"Safer" but more violent?
What can rugby and boxing teach us about changes in D&D from edition to edition.
Since Wizards of the Coast (WotC) took over the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) property, they’ve made numerous changes in subsequent editions of the game. Today, I’m going to talk about an apparent paradox that I’ve noticed: Making the D&D game system safer seems to steer it in a more violent direction.
To answer this, I’m going to look at some entirely different games, ones involving real-world athleticism, violence, and traumatic brain injury: Boxing and football. Adding safety equipment to these sports has been associated with harder hits and a steady stream of concussions unhampered by advancements in safety technology. Safety equipment allows athletes to hit each harder.
In a similar way, changes to the D&D game system that make combat easier to survive allows players to act more aggressively. Since combat in D&D usually comes with rewards to balance its risks, safer editions of D&D shift the balance of risk and reward towards rewarding increased violence.
Rugby & American football
Rugby and American football share common roots and many similarities. Two teams run an oblong ball around the field, with rare instances of actual kicking. The defending team has two ways to stop the ball from advancing to the goal; either take the ball away or tackle the person holding the ball. One of the major differences is that in American football, players wear hard helmets and shoulder pads that are essentially modern-day impact armor.
American football has a lot more protective equipment. So, does that make American football less violent?
American football tackles happen with much higher levels of force.
The average pro rugby player has a seven year career, retiring at an age of 33.
The average NFL player retires after three years, at an age of 27.
Most former NFL players have brain damage, with evidence that many concussions and head injuries are not detected.
The protection worn by American football players supports a style of game where players hit each other as hard as physically possible, in ways that would injure the tackling player seriously without the presence of that protective equipment. The level of violence in American football has escalated since the introduction of protective equipment.
Bare-knuckle boxing
Boxing, as a sport, has changed quite dramatically since the introduction of the boxing glove, and you can see it just in the way that boxers hold themselves. Look at old pictures of pugilists and you’ll see a low guard with shoulders back. A modern gloved boxer will hide their face behind their hands.
Modern boxers aim for the head routinely, even if it’s not a great shot with a good angle. Bare-knuckle boxers aimed for body shots most of the time. The reason for this is simple: A punch to the head is a high-risk maneuver with unprotected fists. It’s easy for someone to break bones in their hand by punching someone else in the head, and the pugilist who breaks their fingers or hand is in for a bad fight and a long recovery time out of the ring.
Modern boxing gloves do a pretty good job of preventing hand injuries, which means it’s perfectly safe to punch someone in the face … for the person doing the punching. 20% of modern-day boxers have chronic traumatic brain injury (CBTI), because modern boxing tends to involve someone getting whacked in the head repeatedly until they keel over. Even in modern “bare-knuckle” boxing, which uses limited wrist guards instead of no hand protection at all, the concussion rate is arguably lower.
Bringing it together: Protection from consequences
In American football, shoulder pads and helmets limit the consequences to a player making a tackle. In gloved boxing, the gloves limit the consequences to aiming for the head. In both cases, the result is a harder-hitting game that generates an astonishing number of concussions on a regular basis in spite of the use of protective equipment.
At its heart, D&D adventures are problem-solving scenarios. D&D grew out of wargaming, but the core distinction between tabletop wargaming and tabletop role-playing games on the tabletop is the ability to use solutions other than brute force. If the cost of warfare is higher, then it encourages players to consider alternative solutions. For example, few PCs consider spending piles of treasure to solve problems, but this can be highly effective.
Conversely, if the cost of warfare is lower, violence is a more attractive solution. In old-school versions of D&D, players who decide the solution to every potential challenge is to charge in screaming and waving a sword will go through a significant number of dead characters. Old-school D&D doesn’t take steps to ensure that the players can defeat random encounters by brute force - or, in some cases, even planned villains. Discretion can be the better part of valor, especially for lower-level characters.
It’s true that different groups of players behave differently. I’ve met 5th edition groups that were oriented wholly around solving problems in a non-violent fashion. I’ve met 2nd edition players who are ready to cheerfully burn through half a dozen characters over the course of a semester-long campaign. It’s also true that there are other features that focus a game more or less on combat.
However, with those caveats in mind, my experience is that game systems where combat is very dangerous tend to be run and played with a great deal more caution than similar game systems that are made more dangerous. The logic makes sense, and there are certainly antecedents for that logic playing out in the real world.