Violence

Mechanics “for” physical violence in a tabletop game (usually dnd-adjacent, though obviously others come up as points of comparison) often strike me as often being for representing something other than physical violence. My preferred relatively low powered and fragile sort of dungeon crawler often thinks of combat as being explicitly punitive, you’ll find all sorts of posts about how OSR fights are punishing because being in one is a sign you went wrong elsewhere, but I think that alone is dissatisfying to me even if I basically like the way it plays out. Not wrong, just incomplete.

I think what makes combat feel appropriately punitive and otherwise be interesting narratively is that it is the point where low-powered, low-fantasy characters are forced to confront their lot at the hands of greater powers. The precarity of attack rolls becomes metaphorical for the sum of non-physical violence that an adventurer has endured, the sort of forces that make them walk into a cave with a weapon like that’s a normal thing to do to begin with. I think of how many people I know who experience endless stress from what my own politics recognize as forms of economic and social violence but theirs cannot, who then find and recognize a different and acceptable target to lash out at. The burden of finding a solution besides a fight feels less like a form of mastery to be celebrated (I balk at certain lionizations of player skill and the way they are deployed) but an interesting contradiction that the player characters might potentially recognize, or not. If the violence happens the catharsis of victory is on the table, but like all catharsis it is dangerous to assume it is healthy or productive and easy to narrativize as necessary after the fact.

I don’t think this is contradictory with a lot of dungeon crawling game’s emphasis on fairly presenting a world that follows a logic of simulation, since I regard all simulation as implicitly being narration. I also think my ideas of what those words mean might be really at odds with how they show up in ttrpg spaces historically.