An emotional mechanism hidden in all TTRPG combat engines (that you can use to decolonize your game)

There’s a long and healthy conversation around subverting colonial expression as it manifests in roleplaying games via mechanics and settings. Last week, there was a great new post on this from Habeeb, the default dungeon is colonial. I really like what he’s done to lay out the violence trap in mainstream fantasy systems — basically that the most well documented and playtested way of solving conflicts is violence, and a significant proportion of sheet space is taken up with the methods and materials for that violence!

One of his core arguments is:

“… combat is the most detailed engine… combat becomes the most reliable engine… the rules are not forcing you to fight, but they are constantly making fighting the cleanest option. and clean options are powerful. clean options become habits.”

He then offers some good examples of games in The Quiet Year and Spire that offer different exploration and mechanical worldbuilding in story and violence. These are great games, and I highly recommend them, but we can also use these combat engines to get into emotional truths of a story that let us begin to subvert the colonial default.

I base my approach to this on a specific design note in Dogs in the Vineyard from Vincent Baker, published in 2004. I continually come back to the passage, because it’s so damn relevant every time I design a conflict or combat, and I want you to have it too! (If someone's written on this before, do let me know! I'll happily link them at the top here.)

In the DitV, the player gets to assign die values to different traits, relationships, and belongings pretty much however they want within the bounds of character creation. Baker writes a note basically for GMs who are nervous that players will use this for powergaming. Here’s the full passage:

Comment: Relationships vs. Traits vs. Things

The reason that the character background options aren’t balanced across Relationships and Traits is that the two things serve very different purposes in the game. Your Traits contribute to how conflicts go, but your Relationships contribute to what conflicts are about. When you take “I’m a good shot” as a Trait, you’re saying that you want to resolve conflicts by shooting. When you take a Relationship with a person, you’re saying that you want to be in conflict with him or her.

You drive a conflict, moment to moment, toward your Traits. You drive the game, scene by scene, toward your Relationships. When you choose your character’s background, you’re prioritizing: do you want more input into how conflicts turn out, or more input into which conflicts?

Make sense? That’s why you get more Relationship dice than Trait dice across the board. Input into which conflicts is more important in the game overall.

Belongings, then, are just super-narrow Traits. I like it when my players put big dice in their Belongings, especially their weapons— every die in a weapon is a temptation to hurt someone.

DitV p. 97 (emphasis mine)

The whole framing of the game is sticky relationships and heightened emotions with no easy answers. The scenario on the back of the book is stuffed with that:

The shopkeeper from Back East? His wife isn’t really his wife. He’s the procurer and she’s the available woman. Their marriage is a front.
Your brother’s son, your nephew, is fourteen years old. He’s been stealing money from his father, your brother, and taking it to visit this woman.
Your brother is in a bitter rage, humiliated by his son’s thievery and grieving his son’s lost innocence. He’s going to shoot her.
What do you do?

The implication in “What do you do?” especially in context of “you’ve made gunslinging your best skill and your gun your best tool,” is that using your gun will make everything here worse, and therefore your first impulse to use violence because it’s the most mechanically effective route will be the worst outcome for your character.

This is admittedly perhaps a strained scenario in a number of ways – you do have to accept that your brother is going to do something wrong if he kills the shopkeeper’s wife, or anyone, and so it would also be wrong for you to do that — but I think it’s still strong enough to see how it can serve as an example of this principle. It gives you permission as the GM to make this important.

(While we talk about DitV, there's good reason why you might not have come across it — the game is a vessel for deeply problematic and colonial “wild west” storytelling that’s been taken out of print by the author, and, as he says, a lot of it “can go to hell." The system is interesting though, and if you want to take a look at it, someone has made a generic system called ‘DOGS’ based on it.)

To paraphrase, Baker says your players’ biggest and most effective tools are the ones they will reach for first to solve problems, so, especially when those tools are weapons, give them problems where that tool, that weapon, will just make it worse. The way Baker does this in DitV is to directly connect the problems to relationships that players’ characters must care about on some level, like direct family relations.

While DitV mechanically calls in the relationships to enhance a dice pool, we can use this as a framing device in games that don't offer a mechanical relationship by tangling our characters' close relationships up in the arc of our story. We can put our characters' loved ones in positions within the dramatic arc of the game that create relational problems for our players. The secret of this framing device is that solving those relational problems in the worst ways is embedded in every character sheet in every game that devotes real estate to the mechanisms of violence.

Side note: I think this is also clear through-line in Vincent and Meguey’s work and you can see it in woven throughout descriptions of play in Apocalypse World — that is foundational, I think, to why it catches the imagination. AW is violent but it’s not violence for an uncritical good or evil, it’s violence with purpose rooted in meaningful relationships, a most precious resource in the apocalypse. (I also find it poetic that I’m writing this 20 years’ reflection just days after the success of the Bakers’ AW 3rd Edition kickstarter success!)

I picked up DitV from the local game store shortly after it came out (pour one out for the amazing Modern Myths in Northampton, MA). At 19 or so, with my experience of, then, almost 15 years playing in generally pretty classic systems, I sadly struggled to run the game! But this idea of tools and relationships tucked quietly into the last pages of the manual landed so solidly with me that I've been referencing it for 20 years; it’s a note that's become a foundational element of both my GMing and playing.

A couple years after I found DitV, a group of us were playing younger versions of our characters in a prologue game to a D&D 4e campaign. The GM gave us a scenario in which we thought our friend, the noble’s daughter, was imprisoned in the castle on the hill of our town so we snuck into the cellar and attacked the guards, killing one of them. The GM had the other guard shout, “My brother! You’ve killed my brother!” and it sent the players at the table, myself included, into a real existential crisis that I personally have not forgotten nearly 20 years later.

It was something that was not in the social contract of that game, but it is something in the social contract of our player world. This relational damage from violence hadn’t been offered in a game that we’d played before — at least not so directly. It was legitimately shocking and I think of it every time I plan or start a combat in a TTRPG! It’s not even something the GM returned to! The rest of the campaign was not a relationally rooted one — we did plenty of killing of anonymous others — and that might be one reason why the campaign lost its luster and we didn’t stick with it.

I’m running a D&D home game now, and it’s set in a colonial context — not exactly by my choice. I leaned heavily on the A Thousand Thousand Islands zine collection for my early worldbuilding for a very pacific-island-rooted corner of the Astral Sea. Rather than building characters from these places as I offered, some of my players developed characters from very western coded cultures who had run away from dominating powers at home. I didn't want to reject what they brought to the table in our home game, but I also couldn't accept them as rootless outsiders, I used their roots to create ties to the islands. For some characters, their loved ones are connected to colonial influences or threatened by them as victims and participants, power brokers and perpetrators.

I’m leaning on my layman's understanding from generally reading along with topics on decolonization plus direct experience working in peacebuilding and conflict transformation. I do know that one effect of colonialism, even one action of it, is to dismantle indigenous relationship structures. It also brutalizes the colonizer by forcing them into morally compromised decisions and they bring this brutality back home with them and it damages relationships and structures in their own society. These colonial systems in games, as described by Habeeb, do not care about the relationships of the people caught up in them. By caring about them, you begin to disempower these systems.

For my characters their struggle becomes, in large part, a bottom-up effort against these powers as I’ve tried to model how these powers’ colonial efforts wreak havoc with the PCs’ relationships. I’m often not fully successful as I’m still growing as a storyteller and relearning these habits. However, I developed this framing approach out of my reading of the tool that Baker offered in DitV, and my results in plot, i.e. what actually happens in an adventure, and what players drive their characters to do often end up somewhere similar to the subversive offers from isaacisafraid in his Anti-colonial Dungeon, a nice reply to Habeeb's 'the default dungeon is colonial'.

In peacebuilding, the end of physical violence is only the start of the long hard work to repair and rebuild. We can engage with the larger impact of relationship-threatening violence to tell what I think are more meaningful stories within classic styled systems by using their natural leanings toward emulating violence to initiate more true-to-life worlds than what we get in the most simplistic interpretation of their rules. We can get there with an additional framing tool that Vincent Baker generously shared with us 20 years ago that helps level up our GMing and playing by revealing an emotional mechanism already hidden in many games.

I hope this tool is as useful to you as it has been for me!

(Special thanks to Toto for reading it over for me before publishing!)