How Violent Do You Want Yor D&D Campaign?

I made this little spectrum to help create a sense of how violent/non-violent each number is. Please use this poll to vote: strawpoll.me/14816623

Personally I find 5-8 a nice sweetspot without being too toned down or over the top.

This.

I tend to keep it 5-7

Lol no one is going to vote a 1.

How the hell is Berserk not an 11? I mean yeah, you have dismemberment and plenty of gore in elven lied and the thing, but how can being covered in burned to charcoal babies ranks lower?

4-6 is best, user.

Y-Yeah! Who would play such a baby game...?

I like either a hellish 8 or 9 or a low 4 or 5 with lots of role play.... If its just going to be slogging through catacombs and sewers at least make it filled with shit.
By that same thing if we travel the country side and every night there is a random encounter or two this is some really bad territory and we should have avoided it.

...

There's a surprising amount of violence in My Little Pony.

By violent/non-violent do you mean how much combat there is, or just how deadly each combat is? Because I don't have a lot of combat but usually at least one person explodes into gore at some point during the combat

As always, first post best post.

I think with berserk it's only an 8 cause it's fairly realistic with it's gore, while Elfen Lied turns everything up to 11 and goes full blood piñata, and is more over the top, even if it goes so far that it turns around and ends up being less shocking than the relatively more 'reserved' series. My question is why Akira is at the same level as Lord of the Rings, Akira deserves at least a 6, or perhaps a 7.

>Heavy Metal
>not as violent as Saving Private Ryan

Did we watch the same movies, user?

Haha what a lame looking game for lame people. Do you have like a PDF of it. So I can laugh at how lame it is

2 or 3 in the beginning, 3 or 4 in the end
Not really violent

I think the problem with your scale is that it doesn't take into account emotional attachment. Like, you have Die Hard and Watership Down as the same level of violence. But I watched those movies both about the same time as a kid, and while I didn't think of Die Hard as violent at all, Watership Down terrified me. It's because in Die Hard it is almost all bad guys getting hurt, and they are killed with gun violence, which feels psycholgically less real. In Watership Down you see protracted physical violence against protagonist characters, which is far more brutal to sit through.

It also doesn't differentiate between violence and horror, which are two different reactions. Like, the violence in Saving Private Ryan is arguably far worse than in The Thing, because it is much larger number of people being killed in faster and more savage ways, but The Thing has the element of nightmare which changes the way the violence feels.

So I'd say maybe think on it more and try to account for that kind of thing.

OP: Okay that's fair. So then what would your spectrum look like?

3 is at least acceptable, anything lower is boring. I can't do straight intrigue all day and all night, I have to punch somebody eventually. Anyone. I'm a sucker for combat, if I'm playing a straight intrigue game I'll go and make some violence by making my character get drunk and try to start a fight or some such nonsense.

But I think I prefer it somewhere around level 6 or 7, though.

You know they could probably make a firefighter FPS game a la Rainbow 6 or SWAT 4. Except instead of guns you have a hose, fire axe, fire extinguisher, or whatever. Shit, how is this NOT a thing?

4-6

Eh, I'd lean 4-7 myself but I can accept yours as pretty good too.

I think the right way to separate it would be to talk about how people feel about 'Combat Violence'. A single punch can be a lot more dramatic and painful than half a dozen people getting mowed down if the former is suddenly happening in an otherwise peaceful situation as it's not supposed to make the viewer feel powerful, it's supposed to shock and put you off balance.

It's sorta like...torture in movies and on tv is rarely that actually horrific but it's a powerless violence for the watchers rather than what you see in a full on battle, which can be a lot worse (I mean, Ash chainsaws things right in half but fingers being broken in a torture scene is a lot harder to watch even if it's less painful/less gorey)

This seems like something that needs a two axis model.
One axis representing the quantity of violence depicted, and another depicting the impact of the violence.
So most action movies would have a very high quantity rating, but a moderate to low impact rating. And horror movies would tend to be the opposite.

I don't really "get" the point of this discussion. If you ask a question of how violent you want your games to be, I'd assume it'd be a question of "where on the scale of story telling to combat do you want your campaigns". When APPARENTLY this was "how graphic do you want the violence depicted". Which doesn't really make sense since for most tabletop that tends to range from "you killed the guy" to "your sword slices him in half and his guts goes flying everywhere". Which is more so a question of how detailed your DM is or how grimdark you want your fantasy.

It might just be me, but regardless I don't think this is gonna be any real fuel for discussion. And to show how pointless I think it is, I'm gonna give you the most pointless answer I can possibly think of-
Depends on the setting.