Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed

kbluck

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I ran across this little morality play of a game: Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed from Greg Costikyan, aka "Designer X". It's a parody of dungeon hack-and-slash games where player characters go room by room killing the various occupants and looting their stuff. Sounds like any dungeon crawl, but the kicker is that it's set in modern times and the victims whom the players are so casually liquidating are ordinary people just like you and your neighbors. Funny, but also made me cringe a bit thinking back on all the imaginary foes I mercilessly butchered with my odd little dice as a teenager.

Warning: Lots of foul language and explicit references to brutal violence, crime of all sorts, drugs, and sex.

Download here. (1mb Acrobat PDF)

--- Kevin
 

Leftie

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Funny stuff. I might actually read this.


Ben
 

Aries

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My gawd that was funny reading.

Not sure it was meant to be taken serious though, but, it DID look like a fully written rolegame manual :)

Plenty of the sarcasm though is precious. Let's face it, just as most racism sounds means because it often hits too close to the truth, most of the nasty remarks in the guy's RPG manual design are fairly on the mark.
 

Dr Zaius

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I wonder if anyone is actually playing this as a serious roleplaying system. There are a lot of people out there who prefere the small 'indie' RPG systems to the big commercial packages like D&D.
 

kbluck

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Don Maddox said:
I wonder if anyone is actually playing this as a serious roleplaying system.
Click here to read Costikyan's blog on the occasion of his releasing it free under Creative Commons license.

The author is the first to clarify that it is satire not really intended to be played. On the other hand, I knew at least a few gamers way back when who probably would have taken it seriously. I still recall after 25 years or so a most distasteful session of Thieves' World that I had the bad fortune to witness where the players seemed to be having a grand time randomly raping and killing their way through Sanctuary. If only they knew they could be channeling their amorality into fame and fortune by writing something like GTA for the Commodore 64...

--- Kevin
 

Aries

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We who have rolegamed, have likely seen it all before :)

We have seen all the stuff we laugh at in various forms.

I had one game session I hosted at my place. I quietly told a friend, he was not to bring the "drugged out social disaster" into my home ever again.
It's fine to play a game that intentionally ponders an imaginary world, another matter entirely to want to socialise with people that can't even be said to be in contact with the real world in the first place.

I've played with guys, that really only required the games combat mechanics, because they were only into ROLLgaming :) Fine if you are between old enough to read, and 19, after that, a person tends to find hack and slash deadly dull eventually.

I find the game only enjoyable when the female characters are being run by actual females. Funny thing though, a lot of female gamers often play male characters. A female though, knows as much about being a male, as a male knows about being a female.
I've tried running a female player character a couple of times. Didn't work. For one thing, finding a guy that can pull it off, is not the end of it.
You also need to have a group of roleplayers that understand, you're not gay :), merely interested in trying to roleplay a female player character. But, as most guys have no clue what it is like to be female (no shock there), most guys will be of no real help in assisting a male player, run a female player character.

Now hermaphrodite player characters are a real scream to play hehe.
"Not a woman!!" (said to my player character by an NPC) has to rank up there among the funny events/comments in my rolegaming past hehe.

Sex is rarely gamed out well in game sessions.
Had this one friend (female gamer, yes guys they exist), she was basically just a typical gamer though (but with breasts etc) when it came to atypical gaming activities. Goes into town, goes into bar, finds small stature male, drags him off to her room, does same thing to him, that the male gamers do to women in the setting).
I kept track though. Finally rolled the right number. Gee Debbie, guess what, your fighter is knocked up, imagine that. What's everyone else doing for the next few months while Deb makes her first 0 level player character responsibility hehe.

One aspect of gaming I can't fathom, is the dark, goth, pro vampire culture, "I want to play an evil PC" types.
Fine, you're evil.
That means I now attack you with rival evil NPC opponents, as well as good aligned questing NPC opponents, not to mention you have no allies at all, only those you control through fear or force or both. And you are quite literally all alone, on your own, and at the mercy of the game 100%. Enjoy.
It's surprisingly easy to kill off evil player characters eh. All the do gooder advantages like benevolent gods and healing powers are not really available now.
Evil is a loner's thing.
 

Dr Zaius

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I gamed with several groups for a short while when I lived in North Carolina back in the early '90s. None of them were really to my tastes. One group had too many 'weird' people as far as I was concerned. Their adventures and characters weren't "evil," but the whole way they played the game seemed rather strange to me. I only played with these people a few times and I decided to move on.

The second group I gamed with was more normal, but a bit too serious. Every one of them was what a boardgamer would call a 'rules lawyer,' and their adventures seemed to center too heavily on debates on the technicalities of a spell radius or the specifics of a saving throw. There was far too much rules debate going on and not nearly enough gaming to suit me. This group also did one thing which has always annoyed me mightily: rushing through the adventure. These guys clearly knew what they were doing and had been playing for years, however, I think they lost some of what makes role-playing fun along the way. The DM didn't build up the plot and develop the story the way I though he should have. Instead, foes where slain and the party moved from one area into another like the pest control man. The adventures weren't memorable at all, and that's a shame.
 

Aries

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I like running the game as the DM mainly so I can have all the fun acting out all the NPCs :)

My NPCs are always memorable.
 
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