Exchange of Realities

This one’s for RPG Blog Carnival: March is bringing us war.

Don’t start an interstellar war; it has no helpful uses

When someone asks you ‘what’s it for?’, you’ll only make excuses

If thirty trillion folks get hurt, you’ll go to bed with no dessert!

Don’t start an interstellar war

–Frank Hayes, “Never Set the Cat on Fire”

In the last five years I’ve been playing, I’ve noticed one element in the games that seemed inevitable once introduced. It wasn’t death, or at least not PC death—that’s only happened in two I was in. It certainly wasn’t taxes; I’m one of the few people I know who would even consider incorporating that into a game.

Image courtesy of Michal Zacharzewski on stock.xchng

The inevitability was war. We’d be confronted with it directly, or blunder into it on accident—even in the games where it never quite came to armed conflict, the GM told me it was going on in the background and just waiting for a chance to spill into the plot. It was the same no matter what the game was billed as, or how hard we tried to avoid it, or even how unsuited the characters were to that sort of storyline. There was always some sort of war, and it always dragged us into it.

I’ll admit, my biases come into play here—I’m not fond of combat in general, and even less fond of mass combat (particularly since I haven’t seen a single system in which it didn’t have its own ruleset). But I don’t think that’s the whole reason why I can’t see what’s so great about war. Random people dying like flies, circumstance way outside anything the PCs can really control, pretty much nothing but fight, fight, fight, fight. And in all these times, I’ve never seen any way to avoid it.

Okay, enough vitriol. Let’s cut to the chase.

Why is the story never about averting war? I asked a few of my friends—ones who have specifically used military plotlines, so as to counter my own anti-war bias, and this is what I got. The italics are my initial responses—I might come back and make proper individual posts of them later.

• People think not having a war is “boring”. The logic I got from my interviewee: Conflict equals excitement. Yeah, I’m with you so far. Conflict also equals fighting. …does it really need to involve weapons? Without war, there is no conflict. Wait, WHAT?
• People dislike the status quo, and averting war just returns to the status quo. Really not sure about this one—if the status quo was itching for a fight, doesn’t averting a war require changing it?
• Due to the wargaming roots of RPGs, people are conditioned for combat. Why does combat require mass combat? Even for the people itching for a fight, it’s not that hard to work one into a game that pursues avoidance of mass conflict—it just means we don’t have to worry about the silly armies.
•  Alternatives are too difficult. Not really. Even if you don’t want to play it out. May I direct you to Nameless Kingdom’s riff on peace treaties?
• Mass combat involves Large Things, affecting More Than Just the Characters, which makes it More Dramatic. Okay, I’ll grant you that one. But that also means it’s a Large Thing to head off at the pass. I’m still not convinced that it has to actually happen in order to be a Grand Plot Device.
• Wars create turmoil and change. Well, yeah; that’s why I want to stop them.

My conclusion is that most of these arguments boil down to one thing: War is easier (aside from having to memorize the mass combat rules or figure out how to fake a clash of armies, but that’s a small investment, right?). It’s a decent reason, but I wouldn’t call it one that justifies never running prevention. I could create a war prevention plot addressing all of these arguments. Yes, it would take a bit longer to set up, but is it really that different from spending ages figuring out who’s likeliest to win where and how?