Two American soldiers are trapped in the tunnels. Ahead of them, a room with eight Viet Cong inside, armed to the teeth, but unaware the Americans are there. Behind them, a collapsed tunnel, and on the other side of the rubble, a creature that can take any shape. In their hands, stolen AK-47s, both short on ammo.
With no good options, my players take the only way out they can see. The two of them charge into the room, win the initiative, and begin to unload on the Viet Cong inside. Gunfire rings out, shots start to hit, and dice clatter against the table. And both the characters and the players look on with dread: this is a last-ditch effort, and as the bullets fly and the dice fall, we all wait to see whether those bullets will fly true, or whether the Viet Cong will end up with a turn to respond.
And impossibly, miraculously, astoundingly, almost every roll hits, despite the disadvantages against it, and almost every hit knocks someone down, and both the characters and the players let out a cheer of joy and a sigh of relief as they look down at their empty magazines and at a room empty of enemies.
This is Violence by Luke Gearing.
Honestly, I very rarely use anybody else's rules to bring games to my table, preferring to create my own systems instead, but frankly, I found the ethos around Violence so evocative (see this, this, this and this) that I wanted to create my own adventure for it. And, I had time to playtest that adventure, so I figured I might as well run the adventure using the system it's designed for. It created a particular experience at the table that I have been looking for for quite some time, and I found myself wanting to put that experience in words. Go read the system for yourself and then come back, because I'm not going to hit on every part of it.
Before character creation, before a description of the core resolution mechanic, and before even introducing rules for what firearms are, Violence hits you with the mechanics for shooting someone. It follows that immediately afterwards with the rules for resolving injuries, which are the primary outcome of succeeding in shooting someone. And for those who haven't read it, the three possible results there are "flesh wound. No effect.," "injury," and "down". That's it.
And, look at what's not in violence. There's no hit points. There's no attributes. There's no system of encumbrance. There's no tables of firearms. There's no skill tree. There's no wounds table. There's no 5e compatibility, and if you attempt to use the 5e SRD you will be hunted with dogs. There's no system of progression. There's not even an insanity table. But that's the thing about violence. It's not about any of the above. It's about resolving violence.
So if it's about violence, then the rules for shooting someone had better freaking work. And I confess at this point that I have tried many systems for guns in games, and found none to my liking. We all know 5e is clunky, but even a Borg-like or an Odd-like just did not connect with my expectations for how violence should feel, and I've been even more turned off by stuff like Friday Night Firefight that turns gunfire into a math equation.
Its at this point that I should put my cards on the table: I've been soaking in media depictions of violence since I was a kid, and the more I grow up, the more I have drifted to grounded depictions of that violence. I think about Heat, True Detective, Collateral, the Way of the Gun, El Camino or some of the shootouts in Better Call Saul, The Veteran, Wind River, and more. I won't try to analyze or explain it, but as I think about the way tension builds up through the act of gunfire, as well as the ways a character can go from, "certainly going to die" to, "certainly going to win the gunfight" in just a second, there's a swinginess that gets lost in systems involving "an action and 30 ft of movement," or hit points or wounds. I also simply cannot conscience a system without attack rolls because of how heavily shootouts involve people missing.
And, at first glance, I thought the one in Violence looked clunky. First, you make a separate attack roll for each shot you fire from your gun. Second, for each shot from a gun, you have to make a calculation about the number of advantages and disadvantages that it should have. That also requires asking whether each of the character's skills applies to the roll, which I have found can really slow games down. Further, every shot that hits requires a further d20 roll to determine if it causes an injury. In the case above, that meant my players were rolling a hell of a lot of d20s, and before we even got to that point there was a period of debate about how many dice they should roll and why. In my head, this mechanic would serve only to slow the game down, and I expected that my players might get a little bit bored.
But then I tried the system. My players found themselves In a life or death, do or die situation with only the bullets in their guns providing them a thin sliver of hope. That desperation showed as they debated with me about whether a VC soldier standing unaware behind a table counts as conveying cover or not. It showed when one of them did the math to calculate their chances of succeeding (Never tell me the odds, kid). It showed further as they prepared their d20s, and chose only their luckiest of dice, and then began to nervously deploy them. And then midway through, they paused to assess their results, and redid their calculations of how well they needed to roll in order to actually accomplish their goal. And then, impossibly, almost everything came up in their favor, and they won a gun fight.
Everything I thought would slow things down instead built tension, and did so in perfect alignment with my expectations for how violence should work. The process of rolling a bunch of dice was no longer a boring part of a 3-hour long combat in a 5e game, but instead, life-or-death in dice. Violence is the only system where in one attack my players could either mow down eight enemies or completely miss their shots and run out of ammo. There's something to this swinginess that really facilitates the feeling of uniquely modern violence.
And, this isn't even to talk about the great mechanics for explosives or hand to hand combat.
So yeah, if I'm running a game with guns, I'm using Violence, and you should too. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Read and download Faceless now.
