Players 'distressed' by gang-rape role-playing game

Elfcrusher said:

That's another sub-text from some of these people: "If people are feeling unwelcome/uncomfortable about being in the gaming community because of bad behavior, and they decide not to participate, that's too bad but it's their choice. They could just tough it out if they really cared. But to ban the people who are driving them away is taking away their rights."

Sorry, but given the choice between those two things, I'm all for weeding out the jerks. The jerks got their way for the first 40 years of the hobby. Time for a change.

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As someone who's been on the receiving end of this kind of behaviour to the point of deciding to entirely avoid FLGSs and conventions, can I just say "Thank You."

Bedrockgames said:

Again, I never said I was in favor of character rape. I said I wasn't concerned about, that it concerned me less than things happening to people in the real world.

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Right. You think that potentially triggering a rape survivor's PSTD is not as bad as telling somebody that he can't run games at public conventions anymore. That pretty much clarifies just how 'concerned' you really are.

Really, I don't think anything more needs to be said after that, but here goes...

I get people an have their trauma triggered. But I don't think you can structure everything in this world around the possibility that people might have trauma around something.

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Nobody is asking to structure "everything in this world" around that possibility. (Even though, statistically, it's a gigantic possibility.) They're just asking that people have the $%#$%#$%ing respect, decency, and wisdom to not roleplay scenarios involving rape, child abuse, the Holocaust, and elementary school shootings with players in a public, open setting. And that those who have neither that respect, decency, or wisdom to avoid doing so, and apparently are unable to understand the problem because they try to jerksplain away their behavior, not be put into a position where they can do so again to unsuspecting participants.

Is that really too much to ask?

Gradine said:

I didn't know what to expect from Bedrock Games as a publisher, but seeing an (albeit fairly old) book they published written by the RPG Pundit proudly displayed on their front page was not nearly as surprising as it would have been this morning.

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I am friends with Pundit. Doesn't mean I agree with him about everything (in fact I think politically he and I are quite far apart). But I get along with him fine. And I published Arrows of Indra. I also used to be a mod at TheRPGsite. When it comes to publishing people and hiring artists, I am just concerned about the material, not what people think about things or their political views. Though to be honest it has been ages since we hired a writer.

Elfcrusher said:

Right. You think that potentially triggering a rape survivor's PSTD is not as bad as telling somebody that he can't run games at public conventions anymore. That pretty much clarifies just how 'concerned' you really are.

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That isn't what I said

Umbran said:

This may be a critical juncture for your discussion. Rather often, once one dips into such approaches, things do not end well. How many other people will you say bad things about to hold up your position?

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Okay, I think I am being fairly mild here. And I am not trying to say bad things about people to bolster a position. There were some things on the thread (like people seeming to embrace public shaming) that troubled me, and I said so. Other things like some of the cruelty in the way people were talking about this guy, also troubled me.

When it comes to the crying, I am not trying to attack the person in question. But my honest reaction to a group of adults crying in that kind of situation (especially when the criers include the game convention personnel sorting out the problem) is this does not seem like normal adult behavior to me.

Gradine said:

I didn't know what to expect from Bedrock Games as a publisher, but seeing an (albeit fairly old) book they published written by the RPG Pundit proudly displayed on their front page was not nearly as surprising as it would have been this morning.

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Gradine, you were a participant in a thread in the last year or two, in which the OP proposed Native Americans showing up on the European coast, in Trans-Atlantic sailing ships, with guns, and with the intent to invade Europe. Some of us raised some concerns about the implications of a scenario in which the PCs are heroic light-skinned Europeans, resisting the invasion of the dark-skinned conquerors - a narrative which is terribly convenient for any white Americans who don't like thinking about their presence on the North American continent as the outcome of unethical actions by white colonizers. Do you remember BRG's contributions to that thread? They were waffly, and generally anti-intellectual; I summarize them as "who are you people who have read books, to tell the rest of us what is and isn't consistent with history."

Do you remember a thread about whether D&D orcs echo colonialist imagery? BRG expressed a lot of concern about people coming to *any* conclusions whether JRRT *ever* used racial tropes. I quoted JRRT's passage about the squinting, slant-eyed, sallow-skinned, villainous man in Bree, whom Sam describes as looking like a half-goblin. (I'm not saying, then or now, that JRRT was a white supremacist; and I applaud JRRT's response to the Reich regarding his ancestry. I am, however, saying that JRRT's *imagery* of people from the South and East of Middle-Earth, closely matches the position on people from lands South and East of Europe, which one might commonly encounter among white aristocratic English veterans of WWI.)

BRG just could not accept that *anyone* could see *any* racist implications, even in that passage. "I just feel like we are getting into very rigid territory about what is allowed and what isn't creatively." And so on, and so forth, never saying it all at once... but over time, BRG established how he felt unjustly limited, constrained, and coerced, by those of us who had objections to the depiction of slant-eyed people as *universally and without exception evil*.

Considering his role in those threads, you might have seen this coming. I did. I didn't want to admit it, because I've enjoyed his posts on more neutral topics such as narrative flow. But when he said he was skimming #213, which has the player's account *in the post* (not just for those who follow the link), and he was *still* denying that Rolfe set up a "you were raped" scene, I could no longer deny the obvious sum of all the "but we don't know" and "maybe it was innocent" and "this isn't black and white" foot-dragging, across dozens of posts, across at least three threads.

Bedrockgames said:

Okay, I think I am being fairly mild here. And I am not trying to say bad things about people to bolster a position. There were some things on the thread (like people seeming to embrace public shaming) that troubled me, and I said so. Other things like some of the cruelty in the way people were talking about this guy, also troubled me.

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Here's what I don't get. You can somehow hold in your head the position that people talking about someone having to stop running public games at conventions is a cruelty that you need to speak out about, while also holding the position that someone straight-up confronting someone with a scenario of being raped is no big deal, and not worth making a public fuss about.

When it comes to the crying, I am not trying to attack the person in question. But my honest reaction to a group of adults crying in that kind of situation (especially when the criers include the game convention personnel sorting out the problem) is this does not seem like normal adult behavior to me.

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Then maybe the situation was more traumatic than you imagined it was.

The truly frustrating thing about these conversations is we have to spend so much time on hypothetical situations that the actual issue never gets dealt with. I mean when some guy can get staggeringly drunk, stalk a woman, assault security staff and we STILL have to debate whether it’s okay to socially sanction him, it just staggers belief.

Tell you what. Go into your workplace and begin loudly telling rape jokes to a group of colleagues. See what happens.

Why should this be any different? The hyperbole here is baffling. Comparing being imprisoned for years with not being able to run games at cons? Seriously? That’s the point of equivalency?
[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION], instead of making allusions, why not actually quote the things that trouble you? Because right now all it looks like you’re doing is victim blaming. Even if that’s not your intention, that is what it looks like.

Riley37 said:

Considering his role in those threads, you might have seen this coming. I did. I didn't want to admit it, because I've enjoyed his posts on more neutral topics such as narrative flow. But when he said he was skimming #213, which has the player's account *in the post* (not just for those who follow the link), and he was *still* denying that Rolfe set up a "you were raped" scene, I could no longer deny the obvious sum of all the "but we don't know" and "maybe it was innocent" and "this isn't black and white" foot-dragging, across dozens of posts, across at least three threads.

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To be absolutely completely fair, the players' description was in post #242. Post #213 was a reply by Hussar, and post #214 was the original link to John Dodd's blog, and contained no excerpts.

Riley37 said:

Gradine, you were a participant in a thread in the last year or two, in which the OP proposed Native Americans showing up on the European coast, in Trans-Atlantic sailing ships, with guns, and with the intent to invade Europe. Some of us raised some concerns about the implications of a scenario in which the PCs are heroic light-skinned Europeans, resisting the invasion of the dark-skinned conquerors - a narrative which is terribly convenient for any white Americans who don't like thinking about their presence on the North American continent as the outcome of unethical actions by white colonizers. Do you remember BRG's contributions to that thread? They were waffly, and generally anti-intellectual; I summarize them as "who are you people who have read books, to tell the rest of us what is and isn't consistent with history."

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I do not recall this thread. It sounds like a thread I might comment on. That doesn't sound like a comment I would make (my major in college was history so I have pretty decent respect for history and history books). I could see myself saying we don't have to draw on real world history for fantasy settings or something to that effect. If you could point me to this thread, I'd appreciate it, since that looks to me to at the very least be a somewhat out of context paraphrasing.

Do you remember a thread about whether D&D orcs echo colonialist imagery? BRG expressed a lot of concern about people coming to *any* conclusions whether JRRT *ever* used racial tropes. I quoted JRRT's passage about the squinting, slant-eyed, sallow-skinned, villainous man in Bree, whom Sam describes as looking like a half-goblin. (I'm not saying, then or now, that JRRT was a white supremacist; and I applaud JRRT's response to the Reich regarding his ancestry. I am, however, saying that JRRT's *imagery* of people from the South and East of Middle-Earth, closely matches the position on people from lands South and East of Europe, which one might commonly encounter among white aristocratic English veterans of WWI.)



BRG just could not accept that *anyone* could see *any* racist implications, even in that passage. "I just feel like we are getting into very rigid territory about what is allowed and what isn't creatively." And so on, and so forth, never saying it all at once... but over time, BRG established how he felt unjustly limited, constrained, and coerced, by those of us who had objections to the depiction of slant-eyed people as *universally and without exception evil*.

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Again, this is a very uncharitable description of my position. I felt there was a lot going on here, including a growing gulf between players with a high level of education who were exposed to ideas like those of Edward Said and players who hadn't been. And I was saying it is a lot more nuanced than people were painting it as. People can read the thread if they want to see my position. I made a point of being honest and clear in that one. I don't think anything I said was bad. I think people have formed a consensus on this topic that rests on some shaky foundations and will not produce the positive results they think it will. But I don't want to rehash it here.

Considering his role in those threads, you might have seen this coming. I did. I didn't want to admit it, because I've enjoyed his posts on more neutral topics such as narrative flow. But when he said he was skimming #213, which has the player's account *in the post* (not just for those who follow the link), and he was *still* denying that Rolfe set up a "you were raped" scene, I could no longer deny the obvious sum of all the "but we don't know" and "maybe it was innocent" and "this isn't black and white" foot-dragging, across dozens of posts, across at least three threads.

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I guess I am just a monster Riley. That is the only possible explanation.

Also that quote was buried in the comments section.