TheRPGSite

That is to say, utraviolence?  Grittiness?  Sexual content?  A general depiction of a truly shitty world to live in?

Yes, this is borrowed from something similar posted on another forum.  I suspect we'll see some different points of view here.

RPGPundit

Oddly enough, they don't. Even though I am a refugee from TBP with all sorts of warnings there, and despise any form of censorship, my fantasy games play out like Ray Harryhausen movies.

Depends on the game. I like "High Fantasy": Tolkien, Alexander, Legend of Zelda, etc. In which cases, no, they arent much darker or grittier than an Andrew Lang collection of Faerie tales.

But if I'm running Warhammer Fantasy? All bets are off. Extreme violence with highly entertaining descriptions from the critical hits table. Diseases abound, some of which are intelligent, because Papa Nurgle loves his children. Cities are dirty, dangerous, and mostly take cues from Gilliam's Jabberwocky and Ankh-Morpork. Sex is there if you want it, with ALL the inherent risks, and a few one might not expect. And just about everything in the world that possesses any sort of awareness hates you and wants to kills you.

Just depends on the setting. My personal settings tend to run more toward the Warhammer end of things. The world is rough, folks get killed for a few coppers, the law is more dangerous than helpful etc.

I largely don't enjoy HBO style adult grim-dark. I've played Warhammer where some sad things happened, but more in a dark fairy tale way. I've played in gritty worlds, but they are not gritty due to people being evil-jerk as in GoT, Oz or Deadwood. PCs do not get tortured, and PCs  doing it means a bad session. Nobody sexually assaults or is sexually assaulted.

If it is a game of dark hopelessness, there is at least a gallows humor. For the most part, though, I'm looking for brighter. Even sadness or moodiness is OK. I just don't want prison rape (Oz), a sheriff forced to crudely strangle a horse thief before ranchers let him leave town (Deadwood), or endless sexual assault, cruel humiliation and gory death (GoT). It's just not what makes me feel better after a week of work, basically.

I don't really do sexual assault in my games. Ultimately, even in my horror games, its about having fun. Certain subjects just are not what I consider fun. This extends to films I watch too. I avoid the whole rape-revenge genre like the plague. Just not my taste.

And yes, that means that I do, under certain fictional circumstances, consider murder "fun". I'm completely okay with that.

A Human mafia don has many similarities to an Orc mafia don.And there are differences too.  Half Orcs come from somewhere and choice isn't always involved.  The details are speculated, not usually played out in the game.  On the other hand, when the two dons fight for territory; the slaughtering is definitely played out.  Dice rolling can be fun.  The Heroes, of course enter that gray area of 'good' killing 'evil'.  Yeah,  a lot violence.

No, never.

I was all set to say not too grim really. Then I recalled the room key for the adventure I ran last Saturday.

Room C1 - Jacob, Huguenot craftsman   (he is audibly mumbling "help me" from behind his cell door)

• top of skull removed > brain matter is visible
• face is a mass of scars > missing nose and lips
• left eye replaced with glass lens >  magnifying lens to allow observation of the optic nerve
• missing left arm replaced with metal prosthetic > metal claw hand with adjustable clamps

Room C2   – empty

Room C3   Armand de Lebrousse, Manacled to Wall by all limbs, waist, and neck with metal cuffs and collars and thick leather belt around his waist and multiple chains > outer portion of cuffs is iron > inner portion of cuffs is silver,

Room C4   – empty

Room C5   - Gabrielle peasant girl

• hair covers right side of face > missing right eye
• mumbles when she speaks > no teeth
• keeps left hand behind her > missing left arm replaced with metal prosthetic > metal claw hand with adjustable clamps

Room C6   Jean-Paul peasant   Manacled to Wall by right hand

• skin on right upper leg has been removed > peeled off
• skin on left lower leg is burned and blackened > by fire
• missing left hand > stump capped with metal cylinder > cylinder contains maggots removing dead or damaged skin
• cannot speak > tongue has been removed
• left eye covered with a patch > beneath the patch is a dead, rotting eyeball

Is this grim?

Several of the PCs would like to kill the guy responsible. Makes it worse that they let the guy responsible get away and then found out what was hidden in his dungeon. On the up side, the two PCs who freed the three would-be highwaymen they had captured are happy that they didn't turn them over to the guy responsible who is the Chief Magistrate and Town Governor of the nearest town.

I have little to no interest in the description of violence in a white-washed, euphemistic way. Prmarily, because it is quite boring, but secondarily, because it is also a bit dishonest, especially when the lack of description is used to hide the consequences of the PCs' actions.
And yes, I have sexual contents in my games, if the players have an interest in them: having eye candy NPC to seduce is something that both the men and the women (both straight and gay) in my groups seem to enjoy, at least occasionally.

However, nothing about that indicates "ultraviolence" or something like that.  Up close and personal, when  you are directly, physically involved, violence is inherently brutal.  Describing the world as it is (or was), instead of how it should be isn't the position that should require extra justification; after all, it is not the one that deviates from verisimilitude.

Grimdark - it varies hugely by campaign, but I generally can't maintain the level of seriousness necessary for GRRM Grimdark - my default tone tends to levity even when horrible things are happening, as in Fritz Leiber's Swords saga.
Also while Martin is great at depicting realistic consequences for stupid behaviour, I don't generally have my good-guy NPCs behave as stupidly as he does. In particular, even Lawful noble houses have had a lot of experience at not dying, and a lot of selective pressure for not dying, too. So the kind of level of grotesque incompetence displayed by the Starks in the TV show would be vanishingly rare IMCs. I tend to have the Lawful Good guys be just as capable as the Littlefingers & Lannisters - they may not engage in the same kind of behaviours, but they are aware that other people may do so and can thus usually take account of it as a possibility in their own plans.

Sex - a few of my campaigns have about as much sex as the HBO show, most have much less. Usually the sword & sorcery type campaigns have relatively more sex (and certainly more nudity), but my Forgotten Realms game has some sex, in a nod to Ed Greenwood.

Romance is fairly frequent in most of my campaigns. I tend to avoid 'doomed romance' tropes, I definitely avoid the 'girlfriend in the fridge' trope of killing a romantic interest NPC to motivate the PC. That sort of thing is best left to a PC's backstory.

Rape - in my more adult games NPC characters may be implied or (rarely) stated to have been raped. I've never depicted forcible rape 'on screen' in any D&D campaign, which is pretty much the same as the HBO show. I have a hard 'no raping the PCs' (male or female) rule. I will look for ways to make this plausible in-universe. If a player were to insist on putting their PC into a situation where this was a likely outcome I would work with the player out of game to discuss what they wanted and what should happen - basically unless the player has consented, the PC cannot be raped. In lighter-themed settings NPC antagonists generally either have a code against rape (eg chivalry, for human types) or no interest in it (eg for non-humans).

Sex slavery - Swords & Sorcery style settings may well have slave concubines. My trashy Deathstalkery campaign has a lot. Most settings don't, or it's not mentioned - eg in Mystara the Alphatians likely have such but I'd probably avoid mentioning it in my 'child friendly' Karameikos campaign.

Food -I try to describe the food & drink to help get a feel for the setting, especially if it's significant - eg in one campaign nobles compete to lay on feasts for guests as a sign of prestige.

Gore - generally the swords & sorcery campaigns have more gore, the Palaces & Princesses campaigns don't have viscerally described gore. My described gore levels may be similar to the HBO show in the most adult-oriented games, but usually less.

Sexism - gender role differentiation IMCs tends to be less than IRL, but I don't make a Paizo-style fetish of avoiding it.  If there are female players I try to keep an ear out for what they want - eg it's very common for players to want an 'overcoming entrenched gender norms' theme for their PCs, usually in the lighter more Palaces & Princesses themed games like my current Karameikos game. If players don't want their PC to face any gender-based obstacle I'll work with that, too. I'm generally more considerate of the feelings of female players here because they tend to bring in more baggage from real life, and for D&D I think players should be able to play a PC of their own sex if they want without being disadvantaged thereby.

Homosexuality - I tend not to use historical medieval attitudes to male homosexuality (and there's no ancient Greek style pederasty - not a trope in GRRM either afaik). My default setting is something like Western Europe ca 1995, or the very early Paizo stuff - no 'gay marriage', but no persecution either.  There's a male homosexual NPC couple in my Loudwater Forgotten Realms game, who 'came out' at Lady Moonfire's summer ball, at the same time Lady Moonfire 'came out' by being escorted by her Tiefling girlfriend Tawny Kytra.
In my Karameikos game my son Bill (age 7 3/4) playing his Baron William PC was annoyed that the Baron's daughter Hope, instead of submitting to the usual arranged dynastic marriage, was smitten with the roguish Elf Sea Captain Anastasia and threatening to sail off with her. At one point he threatened to 'ban being gay' in his Barony - which I think would have gone down badly with some of the other (adult) players! - but he was talked out of it, in-game by the Baron's wife. Instead he bribed Anastasia with his Medallion of ESP to go take a hike. Some 'mature themes' but the overall tone was much lighter than GRRM.

Depends on the game.

My Warhammer is grimdark...because Warhammer! :)

Ultraviolence is common for most of my games. I'm a gorehound so I like my battles bloody. Of course, that doesn't work for running Star Trek or Star Wars so genre conventions are important considerations.

I don't do rape. Yeah, I agree there's a huge history of literature and art where rape is a key aspect, but its one of the few things I won't do at my table.

Quote from: Bren;832407Is this grim?

Yes - doubly so if your setting doesn't have healing magic.

I don't use anything that doesn't fit with the kind of adventure I'm running. I wouldn't usually use gratuitous violence in my swashbuckling, Dumas-esque fantasy game. I would use it in a Dragon Age game, or should I ever run a LotFP adventure where extremes of violence are pretty much a part of the setting.

I always steer clear of sexual violence. It makes me uncomfortable and doesn't really serve the plot of the games I run. I have played games where the GM put in lots of sex with minors, sex slavery etc. in a post-apocalypse world, and I felt like the idea was more to try and make the game more hard-core than to actually explore the setting. That didn't sit well with me, and I wouldn't want a group I ran to be put through the same kind of discomfort.

Quote from: Bren;832407- snip -

This is GOLD! I may need to shamelessly stea- eh... be inspired by this description for one of my games.

Grimdark?  Never.  Brutal?  Every single time.  Limb removal, decapitations, entrails spilling.  And that's just the players.

Currently running a Mutants and Masterminds game on Sundays, and a couple of months ago, the PC's met an Eco-Terrorist named Dryad in the same vein as Batman's Poison Ivy, except she can clothe herself in bark-like armour.  She tore down the Monorail train they were on and killed about 100 people by impaling them on branches and crushing them with falling building when she fast grew a tree in a local rooftop park and garden.

My villains are villains, they're monsters who either don't care, or have convinced themselves what they're doing is the only choice.

It's gotten there at times, sometimes outside my own expectations because that's where the PC consequences went. But generally I shoot for happier fare in my fantasy, and am upfront about it. I am OK with grimdark, but it's often farcical to me and hard to keep a straight face about it. Once you drench someone in that many buckets of shit, it starts to come off more like "You Can't Do That On Television!" (I am now dated...)

There are sadism, sex, rape, child-killing and other types of nastiness in my games on an almost weekly basis, but I don't get too graphic in my descriptions those times.

My personal "ick" button was touched when I was playing a board game set in ancient Rome with some of the people I rpg with and someone mentioned that apparently it was a great crowd-pleaser at Colosseum to splash urine of female baboons in heat to female prisoners/slaves and letting the now-horny male baboons at them...

Quote from: Moracai;832450There are sadism, sex, rape, child-killing and other types of nastiness in my games on an almost weekly basis, but I don't get too graphic in my descriptions those times.

My personal "ick" button was touched when I was playing a board game set in ancient Rome with some of the people I rpg with and someone mentioned that apparently it was a great crowd-pleaser at Colosseum to splash urine of female baboons in heat to female prisoners/slaves and letting the now-horny male baboons at them...

Masters degree in Roman history here. While comparable atrocities did happen, I've never heard that, and if there are any references to it in historical works, it was either a one-off and/or a lurid story to discredit a particular emperor.

It kind of disgusts me that people are "learning" these tidbits from TV shows and whatnot that are either completely fictitious or utterly unrepresentative, and feel that they are knowledgable. In turn they never learn about real ancient history or civilisation and dismiss our cultural past as all evil patriarchs, rapists and slavers.

Quote from: The_Shadow;832456Masters degree in Roman history here. While comparable atrocities did happen, I've never heard that, and if there are any references to it in historical works, it was either a one-off and/or a lurid story to discredit a particular emperor.

It kind of disgusts me that people are "learning" these tidbits from TV shows and whatnot that are either completely fictitious or utterly unrepresentative, and feel that they are knowledgable. In turn they never learn about real ancient history or civilisation and dismiss our cultural past as all evil patriarchs, rapists and slavers.

To be honest, a lot of what we know of history is guesswork, and sometimes, people fill in the gaps with less than credible information.  They make crap up to make it sound better than it is.

I've done medieval weapon research and there's so much conflicting information, and all done by supposed credible sources, that frankly, make it hard to actually know what was real or not.

Nah, i steer clear of misery porn. Sure, bad things happen, but i'm more of a PG13 kind of guy when it comes to RPGs.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;832460To be honest, a lot of what we know of history is guesswork, and sometimes, people fill in the gaps with less than credible information.  They make crap up to make it sound better than it is.

I've done medieval weapon research and there's so much conflicting information, and all done by supposed credible sources, that frankly, make it hard to actually know what was real or not.

That's why the discipline of history exists.

In regard to this particular case, the particular point I would be confident in making, is that the Romans had no tradition of sexualised public violence in their tradition of public violence.

And the larger points are (A) nerds often watch HBO and think they know far more than they do and (B) our Western cultural forebears are too often objects of considerable bias and cheap shots, which is a shame as they left us a rich legacy.

All of which is OT, so I'll leave it there.

Quote from: One Horse Town;832463Nah, i steer clear of misery porn. Sure, bad things happen, but i'm more of a PG13 kind of guy when it comes to RPGs.

Same here. We do have a bit of cannibalism once in awhile, but we try to keep it tasteful.

Plenty of "standard" violence; people get skewered with swords and brained with maces, vampires drinking human blood, space pirates throw people out through the airlock, ghouls eat human flesh, etc.

Not much in the way of explicit sex or sexual violence. I prefer to "fade to black" or veiled references to past events.

Generally speaking, I feel the Grand Guignol style abuse of more extreme elements and scenes of sex, violence and horror tends to jade players and deprive these things of pathos, weight or shock value. I'd rather use them sparingly for better effect.

Quote from: The_Shadow;832464That's why the discipline of history exists.

To be fair, most researchers do true to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes a misreading can lead to misinformation (and it's often, I would daresay most of the time, no malicious at all), and then fame is on the line...  Judgement can get cloudy.  But for the most part, historians are trying to make the best they have with frankly, limited information.

For example, the longest time, we thought the average age for most medieval people was 30-40.  What we recently (as in the last 20-30 years, if I remember my information correctly) is that what the early 'census takers' (if you want to even call them that) used to factor in things like stillborn, infant deaths, death by violence and lumped it all into one giant statistic.  When in reality, the average human would live to about the same age we do now, assuming no untoward incidents happened.

Now bearing this in mind, I think we can forgive ourselves as gamers, if we get certain things wrong.  Like sharks eating people.  They don't, in fact, we find human bodies with chunks bitten out of them, but mostly intact.  Sharks don't think we're tasty, and they'll take a bit and effectively go 'EW~!'

I would like to point out that if the bad guys in my fantasy game are truly evil, rapes happen in my games (and sometimes after a major battle it has happened) it's never described in any detail, and frankly, I never have the players come across it during the act.  Most people can't handle rape.  No civilized society has ever condoned the act outside of war.  And even then.  But out and out violence?  Well, it's not pretty, nor glorious.  But sometimes, it's all you can do, especially when one side decides that it's right, you're wrong, nothing you say will change that, and sadly you have to die for it.

I really need to find my Paizo Critical Hit cards.  I loved that deck.

I try to create a realistic world that exists beyond the table and has genuine consequences and repercussions for action.

This probably means that a ship load of pirates will rape and pillage unless there is a very good reason for them not to do that.

The degree of detail required varies on the audience. "You find the villagers bodies scattered about the place their heads are piled up in the village square" vs "you see the body of a young boy about 8 or 9 years old. His head, roughly severed from the body by a flurry of ill-aimed blows, seems to have been removed" etc

Rape happens and not just to women, to orcs all elves are there to be corrupted after all so ... again no need to detail the actual act just a fade to black.

For D&D usually no. Have done it before and played it. But generally no.

The long running Spalljammer campaign that eventually moved to a new system and setting was, and is, one of the worst of that. One of my characters has been put through the absolute wringer and been effectively "killed" for several years of game time.

Outside of D&D? Yes.

Gamma World was my go-to for brutal. It was still weird. But due to the lethality of the setting things tended to be pretty harsh out in the wastelands. One of my major campaigns as a player was a bitter war with the Purists.

My one serious try as a player at d20 GW(AKA: Nano World) turned into a horrific struggle against the Breeders that saw us having to put down two group members because they had been irreparably overwritten by the fuckers to the point that the characters were effectively worse than dead. Things went understandably downhill from there.

Albedo is another. The setting is no-holds barred grim and very gritty WWII in space. Some characters were killed not by bullets but by having to retire due to combat stress and trauma leaving them a useless wreck.

TSRs Conan RPG was another that tended to get pretty rough.

In my teens and twenties I used to be really big on grimness.

Now, in my 40s, I've had enough of that.  Things are pretty PG-13 rated nowadays.

I have dark stuff in my games, but it's not turned up to 11 like it is in Game of Thrones.  I like to keep it mostly lighthearted and entertaining rather than reveling in misery.  Sex is mostly glossed over/fade-to-black stuff; it happens, but we don't dwell on it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;832391That is to say, utraviolence?  Grittiness?  Sexual content?  A general depiction of a truly shitty world to live in?

Yes, this is borrowed from something similar posted on another forum.  I suspect we'll see some different points of view here.

RPGPundit

Yes. And I also try to inject my world with great beauty in order to give the PC's something to strive for and protect. Sometimes that beauty is something they discover within their own PC's relationships within the game.

In this regard, while on the surface people have called my games gritty and challenging, it's something people walk away from with new possibilities. I go out of my way to challenge the preconceptions of what the players themselves think of their characters and that they're about. They usually find out in the crucible of the campaign.

It's kinda funny, I didn't consider Game of Thrones "gritty". I liked it immediately because it reminded me of my kind of campaigns. My campaigns tend to be larger in scope. R. Scott Bakker's books (The Prince of Nothing Trilogy and the Aspect Emperor trilogy) are probably closer to my games. And yeah, I'd call those books "gritty".

Quote from: jibbajibba;832482Rape happens and not just to women, to orcs all elves are there to be corrupted after all so ... again no need to detail the actual act just a fade to black.

I remember in one of my more Grimdark campaigns, shocking the (all-male, fairly 'bro' type) players when they realised that one of the three human sex-slaves they had rescued from the orcs was a young male... I was quite proud of that moment. :D

Naturally somebody on RPGnet had a nasty dig at me over that, for traumatising my players, and probably bringing back bad memories of my players' own experiences of homosexual rape.  :(

Quote from: Saplatt;832466We do have a bit of cannibalism once in awhile, but we try to keep it tasteful.

*drumroll*

No sex ever in my campaigns. Unspoken contract, not censorship. Everyone at the table tacitly accepted that mixing RPGs with any level of sex beyond Haye's-Code-era levels of innuendo is kinda sad, uncomfortable and pathetic.

Loads of graphic violence though. Guess that paradox makes us good ol' fashioned Americans.

My fantasy campaigns have always been fairly generic epic Tolkien stuff.

Shadowrun gets much, much darker though.

I am cool with brutality, and think that's often contextually relevant as survival on worlds is often brutal. But I am reading the Pundit's title about "GRRM-Brutal" as more over-the-top than mere on screen normal horrors of reality. For that I think more of things like 40k Dark Eldar planet of Commarragh, but as a campaign, and the players are slaves.

I mean, when I run Hell or its adjacent nightmare domains, things are contextually horrifying and terrifying. But GRRM-Brutal reads more to me like a naive, juvenile version of such things. I envision an eight or ten year old writing a horror movie, script, storyboard, title and all, "It's called Blood, of the Kill, of the Blood, Kill, Rape — Now with POOP! — in the Classroom without Recess! Scary, no?"

I am probably reading it wrong, but I am reading Pundit's topic as juvenile over-saturation.

I don't enjoy torture porn (so Hostel was an unpleasant film to me), but we get pretty brutal sometimes. Well, rarely more than you get in the RE Howard stories when I think about it.

It depends on the particular game but generally I like nihilistic horror and so do my friends. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall guts and gore but there's usually an atmosphere that things COULD go very badly. No plot immunity mechanics for a start.
Then again I've been wanting to run a Dark Heresy game and my druthers would have it a lot closer to the original wargame's description... much less self serious and not nearly so pouty-faced.

Quote from: Spinachcat;832422My Warhammer is grimdark...because Warhammer! :)

Warhammer is not grim. Its a horror setting.

40k though is "grimdark" like a Herman & Katnip cartoon. :rolleyes:

Yes, sometimes.  

The violence part, especially.  I run a very gritty setting, and maiming and scarring and injury show up a lot.  

Socially, racism, ignorance, poverty, and classism abound.  As does graft and intimidation and revenge.  

And I don't avoid sex in game; though I don't get as graphic as I do with the rest.  It's a prime motivating dynamic; up there with Violence.

Usually not, however there have been moments. Like an incident in my Exalted game where the players faced off against a famine demon. When they visited the first village of survivors things became pretty grim and violent.

Snotty reply: no, because I have taste and have read Cormac McCarthy so if I'm gonna get super dark I know better places to go

Helpful reply: well I associate "GRRM-brutal" with a tone of adolescent nihilism more than just the straight misery quotient, which in & of itself is not out of line with a lot of the sword & sorcery stuff I've been inspired by (like, try and tell me Melnibone was nicer than the Targaryens). So, substantively, there's a lot of death and strife and disease, but I don't approach it all "oh life is meaningless God is dead and death is final" especially in a D&D framework where that is not at all true. More with sort of a sense that life is fleeting and you must do the best with the (probably little) time that you have. Or it's all just kinda splattery :D

Quote from: Spinachcat;832422Yes - doubly so if your setting doesn't have healing magic.

An apothecary might concoct some poultices that would restore a couple of hit points, but there is not much magic anything. The only miraculous healing seen is the possibly miraculous Benedictine Monk they met who was a healer and some of his patients recovered better or faster than normal, perhaps miraculously so. But he disappeared six months ago or so and his miracles were nothing like restoring missing body parts.  So missing body parts aren't coming back. Magic that could do that would be likely to see the practitioner tried as a witch.

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;832428This is GOLD! I may need to shamelessly stea- eh... be inspired by this description for one of my games.

Glad you liked it. Use it by all means.

I used some random tables that I took from here  (http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/tables.php?mode=5&backto)and slightly modified them to help generate the mutilations.

Scars, Missing Limbs, and Mutilations
Roll 1d10
1...Missing an ear.
2...Missing a hand (roll again: 1-2 wooden hand 3-4 hook 5-6 nothing).
3...Missing an arm (roll again: 1-2 wooden arm, 3-4 wooden arm ending in a hook 5-6 nothing).
4...Missing a leg (roll again 1-2 wooden leg 3 peg leg 5 crutches 6 nothing).
5...Missing an eye (roll again: 1-2 eyepatch 3-4 glass eye 5-6 nothing).
6...Long scar on face.
7...Face is a mass of scars.
8...No teeth (roll again: 1-2 wooden teeth 3-4 artificial teeth; roll on the 'Precious and Semi-Precious Stones' table in the in the 'Treasure' section for what they're made of, ignoring the column headed 'value' 5-6 nothing).
9...Skin is (roll again: 1-2 deathly white 3-4 reddened 5-6 blackened) due to (roll again: 1-3 disease 4-6 magic).
10 roll again.

   Roll 1d8
1...Finger.
2...Hand.
3...Arm.
4...Nose.
5...Ear.
6...Eye.
7...Tongue
8...Toe
The villain, Bertin de Labrousse, is the Chief Magistrate and Town Governor of Soissons. He is a mad surgeon and alchemist whose primary motivation is KNOWLEDGE. Which he is willing to obtain by any means necessary.

Personality: A talker, Labrousse is uncomfortable with silence and will talk to fill any conversational gap. He usually directs his conversation to his ever-present silent servitor Odo or to any other audience. Odo almost never says anything, but that doesn’t stop Labrousse from talking to Odo – though Labrousse is in a sense talking to himself.

    “This experiment will be very painful…not, you understand for me, but for you. I want you to know that I do not do this because of any pleasure it might give me, but solely for the advancement of our understanding. Therefore you may take consolation that the acute and protracted suffering that you are about to experience will advance the cause of science and will lead to a deeper knowledge of the workings of that vital spark that is the prime mover and activator of the human body, what those of a religious rather than of a scientific philosophy would call the human soul.”

Quote from: jibbajibba;832482IThe degree of detail required varies on the audience. "You find the villagers bodies scattered about the place their heads are piled up in the village square".

OK. If we are counting decapitations we better add a few of those in to the tally (1 crime lord and loup garou). But that was the players so totally not my fault as GM.
   
The crime lord's byname was Le Boucher (English The Butcher) so having his head cut off was poetic justice. And the PC that cut off his head is a poet, so poetic justice squared. :D

No, we don't run Game of Thrones.

Quote from: RPGPundit;832391That is to say, utraviolence?  Grittiness?  Sexual content?  A general depiction of a truly shitty world to live in?

I think that level of brutality exists in my fantasy worlds, but mostly as background that's understood. So, for example, if you rescue some NPCs from the clutches of a sadistic, evil necromancer, I'm not going to spend game time having those NPCs recount the graphic details of however they might have been tortured during imprisonment. The players can use their imagination. If the PCs come across some demonic shrine, I might say the walls are covered in reliefs of horrific and unspeakable acts. I'm not going to spend time detailing what those might be. The players can use their imagination.

Quote from: Imp;832577but I don't approach it all "oh life is meaningless God is dead and death is final" especially in a D&D framework where that is not at all true.

Well that depends on the setting - in my Wilderlands campaign it probably is true - unless the Mycretians are onto something...

Quote from: Chainsaw;832583I think that level of brutality exists in my fantasy worlds, but mostly as background that's understood. So, for example, if you rescue some NPCs from the clutches of a sadistic, evil necromancer, I'm not going to spend game time having those NPCs recount the graphic details of however they might have been tortured during imprisonment.

The thing about a surprising amount of 'G rated' entertainment is that it does exactly this without causing any stir. Non-'grim' entertainment can be quite implicitly grim.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;832618The thing about a surprising amount of 'G rated' entertainment is that it does exactly this without causing any stir. Non-'grim' entertainment can be quite implicitly grim.

I don't know of your fancy New World rating systems, but I ran Paizo's Skull & Shackles pirate campaign for my players and at some point there were NPCs that the PCs had encountered in previous books and now had been tortured. One was lucky and had only his eyes poked out. A spellcaster had her tongue, hands and eyes cut off, and one had her arms, legs, ears and nose cut out and was in a vegetative state from all the abuse she had took.

And Paizo doesn't exactly advertise Golarion as a grim setting.

Quote from: Moracai;832621And Paizo doesn't exactly advertise Golarion as a grim setting.

Their cover images don't exactly look like Disney though, so the buyer should know what they're getting into.

(http://i.imgur.com/K3oXbjn.jpg)

It depends on the campaign, and it depends on how you measure the brutality. Many of my games have met or exceeded the level of brutality, if you look at specific atrocities or certain people, but maybe not in terms of how pervasive the depravity seems to be in what I've seen of Game of Thrones... there are almost always some fairly decent people, including some aristocrats, in my campaigns. I haven't seen enough Game of Thrones to see if there are any places that are relatively all right, or not.

One of my campaigns was headed for a pretty horrible set of wars, though, it seemed, if the campaign had lasted another decade or two, that could have plunged almost all of it into the sacking of most/all of civilization.

And I already described the blood slave pens in the Evil Campaign thread, though I didn't go through with that, even though I might use it as NPC location.

I don't have quite the cynicism of GRRM, but there has been even more excessive depravity, at least by some measures, in many of my games and my friends' games.

I've played in a few which I think were inspired by corrupt-Catholicism, Pol Pot and Jonestown, etc., which had widespread people enmeshed in terrible religions which were various varieties of murderous soul-sucking and/or Orwellian dystopic horrors. Not to mention all the corrupt authorities (who were sometimes good cathartic targets for the PCs to lay waste to).

In some games, PCs who were supposedly fairly positive likable sorts most of the time, took to some pretty murderous ways, pre-emptively attacking other armed parties before knowing they were hostile, stripping their bodies of all possessions, letting the orc sever and collect their toes, and at least once dissecting a body looking for more loot.

I ran a sci fi game where the PCs went uber-vigilante and would just show up where thuggish people hung out, and encourage escalation and then turn it into a full-scale bloodbath for fun and loot. A favorite event was gleefully running people over with air cars, and laughing at good Samaritans, pacifists and bystanders. It was a cathartic comedy campaign that didn't last long, but was very brutal in a way only (some?) gamers would understand. Actually I prefer its morality to the Grand Theft Auto series, which it pre-dated by over a decade.

If you measure brutality in terms of murders per character, then many CRPGs may top the statistics. That elf in the bikini on the cover of EverQuest, in order to level up a high level character in that game system, probably had to murder thousands of inferior races, since that's about the only path offered to gain levels in those games.

I find it funny that GRRM is being used as some kind of standard for "grimdark" or "gritty". While they are more realistic than frolicky-fantasay (yay! the anti-grimdark term!!!) it's not like GRRM invented it.

As has been pointed out - Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, and the rest of the S&S luminaries have been doing this for the better part of a century.

I'd also say that categorizing GRRM's violence in his books as "pointless" is a silly criticism, given the fact there are authors out there far more egregious in terms of the level of violence implied or otherwise that make use of those acts on purpose for illustration on how their world works. GRRM's violence is implicit, not pointless.

Of course if ones sensibilities are too reserved for that... there's plenty of Pern and Xanth books to tickle you.

My apologies.  I thought "GRRM" was just some kind of new semi-derogatory slang for grimness, like "grimdark."  It's only now just dawned on me that it's supposed to be initials.  So, DOH!

Oh, also, one of my favorite brutality examples was when the players explored a fortress, and found room after room with old hacked bodies that had been stripped of their clothes and anything of value gone. They were appalled, and were wondering what horror had done this... and then eventually realized that they had been here before, and this was just the aftermath of their own earlier handiwork.

Quote from: Gabriel2;832650My apologies.  I thought "GRRM" was just some kind of new semi-derogatory slang for grimness, like "grimdark."  It's only now just dawned on me that it's supposed to be initials.  So, DOH!

I'm pretty sure it stands for Grim Ravaging Rape Murder.

At least, I haven't seen evidence to the contrary.

While I don't think any subject is "off-limits", I make generous use of "Fade to Black" to keep my games as close to PG-13, as possible.

Quote from: Skarg;832652Oh, also, one of my favorite brutality examples was when the players explored a fortress, and found room after room with old hacked bodies that had been stripped of their clothes and anything of value gone. They were appalled, and were wondering what horror had done this... and then eventually realized that they had been here before, and this was just the aftermath of their own earlier handiwork.

... I post this post-screen-clean after choking on my coffee from laughing so hard.

hahahaha awesome!

Quote from: Skarg;832652Oh, also, one of my favorite brutality examples was when the players explored a fortress, and found room after room with old hacked bodies that had been stripped of their clothes and anything of value gone. They were appalled, and were wondering what horror had done this... and then eventually realized that they had been here before, and this was just the aftermath of their own earlier handiwork.

Priceless. :rotfl:

Quote from: Novastar;832656While I don't think any subject is "off-limits", I make generous use of "Fade to Black" to keep my games as close to PG-13, as possible.

I don't have have any young folks playing with me (wouldn't mind if I did). I only fade to black to speed things up.

Usually I'm juggling all the players desires to hack away at various plot-threads they have working so I don't have a lot of use of needless expository scenes for their own sake. But... every now and then it's required.

The nastier stuff is largely in the background in my games. If I say that pirates have been raiding villages along the Somewhereorother Coast, it's implied that rape, murder & etc. was taking place, but I'm not going to go into the details.

Quote from: Gabriel2;832650My apologies.  I thought "GRRM" was just some kind of new semi-derogatory slang for grimness, like "grimdark."  It's only now just dawned on me that it's supposed to be initials.  So, DOH!

Ooooh, everyone's talking about George R. R. Martin and Game of Thrones... You're not the only one confused. Stupid fucking acronyms. I also though it was slang for grimdark, like Riot Grrls music.

If that's the boundary, then pfft, my average D&D campaigns are grittier, even pastel-colored fantasias. Go run Birthright or Stormbringer and tell me GoT is something special in terms of nastiness. Politics is nastiness, as it is the struggle for power distribution by those who hold power.

Everyone tells me to watch or read GoT as if it is something special. My brief skims of it leave me cold. It seems like cheap melodrama in mud 'n blood fantasy trade dress. If you want gritty ruthlessness go read dynastic history of pretty much any place on earth. Japanese, Latin, English, and Korean period soap operas were more entertaining — prettier costumes and actually useful due to fidelity. One day I'll sit and binge GoT proper, but I get the same "it's going to be a let down" feeling like the buzz around LOST or Heroes.

The only thing that Game of Thrones does better than anyone else, in the market, is the author's willingness to off every single character for what I think is mainly shock value.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;832643Their cover images don't exactly look like Disney though, so the buyer should know what they're getting into.

That doesnt look grim at all. In fact it looks the opposite of grim. Just a standard over the top battle.

Quote from: Omega;832709That doesnt look grim at all. In fact it looks the opposite of grim. Just a standard over the top battle.

:D No, this is the opposite of grim:

(http://i.imgur.com/vCyrD1v.jpg?1)

We're talking about points on a spectrum here. A full blown satanic-themed demon slitting a good dragon's throat in full view while a helpless party slips into the treacherous heaving earth is somewhere between Warhammer 40k and Veggie Tales. I'd argue that image is much closer to 40k than a lot of Disney movies, which are closer to Veggie Tales.

I tend towards PG-13. With a few excursions into graphic-ness, but never too deep.

Quote from: Omega;832709That doesnt look grim at all. In fact it looks the opposite of grim. Just a standard over the top battle.

(http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111202191145/villains/images/d/dc/Dragon_Maleficent_-_Part_7.PNG)

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;832737We're talking about points on a spectrum here. A full blown satanic-themed demon slitting a good dragon's throat in full view while a helpless party slips into the treacherous heaving earth is somewhere between Warhammer 40k and Veggie Tales. I'd argue that image is much closer to 40k than a lot of Disney movies, which are closer to Veggie Tales.

Oh it's a good dragon? I was wonder why the demon was slitting his own mount's throat.

Quote from: Bren;832744Oh it's a good dragon? I was wonder why the demon was slitting his own mount's throat.

Since when does evil cooperate with each other???  Good barely tolerates other Good on the best of time, and Evil is more open minded, what?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;832746Since when does evil cooperate with each other???  Good barely tolerates other Good on the best of time, and Evil is more open minded, what?

Cooperate? Who said anything about cooperation? Spells, threats, and pointy hooves to keep the mount in line.

Heh, only now do I realize how ambiguous that image is. I actually experienced Path of the Righteous as a player, so of course it all makes sense to me, but to a casual buyer...

Once in awhile I sip a little something in.  I had the PC's get hired to rescue a nobleman's daughter, kidnapped on a hunting trip in a swamp by a tribe of lizardmen.  When they tracked the perps down she was already dead and eaten.  

It was also something of a trademark for me to describe the deathblow of the last villain in a comically over the top way.  It started with a horse mounted bandit getting killed by an arrow.  I added the detail of him being dragged a bit because his foot got caught in the stirrup as he fell lifeless from the saddle. One guy commented that he liked the detail, so I got more and more elaborate.  Stuff like a JFK style "magic arrow" bouncing off stuff and piercing an NPC's eyes/ears/vitals multiple times, and such. I can't even remember them now, but the party used to look forward to them and we all laughed our asses off a couple of times.

Since my campaign focused on Lovecraftian themes, I had Nyarlathotep pay their area a visit, and turn a formerly good and noble paladin evil, prompting him to rape and beat his betrothed half to death. The PC's were hired to bring him to justice.

Sometimes the party made things dark; they surprised a hobgoblin hunting party once, and after they killed them all and realized the tribe they came from was occupying the dungeon they wanted to get into, they cut the heads off the corpses and mounted them on spikes. One guy wrote "The Hunter has Become the Hunted" in blood as a sort of terrorist threat.  The hobgoblins sent out search parties, one of which they killed and treated in a similar fashion, writing "Send More".  

But as a GENERAL rule, my campaigns were  a lot like a Fritz Lieber novel level of violence.  Sex was almost nonexistent, because we were teenage boys and that would have been perceived as weird.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;832737:D No, this is the opposite of grim:

(http://i.imgur.com/vCyrD1v.jpg?1)

No. Having to sit through it with your neice is grim. Oh god the grim!:eek:

Quote from: tenbones;832648I find it funny that GRRM is being used as some kind of standard for "grimdark" or "gritty". While they are more realistic than frolicky-fantasay (yay! the anti-grimdark term!!!) it's not like GRRM invented it.

As has been pointed out - Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, and the rest of the S&S luminaries have been doing this for the better part of a century.

In fact, I'd say GoT is not "grimdark", it is a different thing altogether, a form of 'realistic gritty'.

Yes. Since I moved to Newcastle my games have become as grimdark as I have always wanted, it's a synthesis of time, players and mood. That's our Thursday night group, and all our games there, whatever the system or setting, have a grimdark edge. Murder, intra family poisonings, dodgy affairs, betrayal, all that. We don't play rapists, but they exist and we usually have dealt with them grimly.

Now on Sundays.. similar people, but it's happy and moral, lawful good and positive attitudes have followed.

So, Grimdark Thursdays and Pure as Driven Snow Sundays..

The new Tuesday night group is still finding it's tone...

Violence? Graphic, but not wallowing in gore. Limbs are cut off and people get disembowled or devoured by monsters. But we don't indulge in sadism, or linger on the details.

Grim? Our campaign worlds tend to be cruel places where everyone is watching out for number one - think Lankhmar, Nift the Lean, or Warhammer Fantasy. But that's not the same as A Song of Ice and Fire. The stuff we run has an underlying streak of black humour and irony missing from Martin's world.

Sex? Never bothered with it. No interest in introducing romance, whores, or rape in our RPGs.

My gut reaction is no...violence yes, but R at best. Grim yes, but not overwhelmingly so because in the past those games tend to be short and my campaigns always run long. Sex? Not really, a hand-waive to it at best when there's a player who wants his PC to pursue some relationship or something, otherwise a lot of PG-13 vague references or implications without actually stating anything whenever possible. Except for once when I ran what I called a "Heavy Metal rated" campaign years ago, mostly because the players at that time were the sort to appreciate it. But my "HM rated" campaign was still nothing even remotely as freaky as you'll see Raggi produce, so YMMV.

I actually have to take it back.  My games never go the GRRM level.  Simply because we have moments of humour in our games.  So far, in the show at least, it's been relentless brutal to the point of numbing.

My games never go that far.  Do people lose limbs, if the system supports it.  Do people die?  Yes.  Are there horrible things happening?  Of course, monsters are well, monsters.  But there are also lighter moments, like the time there was the Kobold holding up a stone on Lance Rock (it's a dropped menhir of stone that's a 60 degree angle, and we had one of the players mention that if he saw a monkey holding up a baby lion he was going to run.  I played with it, and had a Kobold Shaman using the Forgotten Realms sun to find the right rock to do some divination with.)  The players had a bit of fun with that, and they actually talked to the little guy about what he was doing.  And got a free reading out of it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;833327In fact, I'd say GoT is not "grimdark", it is a different thing altogether, a form of 'realistic gritty'.

Yep.

"Grimdark" for me - R. Scott Bakker. Hands down. That's some dark, scary shit. It's very Cthulu-Fantasy, not in a Conan way. I read those books and they infested my dreams. And I don't say this lightly as a former EMT in LA - I've seen it all. Almost every form of inhumanity short of really crazy shit you'd require time to conceive and execute on - I've probably seen it up close. Bakker's books had moments that plucked a few of those strings for me.

I think he does a good job of using that horror as a conceit of the world.

I've considered "going there" in my Spelljammer game - on one planet where the conceit - essentially where the big bads are Tscimice like monstrosities and their servants are vile creatures motivated by the pleasures of the flesh over all else. I probably won't. For all the reasons we understand wouldn't make for a fun time.

That brings up an interesting new thread about horror-scary vs. horror-campy for games! I'll post it.

As a rule my fantasy campaigns tend to be not all that "realistic gritty", but my Dark Albion campaign has certainly played like Game of Thrones.  Considering that both settings come from the same historical source (the very gritty War of the Roses), I guess that's not surprising.