As I mentioned in the other thread, I have a player who, due to bad religious upbringing, couldn't tolerate his characters being possessed. He's OK with it happening to other characters (I asked). I don't think he's "missing the point" here. In this case, it's not the concept of being possessed that bothers him so much as the connections to (what is likely) emotional abuse in his upbringing.
There are players who don't want their character to die. According to your logic, that means there's no death in a game.
I agree that may have been their intent, but those tools are not exempt from the same needing to be "shaped & edited to better match the genre" hurdle. A player deliberately riding the wire balancing feel good & reward hormones like dopamine oxytocin & adrenaline with stress hormones in a game where those things are being deliberately invoked is going to feel intense pressure to tough it out & prove themselves. That pressure will make actively thrusting themselves in the spotlight to shut that down very difficult. The X card & such are reactive tools needed when someone is not going to be in the same neutral clear headed state as when filling out a proactive tool long before reaching that state.
I would give short shrift to a player who expected not to die, but was happy to see (or even contribute) to other NPCs or creatures dying.
Good for you. You've rejected a large swathe of modern players.
Ah. So you recognize that it's scary, and since this is a thread about safety tools...about tools to empower players to reject things that are scary in the name of their personal feelings and safety...what are you on about again?
As has been said anyone who had with issues with idea of lack of control because it caused emotional trauma would be protected. These things would just be removed from the game. I would expect that to be an issue for anyone in the game to suffer that though. Not that they were cool with it, just not when it happened to them.
Can you understand the difference between a PC and an NPC? Then you should be able to grok the difference between a player not wanting something to effect their character whilst being okay with it effecting an NPC.
Well, good thing that's not what we're talking about then. What we're talking about is domination. Not the rest. Also, there's a whole wide universe of horror to draw from. Can you honestly find nothing else in the entire genre you could use? That's an incredibly limited view of horror you seem to have.
Maybe we should examine their prevalence in standard heroic D&D. Again, safety tools are meant to help players feel safe at the gaming table. A lot of people do not want to lose bodily autonomy. Maybe those effects should be lessened across the board.
Again, we're not talking about that list of things, nor is the horror genre limited to those things. You appear to be wildly flailing at this point.
Ahh. It makes sense now. You seem to treating not wanting and being unacceptable as synonymous.
So here's the thing: the human body has only so many ways to respond to things that upset or threaten it. It kind of doesn't matter if it's a real world thing or a completely fictional thing: if your body decides to send you the "NOOOO!!!" signal, you get that signal, even if the stimulus is something completely harmless to you in reality--like having your character be Paralyzed.
Sort of. But it's a good start.
What's a line for you may not be a line for someone else. That's the point. People assuming their lines apply to everyone else is the source of a lot of problems. What you find unacceptable others revel in. What you find beneath contempt (a fear of clowns, for example), others find abjectly terrifying. A phobia of clowns is a real thing, by the way. So too with spiders. Loss of control. Etc. Your lines are not my lines. And neither of us should have to justify their lines to the other. Yet here we are.
