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

mrm1138 · Jun 5, 2019

dco said:
...and would have preferred if those people only played their safe games in their sanitized environment.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that a con game in which a GM is running for a group of people s/he has never met before is the perfect place for "safe games" in a "sanitized environment."

Immortal Sun · Jun 5, 2019

HAHAHAHAA wow people are actually defending this? God damn the internet is so predictable. JFC

Riley37 · Jun 5, 2019

dco said:
Those players should not play rpgs with people they don't know.

If you run a gaming convention, or run a game store which hosts games, then you can ban those players.

Otherwise, it's not your decision to make (or in the UK, your decision to take).

I attended a convention recently. I imagine that much (most?) of its income came from registration fees, and I imagine that most of the players who paid registration fees expected games which cleared the low, low bar of avoiding "you wake up handcuffed together in the back of a van" (let alone naked and sore). If that sort of scene were common, in games at the convention, then I suspect repeat business would decline. I, for one, would not pay to come back for more of that.

I have visited games at my Friendly Local Game Store. One of them featured a PC who was, in the words of the player, "rapey". Whether I go back to that store is my decision. I'm not going back to that particular DM, and thus not to the store's Monday evening table. The store gets weekly fees from the players who sit at that table; on the other hand, it would also get a weekly fee from me, if the GM set stricter boundaries on that particular player - so whether it's making good money on that table, or whether it's missing opportunities to make MORE money, is theirs to evaluate. I imagine most women would also find that table too uncomfortable for repeat business, and in Northern California, losing the business of female gamers means losing a substantial percentage of one's customer base. We each make our choices.

If you're about to dismiss me as thin-skinned: I've played in home games which entered thematically touchy territory. In one of those games, a Bad Guy captured the PCs. Between sessions, the GM asked us to each write a description of the most traumatic event our PCs had ever experienced. In the next session, our PCs were strapped to tables and forced to re-experience those traumas, sort of like the torture scene in "Princess Bride" but more personalized. One of the PCs re-experienced seeing his brother die (from his background story). I considered asking the GM to stop the scene, as it was hard for me, in the wake of my brother's death the previous year. I decided to roll with it; when I told the DM, afterwards, he apologized, and he told me that he had a plot planned in which the PC's brother shows up as a revenant. He offered to drop that plot line. I thought about it, and replied that I could handle it, because knowing it was coming, and I could prepare myself mentally. As it turns out, we defeated the revenant; then my paladin PC spoke at the funeral and consecrated the burial ground. In the end, that was a positive way for me to bring my real world grief into my PC's expression of personality. But it was very much a good thing, that the GM was *willing* to ditch the revenant storyline, out of respect for one player's experience.

Riley37 · Jun 5, 2019

dco said:
The hobby will last less with all the immature and useless drama.

Whenever there's a thread which involves sexism, misogyny, or related topics, someone posts about how the hobby (and the related industry) are DOOMED if they follow the agenda of "could we please have less sexism, harassment, rape, and misogyny in TRPG".

TRPG has been an established hobby for over fifty years. How long have Chicken Littles been declaring the imminent end of TRPG, unless TRPG goes exactly the way THEY want it to go?

Green Ronin is still in business.

Sadras · Jun 5, 2019

This doesn't seem like a great adventure for LARPing

dco · Jun 5, 2019

mrm1138 said:
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that a con game in which a GM is running for a group of people s/he has never met before is the perfect place for "safe games" in a "sanitized environment."

Have you seen the news? Obviously you are wrong.
And sanitized for what? Perhaps someone is distressed by violence, torture, etc.

Riley37 said:
If you run a gaming convention, or run a game store which hosts games, then you can ban those players.

Otherwise, it's not your decision to make (or in the UK, your decision to take).

I attended a convention recently. I imagine that much (most?) of its income came from registration fees, and I imagine that most of the players who paid registration fees expected games which cleared the low, low bar of avoiding "you wake up handcuffed together in the back of a van" (let alone naked and sore). If that sort of scene were common, in games at the convention, then I suspect repeat business would decline. I, for one, would not pay to come back for more of that.

I have visited games at my Friendly Local Game Store. One of them featured a PC who was, in the words of the player, "rapey". Whether I go back to that store is my decision. I'm not going back to that particular DM, and thus not to the store's Monday evening table. The store gets weekly fees from the players who sit at that table; on the other hand, it would also get a weekly fee from me, if the GM set stricter boundaries on that particular player - so whether it's making good money on that table, or whether it's missing opportunities to make MORE money, is theirs to evaluate. I imagine most women would also find that table too uncomfortable for repeat business, and in Northern California, losing the business of female gamers means losing a substantial percentage of one's customer base. We each make our choices.

If you're about to dismiss me as thin-skinned: I've played in home games which entered thematically touchy territory. In one of those games, a Bad Guy captured the PCs. Between sessions, the GM asked us to each write a description of the most traumatic event our PCs had ever experienced. In the next session, our PCs were strapped to tables and forced to re-experience those traumas, sort of like the torture scene in "Princess Bride" but more personalized. One of the PCs re-experienced seeing his brother die (from his background story). I considered asking the GM to stop the scene, as it was hard for me, in the wake of my brother's death the previous year. I decided to roll with it; when I told the DM, afterwards, he apologized, and he told me that he had a plot planned in which the PC's brother shows up as a revenant. He offered to drop that plot line. I thought about it, and replied that I could handle it, because knowing it was coming, and I could prepare myself mentally. As it turns out, we defeated the revenant; then my paladin PC spoke at the funeral and consecrated the burial ground. In the end, that was a positive way for me to bring my real world grief into my PC's expression of personality. But it was very much a good thing, that the GM was *willing* to ditch the revenant storyline, out of respect for one player's experience.

I didn't say anything about banning the players, they should know themselves, if the fiction can distress them they should not play with strangers and games they don't know with 18+ ratings. And they always have the option to leave the game if the yare so distressed.
I also didn't say anything about the convention, if it has its own known rules and people pay for usually awful adventures good for them. The GMs are paid? In my young times roleplaying groups organized conventions that were free.

I'm not interested on you, I'm surprised by the news, I've seen far worse things than rape, like being tortured to death, mutated, killed, sacrificed, dismembered, eaten alive...every player I've ever met had a character that suffered something awful in game and a lot of them did something awful themselves. But hey, someone got distressed and it reached BBC news and we have people in a holy crusade, lol.

Riley37 said:
Whenever there's a thread which involves sexism, misogyny, or related topics, someone posts about how the hobby (and the related industry) are DOOMED if they follow the agenda of "could we please have less sexism, harassment, rape, and misogyny in TRPG".

TRPG has been an established hobby for over fifty years. How long have Chicken Littles been declaring the imminent end of TRPG, unless TRPG goes exactly the way THEY want it to go?

Green Ronin is still in business.

Who declared the end of RPGs? Sorry, it wasn't me and I don't care, I can always play with the material I have, no need to pay to play.
I only say that people should avoid playing with strangers 18+ rated games if the fantasy can distress them, as simple as that.

macd21 · Jun 5, 2019

dco said:
Have you seen the news? Obviously you are wrong.
And sanitized for what? Perhaps someone is distressed by violence, torture, etc.

I didn't say anything about banning the players, they should know themselves, if the fiction can distress them they should not play with strangers and games they don't know with 18+ ratings. And they always have the option to leave the game if the yare so distressed.
I also didn't say anything about the convention, if it has its own known rules and people pay for usually awful adventures good for them. The GMs are paid? In my young times roleplaying groups organized conventions that were free.

I'm not interested on you, I'm surprised by the news, I've seen far worse things than rape, like being tortured to death, mutated, killed, sacrificed, dismembered, eaten alive...every player I've ever met had a character that suffered something awful in game and a lot of them did something awful themselves. But hey, someone got distressed and it reached BBC news and we have people in a holy crusade, lol.

Who declared the end of RPGs? Sorry, it wasn't me and I don't care, I can always play with the material I have, no need to pay to play.
I only say that people should avoid playing with strangers 18+ rated games if the fantasy can distress them, as simple as that.

Thankfully the organizers of UKGE (and, I would suspect, most other cons) don’t agree with you, and expect GMs to maintain certain standards of decency even for 18+ games.

dco · Jun 5, 2019

macd21 said:
Thankfully the organizers of UKGE (and, I would suspect, most other cons) don’t agree with you, and expect GMs to maintain certain standards of decency even for 18+ games.

Good, as I said if they have their rules people should follow them, no need to convince me of something I'm really convinced.
Let me know what is allowed in those cons and we talk about ethics and decency.

MGibster · Jun 5, 2019

mrm1138 said:
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that a con game in which a GM is running for a group of people s/he has never met before is the perfect place for "safe games" in a "sanitized environment."

A safe place isn't just a place where people are polite to one another and treat each other with respect. It's a designated area where, among other things, people won't have to be exposed to ideas they find upsetting, disagreeable, or challenging. I can't promise a safe space if I'm running a con in a public venue.

That said, of course I'm not not going to spring sexual assault on my player characters. Just because my game isn't a safe space doesn't mean anything goes. There are a lot of things I'm not going to work into a convention game precisely because the venue is public and there's an excellent change I won't know any of the players.

Guest 6801328 · Jun 5, 2019

I would think that we could get general agreement that there's a difference between playing a game where dice rolls represent "killing things" with swords...and going into the details of torture, dismemberment, rape, slaughter of civilians, etc. And that when the GM plans to cross the (admittedly blurry) line into those things, it would be a good idea to make sure that everybody at the table is fully on board with it.

The problem is that the line is blurry, and anybody with a political agenda can exploit the difficulty/impossibility of defining the exact line as an argument for their views.

But in a practical sense, if we just err on the side of caution, everybody can have fun playing the games. I would think that being a little bit extra cautious ("Hey...this game is going to include some graphic torture scenes. If you'll find that upsetting it might not be the session for you.") doesn't cost anything, but erring the other way risks upsetting people. And even if you think "those people" are unnecessarily or irrationally sensitive, why would you want them to have a bad experience?

Or maybe what some are thinking is that "catering" to those people is a slippery slope leading to the degradation of their rights?

The trick I learned to finally have patience with other drivers is to imagine that it's my mom driving that car. That trick may be applicable here.