Tabletop Game / Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed

Following

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.

• Absurdly High Level Cap: After character creation, skills can go as far as the player wants.
• 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."
• A-Team Firing: Because the maximum a PC can have their gun skill at is 10, giving them a 50% chance to hit in a normal situation, and it's easy to suffer penalties on top of that (such as for getting shot at), missing is very common, and even NPCs who are supposed to know how to use guns (such as cops) are still likely to miss due to their skill levels not being all that much higher. As pointed out in the skill section, the most frightening thing isn't the fact that guns are in possession of evil psychotic scumbags, but the fact that they barely know how to use them — a nice recipe for many dead bystanders.
• Badass Bookworm: One NPC is a Yuppie who is good at his office job, but is even better at martial arts and fencing. Engaging him in melee combat is suicide.
• Bank Robbery: One of the adventure ideas is for the players to rob a bank. It's noted, however, that banks don't hold quite as much cash nowadays as one would hope.
• Bigot with a Badge: Being black or hispanic increases the character's chance of being harassed by the cops, because "Welcome to America". It's also mentioned that cops consider gay people to be potential scum.
• Billionaire Wristband: Watches count as jewelry in random loot tables, and for a rich person, this can potentially mean a wristwatch worth a thousand dollars.
• 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.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Rules for torture are included, which amount to attacking the victim with a weapon and hoping that they get overwhelmed by pain, but don't die from the loss of Hit Points. The Torture skill can be used here in order to reduce injury and increase pain.
• Creator Provincialism: It only takes a few pages of reading to realize that the game is written with the assumption that all campaigns will take place in USA.
• Critical Existence Failure: Downplayed — losing Hit Points does not give any penalties, but weapons inflict pain in addition, and suffering too much of it will result in the character's incapacitation.
• The Cynic: "Designer X", full stop.
• Devious Daggers: The only melee weapon skill given in the sample skill list is Knife Fighting, and knives are some of the best melee weapons in the weapon list. Rather appropriate, given that the Player Characters are all sorts of violent thugs.
• Dirty Cop: All cops are portrayed this way, hassling people just for not being white, brutalizing anybody they catch, and defending other cops who engage in corruption and brutality.
• Disc-One Nuke: The shotgun costs only $200 (a good price, given that players start with 100-600 dollars), but does the same damage as a submachine gun, which is far more expensive. Its hide factor is also low enough that, with the right outfit, you could carry it without raising any attention.
• Dodge the Bullet: Averted; the rules explicitly disallow that as something which only happens in movies.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Trying to shoot while moving will give a significant penalty to one's rolls. Full-blown sprinting will make it completely impossible to shoot.
• Drill the Lock: The expected method of using the Locksmithing skill is to drill out a lock, as there no stats for lockpicks.
• 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.
• Dumb Muscle: Most cops only roll 2d6 for Everything Else (which includes intelligence), instead of 3d6, and it's pointed out that they're idiots. However, they get +2 to all the other characteristics, which makes them stronger and tougher.
• 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.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Cops have higher combat characteristics on average, wear armor, get access to good guns, and have high combat skills.
  • SWAT members have all the aforementioned strength of cops, but take them to greater heights. They also come in squads, so it's almost always better for the players to simply run away or hide from them.
• Establishing Series Moment: In case you thought the game was serious, the first page opens up with an extremely ridiculous copyright notice, stating things like how everybody who shares 98% of your DNA (basically, the entirety of humanity) is bound by it from the moment you open the book.
• Evil Versus Evil: Encounters between the Player Characters and the cops are framed this way — on one side, you have sadistic psychopaths, and on the other side, you have sadistic psychopaths with badges and more muscle than brains.
• Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving: Some of the skills NPCs have include such "useful" gems as Blush Prettily and Make Offspring Feel Guilty.
• Failing a Taxi: If a character's Police Harassment Number (chance of being harassed by cops) is higher than zero, they can never hail a cab, explained as cabbies having a healthy sense of self-preservation. Amusingly, this means that black and hispanic characters will never be able to use taxi services, since they always have a +1 to that number.
• 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."
• Going Commando: The equipment list points out that socks and underwear are optional.
• Hard Truth Aesop: The chapter on drugs essentially ends up telling the reader to drink alcohol instead. Notably, the reasons given for sticking to alcohol all come down to legal and social issues around drugs, along with practices of users and dealers, rather than the actual drugs themselves, as sharing glasses won't give you AIDS, you won't go to prison for owning alcohol (in most countries, anyway), it's not ridiculously expensive (as there's no extra charge for illegality tacked on), you can procure it easily, and it's not cut with dangerous substances.^note The legalization of cannabis— at least in some states— means that some of the risks for it have been mitigated.
• Harmful to Minors: The description for the mom with small children points out the fact that her children will be irreversibly changed if she gets murdered right in front of them. Assuming that they survive, of course.
• Hidden Weapons: The way concealment works is that suspicious items (such as weapons and drugs) have hide factors, which increase the chance that cops (and sufficiently alert civilians) will harass you. However, clothing and containers have negative hide values, thus helping you conceal your equipment.
• Honest Rolls Character: Characteristics for characters are determined by rolling 3d6 in order (but you can reroll if the total is too low), and starting money is determined by rolling 1d6x100. When it comes to skills, however, players always have 100 points to distribute.
• I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Trying to fight the cops is a losing proposition, as while they're stupid, they have high combat skills and attributes (potentially higher than what a PC can have, in fact), are well-equipped, and can call for backup. SWAT members are even more dangerous, with extremely powerful weapons and armor, and ridiculously high stats.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Assault rifles usually do enough damage to instantly kill the target, but they're extremely expensive, and so is the ammo.
• 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.
• 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".
• Jack the Ripoff: One adventure idea is that a copycat has been inspired by the crimes of the Player Characters, and they have to track down the killer because they violated their intellectual property.
• Let X Be the Unknown: The author is referred to with the pseudonym "Designer X".
• Made of Plasticine: The piano wire with a brick attached relies on this, as wrapping the wire around their neck then allows you to easily decapitate them on the next turn by throwing the brick.
• Mama Bear: The mom with small children has the skill "Fight Like a Tigress to Defend Her Offspring". Unfortunately, it's only at 10, so she's still easy to beat.
• 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."
• Middle Eastern Terrorists: A "Bin Laden Cell" is included as a possible nasty surprise for the players. They won't take kindly to a group of thugs barging into their apartments, and will make sure to eliminate them as witnesses.
• Misidentified Weapons:
  • The standard pistol is identified as a .38 Automatic. While .38 Super pistols do exist in real life, it seems like what the writer meant is a 9x19mm pistol, given that it's assigned to every cop.
  • The Hand Cannon is identified as a .454 Automatic. No such gun exists in reality, however.
  • Armor-piercing ammo is identified as teflon bullets. In reality, teflon does not enhance armor penetration in any way.
• Mugging the Monster: Two of the nasty surprises for PCs include a Badass Bookworm (a Yuppie who is in great physical shape and is a master of fencing), and a Bin Laden Cell (all heavily armed and willing to kill whoever barges into their apartment).
• Murder Simulators: The book mentions Grossman's claims that video games can train one to engage in real violence, but then mocks the whole idea.
• Murphy's Bullet: If you fail a ranged attack roll by 5, you'll always hit a bystander or something you'd rather not hit. As there's no modifier to this number, this means that an untrained character with a gun can easily commit mass murder by complete accident.
• Never Learned to Read: In a downplayed variant, all Player Characters are assumed to be functionally illiterate by default. If you want to be actually literate, you have to invest skill points into Reading and Writing.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Modifiers are provided for firing guns at close range, including one for a contacts hot. Amusingly, if you really suck with guns, it's possible to miss with the gun pressed against the target.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: It's possible for a character to roll 1 for their Hit Points or Pain Points, which means that they can easily die to a single punch.
• 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.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: According to the equipment tables, the best outfit for hiding your gear and maximizing defense at the lowest cost is army boots, baggy pants, kevlar vest, wool army coat, baseball cap, and a leather backpack, thus allowing you to hide an assault rifle with a spare magazine while remaining inconspicuous, even though your outfit looks a bit ridiculous.
• Randomly Generated Levels: There are rules for generating random apartments, but Designer X considers the idea of randomly generated game worlds to have been stupid from the very start.
• Recycled with a Gimmick: A classic dungeon crawler, but in a modern day and about psychopaths who slaughter their way through apartments full of innocent people.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Parodied in the list of what you need to play, as it includes Violence™ logo dice (which only differ from standard dice by having a Violence™ logo on them) and all the Violence™ accessories and Violence™ logo products (a rather huge list), along with the Violence™ character sheet pack™. You will also need Violence™ pencils in the future once they're finally made. Of course, the joke is that none of these actually exist.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: With an average person having only 3-4 Hit Points and Pain Points while even a standard handgun or a knife does 1d8 damage and 1d4/1d6 pain, combat is usually decided in 1-2 hits.
• 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?"
• Serial-Numbered Holocaust Survivor: One of the sample NPCs is a grandma who survived the concentration camps, with a tattoo marking her as a survivor.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: One of the ways to increase your reroll number (which allows you to reroll characteristics if the total of them is too low) is to agree to have your characters pepper a ridiculous number of profanities through their speech.
• 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.
• Stylistic Suck: As the book's intro states, it's better to write a bad set of rules than a good one, as it will take longer for players to notice that the game itself is complete and utter dogshit.
• S.W.A.T. Team: Stats are given for SWAT members, since the antics of players are likely to get one called. As the game points out, the average player character has no chances against one.
• 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.
• Tap on the Head: The Cosh skill downplays this, as a success will knock out the target, but you still roll full damage for whatever you attacked them with.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!:
  • As the book notes, a character with low Intimidation will look completely harmless. Given that they're a Violence™ Player Character, however, they're going to be some of the vilest people in the campaign.
  • A business suit helps you hide weapons pretty well. Not because it's good for hiding lots of stuff, but because it makes you look like a normal person rather than a murderous psychopath.
• Tradesnark™: 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™".
• Trash of the Titans: The description of the hippie notes that his apartment is absolutely filthy, to the point that it's infested with cockroaches, rats, and mice. Notably, his Housework skill is at 1, even though skills normally start at 3.
• 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 [sic]. You delight in pain and blood and mayhem."
• With This Herring: Because you start with 1d6x100 dollars, it's possible for a given Player Character to not have enough money to buy a gun (even if the prices are surprisingly low), unless they want to go totally naked, thus forcing them to start with only a melee weapon, if they can even afford that.
• 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.
• You Have Researched Breathing: There are separate skills for reading, writing, and mathematics, and you can be a good writer while being only barely able to read what you wrote. The game's explanation for this is that 20% of America is functionally illiterate, and the PCs are likely to fall into that group, so therefore they should be made to invest skill points.