As someone who is more than a little sick of how much tt & digital games handwave away the horror of killing people (where “enemies” are infinite, nameless entities that have no history in the world and always fight to the death) I’ve been looking for ways to re-sensitize my players to death and killing. Do you have any ideas of where to start with this? Do you know any games that have done it well?
It depends on what in particular you’re looking for. It’s really only true that tabletop RPGs are big on killing if you’re restricting your consideration to a tiny handful of the most popular systems. There are a great many tabletop RPGs that just plain don’t have rules for combat or violence at all, and a great many more where, while violence is mechanically addressed, killing people simply isn’t something that can happen without the explicit consent of whoever’s playing the character in question. “I want an RPG where killing people is rare” is a different question from “I want an RPG whose rules don’t address violent conflict, period”, and that’s a different question again from “I want an RPG where the mechanics explicitly address the moral cost of violence” or “I want an RPG where violence is possible, but there’s little incentive to employ it because the mechanical rewards for getting violent suck”.
