"Not Recommended For Readers or Players Under the Age of 18. Actually, We’re Not Sure It's Recommended For Anyone"
You're all a bunch of perverted little Attilas, without the guts to pull a knife or shoot down that son of a bitch across the hall in reality. And so you get your jollies through "interaction," the simulation of what you long to do but haven't the cojones. Am I right? Or am I right?
— From the introduction
Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed is a dark satire of conventional dungeon-crawling Hack and Slash Role-Playing Games created by Greg Costikyan under the pseudonym of "Designer X". Players take on the role of a sociopathic killer, stalking the streets of a major urban center as they assault, rob, rape, and murder innocent people and take whatever they have.
Although it looks like a conventional Tabletop Game, Violence™ is actually a Genre Deconstruction and Author Tract against the mindless violence of popular RPGs and Video Games. The author, known only as "Designer X", holds naked contempt for his audience, his publisher, and himself, admitting openly that he's only writing this game to make a quick buck and insulting his readers for wasting their time with such puerile entertainment.
The game was published in 1999 by Hogshead Publishing, but has been released as open source under the Creative Commons license. It can be found here.
Tropes? As if you disgusting sickos actually care about tropes.
- All Men Are Perverts: "Designer X" notes that men love to play female character with big breasts."Choose a gender. In reality, scum like you are almost always male, but go ahead, play a female character. One with big boobs, no doubt. Female characters popular among male players almost always have big boobs. If you don't believe me, play ''Tomb Raider I."
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: The Violence™ Experience Point System™, where players can redeem Violence Experience Points to the GM for improvements to their character. Players get Violence Experience Points by either buying additional Violence™ supplements, or subscribing to the Violence™ Roleplaying Gamemasters Association™ and buying more.
- Cluster F-Bomb: In Violence™, one of the ways to earn extra character points is to agree to make one out of every four words out of your character's mouth be an obscenity.
- Collateral Damage: The section of Combat marked "Innocent Bystanders" makes a point about how slinging bullets in a crowded city can lead to people getting hurt badly, through pointing out the consequences of a gun battle (if it can really be called such) between a violent scumbag with an Uzi (your typical Violence player character) and a little old lady with a revolver in her apartment.
- The old lady got two shots off before getting cut down, and neither one of them hit Uzi guy, but they did go through the wall (made of cheap modern wallboard which can't stop bullets worth crap), and some poor immigrant in another apartment packed full of them is now without much of her lower arm.
- Meanwhile, Uzi guy got off twenty shots of which maybe three hit the old lady. The prewar brick wall behind her absorbed the impact of most of the bullets, but the rest went through a window, shattering it and resulting in casualty number two, a bike messenger who was riding below the window when it shattered and is now bleeding on the sidewalk and screaming bloody murder.
- Meanwhile, whatever bullets didn't go halfway through the bricks of a building across the street went through another window along the way, grazing the head of the kitty sleeping on the windowsill (casualty number three, currently bleeding and yowling beneath the couch) and possibly also hitting the personal trainer who lives there, who is now prone on the floor and calling 911 on his cellphone. Needless to say, there's a reason that the law frowns upon firing weapons in city limits.
- Competitive Balance: Painfully averted. While there are rules for standard RPG mechanics (character creation, weapons prices, skills, etc.), it's clear that "Designer X" simply wrote them via stream-of-consciousness, with no regard for how the game would play on a competitive level. Then again, how many rules do you really need to chop up innocent bystanders?
- Code Name: The author's name has been replaced with "X" or "Designer X" throughout the document — except on the final page, where "About the Author" reveals the author as Greg Costikyan.Hah hah. We promised him we wouldn't actually use his name on this game, but we're not fools. It's bound to sell a few extra copies if we slap his name on it, anyway.
- The Cynic: "Designer X", full stop.
- Dodge the Bullet: Averted; the rules explicitly disallow that as something which only happens in movies.
- Drugs Are Good: Played with. The section on Drugs is basically an extended Author Tract that can be summarized as "Drugs aren't that bad, but they can be addictive and dangerous, so stick to alcohol because it's safer," along with some guidelines for roleplaying various effects.
- Dungeon Crawling: Brutally deconstructed. Instead of brave adventurers exploring an underground complex, fighting the monsters and recovering their treasure, the players are murderous psychopaths intruding on a low-rent apartment building, murdering the residents for their meager hard-earned possessions.
- Genre Deconstruction: Violence™ viciously dissects the way nearly anything done in the average roleplaying game would be violent sociopathy in real life.
- Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: "Designer X" points out the various ways RPG publishers (and the readers) can make more money selling needless game supplements and accessories."Actually, tell you what, if you wanna do a supplement with a million different kind of guns, it’s probably the kind of crap that the deranged players of this despicable game would eat up. So why don't you write Wallis and tell him you wanna write Madmen & Magnums™, the gun supplement for Violence™, and he’ll pay you some absurdly low royalty and I'll get a piece of it and you and me and the kind of wankers who read Gun Lust magazine will all be happy, or at least happier than we'd otherwise be."
- I Read It for the Articles: In the section on sex (specifically, "Fucking"), the author gleefully notes that writing a BDSM supplement for Violence™ would allow doing all sorts of lewd things in the name of "research".
- Innocent Bystander: One section of the rulebook is devoted to describing the various types of characters that the player may encounter, including hard-working illegal immigrants, grey-haired grandmothers, bourgeoisie hipsters, struggling mothers, and Orcs."You're playing a fucking role, okay, you're supposed to act like a real character in this world. And yet you saunter around, killing intelligent creatures like they're just another widget, a bunch of pixels to blow away, a mechanism for obtaining experience points and treasure. That isn't roleplaying."
- Instant Marksman: Just Squeeze Trigger!: Averted. The rules state that new characters cannot have a Handgun skill greater than 10 because they're not professional marksmen, and exceptions must be justified to the GM.
- Let X Be the Unknown: The author is referred to with the pseudonym "Designer X".
- Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: The Author can't imagine a female player would want to touch this game."You mean you’re a female player? Christ almighty, why do you want to play this game? For the love of God, find something decent to play. And ditch the assholes who got you into this; there have to be better gaming groups out there."
- Only in It for the Money: "Designer X" makes no bones that he's only writing this game to make some money so he can pay his bills."And I can't be bothered to do the research, I don't even want to discuss what my fucking advance is, and I'm knocking this out between projects that actually have a chance of paying my rent for the month."
- Paper-Thin Disguise: The "Designer X" sticker on the cover blocking the author's name is not entirely opaque, and "Greg Costikyan" can be faintly seen underneath.
- RPGs Equal Combat: Violence™ is an extended Take That! against this trope.
- Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Similar to Paranoia, the rulebook will suggest gamemasters modify game results based on his whims towards the players."Try not to give [experience] points to assholes. If the bastard has spend the entire game getting on your nerves and picking fights with the other players, well, who needs that crap?"
- The Sociopath: Players are forced to take this role. Notably, while there are pages of rules for weapons and combat and treasure, there are no rules whatsoever for relationships or human interaction. The closest the game gets is a "Sports Lore" skill which can be used for making small talk.
- Take That!: Whenever the rulebook isn't covering actual game mechanics, then the author is either taking potshots at the audience or taking potshots at tabletop RPGs and video games.
- Take That, Audience!: Although there are rules for standard RPG mechanics, the actual point of this game is to deliver a barrage of insults against the mainstream gaming industry for its focus on glamorizing violence.
- Trade Snark: Not only is every occurrence of the title Violence™ followed by the lawyer-mandated trademark symbol, but the symbol also appears in other places, such as the "Violence™ Experience Point System™".
- Villain Protagonist: All players take this role, by design."You are a degraded, bloodthirsty savage, the product of the savage streets, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a droog, a character out of Brett Easton Ellis. You delight in pain and blood and mayhem."
- Who Would Want to Watch Us?: From the closing section of the rulebook:"Hope you got a chuckle... And it made you think. In the meantime, go find a decent game. And if you actually run this thing.... I don't want to know about it, okay?"
- You Bastard!: Sure, there are rules, but Violence™ is more accurately seen as a long and detailed rant aimed at hack-and-slash roleplayers, with tables and game mechanics sprinkled throughout.
