the character sheet is an efigy
This post is an edit of a thread I posted on bluesky some time ago. Links at the bottom of the page.
The ubiquity of violence as sport in roleplaying games, as direct legacy of wargame and dungeons and dragons, creates a very strange situatuon where engaging violence is mostly a timer with binary states: 0HP or 1+HP. That is it. I will not reinvent the wheel on this coz smarter people can explore this subject in much depth than i could possibly do, I am just a regular ttrpg babe, afterall.
The point is: the brutality of violence gets all prettified and exciting as a war of attrition. My numbers matter more than yiur numbers and violence gets higienized. It is clean, bloodless, and its effects get washed away with a nap.
As we engage our fun little play in settler-colonialist deeandee and the likes, we can waive injury.
What makes violence so brutal is not only its immediate pain and the potential for extermination of the other. There is a horrifying space that is not here nor there, where the application of aggression as a tool of extraction gains depth: the destruction of agency after the fact.
Being unmade and dehumanized not only through becoming a target, but through the destruction of their personal and spacial identity: injury. ‪ A single moment that may turn your life into further hell. Injury takes days, weeks, months, or even a whole life of treatment to.heal, and may leave lifelong consequences that affect your ability to function in many ways. ‪ An anedocte: I remember as a kid in school almost losing my eye because the other kid bullying me wouldn't take my talking back. He stabbed me in the face with a pencil, with enough force to destoy my eye if he had not missed by less than an inch. A pencil. ‪ We play swinging swords at each other and we will play the good cop and say "my final blow is non-lethal", and once the scene is over, we turn away and do not look back at the potentially life disrupting harm inflicted upon another.
That is not even to talk about trauma and emotional scarring.
Tactile Harm
Violence may not remove one's life but will destroy parts of their being at varying levels and the way we abstract it as a numerical threshhold to be conquered or protectec says volumes about the the way the hero is an unfeeling weapon and their target is a victim deprived of personhood.
In which ways can the lasting outcomes of harm, not only of violence mind you, become tangible, something players can't skirt around when playing, encouraging other forms of play?
I can recall a couple examples:
As before mentioned, in Zephyr, harm transcends the fictional layer by afflicting the player character sheets: you gotta plow holes through it, or slice it to halves, and the game does not mince words about the true, devastating long term consequences that state violence inflicts upon individuals. Every character sheet is more than a note or reminder, but a material efigy of the characters being played.
Their pain is your pain, their loss is your loss. Your character sheet becomes broken and torn, as the individuals represented do too.
Then there is Map Making games. Many map making rpgs actually hit onto something: the transience and physicallity of locations represented in index cards, notes, squiggles, pieces torn and rewritten.
Look at the Quiet Year, which kind of lost its true meaning in mainstream popular conception, becoming some sort of worldbuilding exercise; we lost sight of its themes of violence, community, and how we affect the environment around us through both.
In such a game it is the map itself that is the character sheet, as all players share it and must inflict changes upon it as play progresses, making structures, destroying others, reshaping the land, and ultimately, seeing the effect of all of it being lost when another entity arrives to raze all that has been built. ¹
In any case, map making games hit that space often, creating malleable, tangible proxies for the Character they center on, the Place.
So what about other games?
I incidentally did something similar with Heroes of Might and Magic, where harm translates into the inability to acces certain actions. You literally lose your ability to cast certain magic or strike with your sword, and that is rather destructive to your character. ‪ It is very superficial and it was accidental at first, but I am proud it exists even while flawed.
I would love to know of more games that approach such changes to the fictional body in tangible ways onto the physical tokens of play.
Notes
- I recommend looking into deep forest which is a re-read of TQY from the perspective of the native inhabitants of the land as opposed to the perspective of settler-colonists, also such an interesting study of how setting and play shape perspective).