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

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 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.

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.