For the purpose of this article I'm talking about violence in the sense of causing (deliberate) physical harm to someone’s body.
Exposing a character to danger is the fastest way to increase the tension in a narrative. Danger can take many forms, from ‘being unable to financially sustain your business’ or ‘your romantic partner leaving you’ to things like ‘being killed’ or ‘suffering serious injury.’ The latter have the draw of being both life-threatening and universal. Not every audience member might be at risk of losing their business, but everyone is at risk of experiencing a physical injury (even if only a little).
Applying this to gaming, many games use physical violence as their ‘danger’ hook; i.e. a fail state in your game will result in a character experiencing physical violence. Physical violence is often preferable to other life-threatening dangers like starvation or disease because of its immediacy. The hero being skewered by spikes can be avoided by a last-second dodge, whereas the hero starving to death will (almost always) take weeks.
So violence-as-danger is fast and can be used frequently. It's high-stakes in that there are potentially large consequences for failure. It's relatable in that the audience will know why the characters want to avoid the danger.
Conflict is another universal element of narrative. A common type of conflict is a ‘love triangle’ where two characters compete for the affection of a third. Other conflicts can be ideological or political (such as a story about an election), commercial (such as two inventors trying to market their creations), or physical (such as two sportspeople trying to win a tournament).
This is a lot of words to say why combat is popular in gaming, isn't it? Put simply, combat is a fast & volatile form of conflict where the characters are in danger of experiencing major physical trauma. The success states and failure states are immediate and universally recognizable.
There's plenty of writing on non-combat gaming, and right now I don't feel like talking about that. Instead, I brought this up to discuss a different problem.
People don't like observing realistic graphic violence.
So we have a paradox here! On one hand, violent combat is an easy & effective form of narrative conflict (and can be represented clearly in mechanics). On the other hand, realistic depictions of violence tend to be unpleasant or unnerving at best, and straight-up horrifying, disgusting or triggering at worst.
Popular media in the Horror genre often features graphic and brutal violence intended to provoke those reactions of horror and disgust in the viewers. In my experience, most horror media actually overplays its physical violence and makes it appear more viscerally disgusting than real-life violence would be… which can paradoxically make it less viscerally disgusting since it’s obviously fake.
In the sphere of tabletop RPG horror, games like Dark Heresy have memetically gruesome critical-hit tables (linked site is NSFW) in order to heighten tension in its gunfights. “Your heroes are facing nightmarish terrors from beyond the stars” can be illustrated quite well when the descriptions (and mechanics) showcase how horrible your inevitable deaths will be.
As horror-inspired ‘weird fantasy role-playing’, many Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures use graphic imagery for similar purposes as DH does. The viscerally detailed cannibal kitchen the players may explore in Better Than Any Man (free and linked) explicitly chooses to portray violence in a way intended to disturb and disgust RPG players that have probably raided dozens of cannibal-cultist lairs in their adventuring career.
So how come players would be disgusted by BTAM if they’ve raided dozens of cannibal-cultist lairs already? It’s probably because despite all the violence and murder seen in a typical combat-heavy role-playing-game, it’s never really dwelled upon. I’d like to lay at least some of the blame on hit-points abstracting away actual injuries, but honestly it’s not a mechanical problem.
Realistic violence just isn't fun.
It’s sudden, painful, unpredictable and irrevocable. You can experience it at any time as a result of blind chance, accident or deliberate malice. Realistic violence means realistic suffering. It’s hard to feel like a hero when the ‘evil’ drow is clearly and unambiguously feeling quite a lot of pain and regret. It means bookkeeping to determine the extent of specific injuries. It means that even an unambiguously heroic action like ‘prevent the doomsday cultists from burning the orphanage’ is going to be a harrowing experience full of the smell of burning hair and meat.
On the other hand, a game like Paranoia might have fun narrating gushing arterial sprays, or your party's barbarian might run around collecting ears, but those aren't more realistic. They're just less sanitary. Sure, real people collect ears and real arteries gush, but you're not being realistic if your depiction of violence extends to the gruesome displays and not to the real psychological effects of causing suffering.
No wonder that writers shy away from publishing it, and that GMs avoid narrating it. I really wouldn't make violence in my games realistic unless I was deliberately trying to depress people.
Why bring it up, then?
The more abstract and disconnected from reality your combat is, the more abstract and disconnected from reality the participants are. In combats represented as rounds, attack actions and hit-points, it's easy for players to lose sight of what they're fighting, what they're fighting for, and why their characters should care. You need at least a taste of real weight and consequence to stay present.
The same thing applies to a lot of other things, such as encumbrance mechanics and food. Tracking a 'realistic' depiction of calorie intake and waterskin volume might not be 'fun' for most players, but simply brushing those elements off as 'you put it in your bag' or 'you find water' both robs some authenticity from your world, and risks confusing your players when you decide that no, you can't just 'put in your backpack' a pile of gold bars, and you can't just 'find water' if you're making an un-supplied impromptu walk across a desert!
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