Motives for fighting in RPG's
 

So, yeah, one problem I have in writing is finding ways to justify characters fighting or even killing their perceived "bad guy."
I mean, I know the benefit in games - relieve stress and anger from modern life.

That is different from the conflict and internal pain needed to want to hurt someone. Hell, there are neurological constructs meant to add personal pain - guilt - when you hurt someone.

But on the other hand, when one gets bored, I've seen people tend towards cruelty in both real life and fiction with animals, bullying, and NPC's.

So, how is it rationalized in things like D&D or Skyrim?

Most RPGs rationalize it by setting the conflict in a place where violence is justified.

Self-defense and war are the two most common justifications -- either the enemies are violent invaders themselves, or the enemies are in the way of you bringing an end to the war. The enemies being uncontrollable/wild/insane/etc. is another common justification.

In almost all cases, the part that sets the heroes apart from the enemy is that the enemy is the one initiating hostilities and the first to display lethal force and intent. When the enemy hasn't initiated active hostilities, the enemy is still causing ruinous harm to the heroes and/or the world, and the heroes have no choice but to take action.

When these justifications AREN'T in place, it's usually to MAKE you feel like something's not right about the characters' motivations.

Sometimes it IS completely unjustified, but in those games there's generally not much of a plot at all -- a flimsy framing mechanism to give the action an excuse to happen, if anything.

You bring up Skyrim in particular. The main plot falls into the "enemy is causing ruinous harm to the world, the hero is the only one who can stop it" justification, and it's fairly rare that the Dragonborn is initiating hostilities instead of defending themself from aggressive or mindless foes.

Side plots deviate greatly from this, but since the game is intentionally giving you options to make moral choices, that's intentional.

Okay I'm gonna read through this later when I have time but, you (specifically you, Law) need to play Undertale if you haven't already.

Well, in Dragon Age, it's either people are doing bad things and you're stopping them...or something is ruining the world in general....dark spawn and the taint and the blight that comes along with it....demons and stuff from the fade causing chaos...parent trusting a blood mage to teach their child instead of sending him to the circle and so he gets possessed by a demon....the qunari causing some chaos...dude putting people together out of parts after killing people that the parts came from. Darkspawn that can be reasoned with, but can still cause the taint and blight but want to change things. Fun stuff like that.

Remember, killing doesn't have to be justified...not everyone kills for a reason.

Much like Game of Thrones, I've been avoiding Undertale because I think it may be too close to what I am working on... <.<

That said, Coda's statements & bringing up the concept of Undertale gives me an idea of how to work things. An idea that also makes what I am working on easier to flesh out (though harder when I get into the code). Thank you. :)

Undertale is basically taking all the standard video game RPG concepts, and tearing them apart. In a good way.

in skyrim and lots of other video games, enemies act without rationality. They will attack you and refuse to surrender no matter how badly they are doing in the fight. It becomes kill or be killed, literally.

All games center around a story. And all stories have a conflict and a resolution to that conflict. Sometimes the easiest conflict to tell is actual conflict. And at the end of the day, it's an excuse to punch someone and get invested in the combat mechanics. Without that, it becomes some indie game that tries to 'tell a story' and vanishes to the bargain pages of Steam because people want actual game play.

Also, people who torture NPC's for no reason are mentally unstable, and left unchecked can go on to do much worse and become staff on forum websites.

Anyone in particular that you're thinking of, Salone? :p-tongue:

I like games like Dishonored that let you not kill the baddies.

I don't think anyone does it "for no reason." People don't work that way. There's always some reason why they do things.

Some people might enjoy playing the villain (a recent-ish study showed that a large number of second playthroughs of games with moral systems play the evil route). At that point, it's not for no reason; it's because that's what the character would do. And that doesn't directly imply mental illness, because actors play sadistic villains all the time and can even enjoy doing so. Yes, someone might choose to play the villain that way BECAUSE of a mental illness, but it's not a prerequisite.

Me. When I play Skyrim as a bad guy I like to leave various vegetables on bodies. Or spend a very long time organizing flesh piles. If you're going to be a villain, presentation is everything.

Keep in mind I haven't made a serious post on Trisphee since like 2011.

>.> Having a reason that justifies cruelty is closer to being mentally unsound, I think. Such reasoning is often illogical. Though, as in the debate of assisted euthanasia, there are likely exceptions.

Counterpoint: Having a venue to act upon negative ideas that doesn't have an impact on the real world is a healthy thing. It's valuable for emotional growth to be able to make a distinction between fantasy and reality and to explore scenarios and mindsets outside of the milieu of day-to-day life. It's actually UNhealthy to insist that fantasy worlds should be held to the same standards as reality, because that removes a point of distinction between the two environments.

Certainly there's a developmental risk in exposing children to violent imagery without moral feedback. There's a reason that such games are rated T or M -- it's not just some socially acceptable threshold of "it doesn't make us feel weird for a person this age to see these things anymore" but an actual thing that has measurable effects on emotional and social development.

But in an adult -- someone who has passed these formative years of development -- who has a healthy grasp on the difference between the real and the fictitious, there is no observed causation suggesting that performing "evil" acts in a fictitious context translates into performing "evil" acts in reality. There IS a correlation going the OTHER direction -- people who are emotionally troubled or naturally violent are more likely to gravitate towards these fantasy worlds. But being cruel in a game is ultimately no worse than playing a cruel villain in a movie, and we don't deal with actors going on rampages.

There was a study done a few years back where they had participants play violent video games... They found that it actually made the participants more empathic, and better people overall.

(I was more responding to Salone's "people who torture NPC's for no reason are mentally unstable" thing than anything else. You are correct in your statement - I was stating that justifying it as something along real moral values is potentially flawed...I don't know if I typed that correctly)

So, as a query, with many people seeking improved realism and making real-life things based on fiction, is that healthy or obsessive?
(Not so much expecting an answer, but is a theme I am trying to look into.)

I have fun killing random NPCs in video games and I certainly wouldn't consider myself mentally unstable. In real life, I'm a pacifist and I don't believe in any kind of violence, but I play characters who are violent or even psychopathic all the time. In one of the D&D campaigns I'm playing right now, I have a character who is obsessed with blood and enjoys killing things. That's just who the character is.

My guess -- though I don't have any studies to back it up -- is that it's healthy as long as moral feedback remains present and the cognitive separation of fantasy and reality remains intact. That said, I could easily imagine that a child playing a sufficiently realistic game (VR?) without moral feedback (earning points for doing evil things?) could gain some depersonalizing mental patterns.

That effect was only found in adults. A separate study showed that they heightened aggressiveness in children and that the effect lasted several hours, whereas the heightened aggression in adults only lasted a few minutes after the end of play.

I was thinking more "person tries to make a flame sword, and a kid gets a hold of it and you have a burned kid" issue, or one of the things I like to say which is "Dragons may not be real, but we could one day make them!" (I know that is an exaggeration)




VR will be interesting to see how it develops. I am not sure how great an effect it will actually have. It may be of use in dangerous or automated lab conditions, and improves gaming, but I am unsure how it will change communication. And yeah, it may confuse a child who has not developed a full sense of the world around them, and could result in them trying a "game thing" (like flying) irl.

Agreed, but that's why children need supervision -- because they DON'T have a good separation of fantasy and reality and they need to be taught.

I think that Coda explained it very well. As I read your initial post his words were pretty much what was coming to my mind. So...I don't have anything to add except to say "Good work Coda."