actually STILL have that reaction to cats, especially when they do dumb cute cat stuff. Cute stuff makes us happy and they have over time grown more cute as we bred them and the ones that survived were more likely to survive.

If someone is trying to kill you or your countrymen you have every justification to kill them

Having played the game, Caim is also a mentally unstable individual with psychopathic tendencies. He’s a villain to me because it’s quite clear that at heart he’d just a bloodthirsty zealot who just happens to be aimed at a marginally worse target then he is.

And you are so right on the restraint thing.

>When you turn 18 society just kind of cuts you loose and you are tossed out into the wolves and left to figure out how to live life on your own. Now most people eventually do so, but at least in our country the military tends to...well for lack of a better word, pray on the rudderless and aimless young men of this particular age group well before they had time to really develop real-life directional skills. I think being cut free from the rigidity and discipline of military life and then tossed into civilian life can be disorienting to a lot of people, especially if you never developed those life skills on your own and you signed up when you were 18.
I'm sure Armyanon can back me up on this, but there are a lot of dudes in the military that aren't actually adults in a lot of ways. They live in the barracks and the only bills they have to worry about are cellphone/internet/maybe a car payment. Otherwise, in their personal lives, they kinda live like children. They stay up as late as they want, don't have to worry about providing for anyone, don't have to worry about housing/food, don't have to worry about much honestly. Just be at formations in time, keep your uniform squared away, and do what you're told.

No it didn't. Humans are not built to kill other humans, and those that do suffer extreme guilt and upset, and trauma from the act. Ask a veteran willing to answer what it feels like to kill a man, and you'll see what I mean.

Also, soldiers in battle suffered a lot of trauma on their own. PTSD and guilt isn't a modern thing.

I will absolutely back it up. Most of us are kinda manchildy.
I was lucky enough to have lived for awhile outside of Army life until I was maybe 22, so I had already developed and gotten ahold of those “living adult life like an adult” skills, and then when I joined I had a commission (was paying for college) so my responsibilities were at least marginally greater in theory, but for a lot of military guys you basically aren’t really forced to grow the fuck up like you are after high school because the military is a very high school-like social situation, which basic essentials being provided for you and life boiling down to “go here because I said so” from parental figures and such.

Depends on how you’re doing it.
Killing a dude hot? If you have training you’d be surprised how easy it is to fall back on it in the heat of the moment.
Killing a dude cold? I’ve HAD combat training and have had to take human life before and I still don’t think I could do it. It’s not easy to just wack a guy in cold blood on the spot without feeling anything. I think to pull that off you have to be REALLY desensitized.

Yeah, but I was referring to Ataro saying that Caim is a villain for having multiple kills at all.

see
Caim is NOT a good, or even decent person.
He was intentionally made to be a psycho murdering bastard. You aren't supposed to root for him, and he takes the bloodshed to excess out of sheer joy of bloodshed.
He is a villain because he enjoys killing for it's own sake, and "muh country" is an excuse to do it and get away with it.

I think that the developer’s a pacifist from a culture of noted pacifists and that it influences his viewpoint.
I don’t agree with him because then by his own estimation I don’t count as a good person even though I sure as shit never tried to kill anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me first, and at least in one of the two situations where I had to use my weapon I did so while having some knowledge that the guy I was offing at the time was not a particularly pleasant human being.

This thread is so full of nu-males it hurts, they're fictional fucking characters designed for you to have a little fun getting from one location to the other.
If you honestly have this hard a time separating reality from fantasy you're actually far more concerning than anyone who kills fucktons of characters for fun.

Relax user; I’m able to separate my fantasies from my reality.

Or we're discussing how people should react to killing in a role-playing game

At least two of us on here served.
We’re just discussing the realities of combat rather then the fiction of it.

Some are, others are legitimately acting like killing a character in game has irl moral issues.

Caim is really an exception to this kind of debate.
I can think of a handful of morally conflicted military characters in Japanese games that you could actually apply this to, but Caim is a flat out crazy killer with no redeeming value.
The real ending of the game involves Caim literally ignoring the true threat to the world to stand by a castle gate to slaughter anyone that comes out to fight him for hours.
Compare that to say, the MCs in Front Mission games.

And you have my thanks for telling us what it's like. Far too many military people have far too many hangups on subjects they don't want to talk about, like cheating spouses and what it's like to kill people. One belief I hold very highly is that if a subject becomes too sensitive to talk about, then it MUST be talked about and anyone who has a problem with it being discussed is a massive flaming faggot.

>acting like killing a character in game has irl moral issues.
Where?

You can actually tell that they worked a bit with the JSDF when it comes to Front Mission. Dramatized Tom Clancy conspiracy shit aside, those games are golden. I miss old Squaresoft.
Also, how fucking fast would I volunteer again just for the chance to drive a goddamn mecha? Holy shit yes.
Well, I have the benefit of being fairly bright and able to express myself. Keepining in mind that a lot of vets are kinda manchildy as stated here , , even talking about it is kinda hard when you are never forced to develop those communications skills.

I mean how many high schoolers do you know and have you met in life that were genuinely eloquent and thoughtful? Now understand that a even those of them that were weren’t likely to be the sort that served. You’re a lot more likely to find that kinda dude who treated high school like a game in the Army.

It being discussed, and forcing someone who isn't ready to come to grips with it is different.

I can understand what you're saying about them using directionless 18 year olds, that was me!