Consent in Gaming - Free Guidebook

[jgsugden]

Consent in Gaming - Monte Cook Games

Tackle Mature Content with Confidence! From fending off an attack by bloodthirsty pirates to delving into dank caverns, roleplaying games […]

www.montecookgames.com

Sean Reynolds and Shanna Germain have a free book on Monte Cook's site that is worth a look. It is a worthwhile read, whether you're in the camp that thinks it is going overboard or the camp that thinks that tools like this are desperately needed.

 

[Morrus]

Warning to potential replies. If you’re planning on posting some alt-right rant against inclusivity here, don’t. You’ll be shown the door.

 

[Shardstone]

Nifty! I got into a big argument about this on Facebook. A lot of people don't have a good reason for not liking this I found; it seems effective and useful.

 

[MNblockhead]

You have to give your contact info including e-mail to set up an account to download this, so I expect I'll be clicking on unsubscribe links in the footer of a mass e-mail from Monte Cook Games in the near future, but I do appreciate that they are making this available to the gaming community for free.

The 13 page booklet is about what I expected, general rules to raise awareness and encourage an etiquette of sensitivity at the gaming table. I feel it is much more appropriate for public games at conventions and game stores where most of the participants are strangers to one another. Even then, I find some of the exhortations will be difficult for many DM to implement and perhaps hard to accept by some players.

For example, "The default answer is 'no'." In this section the authors state that consent should start with opting in to things you want to try in the game. Yet, it immediately goes on to contradict itself by stating that "its inevitable that sometimes it also involves opting out of things you want to avoid."

To me this is the crux of the problem. TTRPGs are very open ended and it is very difficult to scope out everything that may come up in the game. Saying that the default is "no" is rather pointless. Better to simply state that the before the gaming starts that it is a good idea to clearly explain the tone of the game and kinds of things that may be encountered and what is and is not acceptable for the session. But if something comes up that was not anticipated, which a player was not expecting and is upsetting, there should be ways to address this. I would have appreciated seeing more tips on how this can best be addressed.

Unfortunately, the answer to how to address this is that each player has a veto. "It doesn't matter why consent wasn't given". "There may not be a reason why they're not consenting." "It's not up for debate." "They can always change their mind about what they are or aren't consenting to."

While in most cases an empathetic DM and other players can and will try to be accommodating, strict adherence to rules like seem vulnerable to abuse. The only rule that I can't get 100% on board with is:

"Anyone is allowed to leave an uncomfortable situation at any time."

Obviously nobody should be pressured to keep playing in an uncomfortable situation, but if a group is enjoying a game and are within the agreed-upon scope of content, maybe the one person who is not comfortable needs to step away from that scene or maybe it just isn't the game for them.

I do like the checklist at the end of the booklet which would be helpful for a new group to indicate any plot or story elements they may not be comfortable with. But unlike the suggestions in the rest of the booklet, this tool seems best used with a group of players at the start of a new campaign who will be playing together regularly. I can't see how this would be used with most convention games where the content is already preset.

I appreciate awareness and sensitivity training. But these black and white rules seem impractical. If I had to accept the rules posited in this book, I'm not sure how I would ever run a public game again.

 

[Shardstone]

Someone also came up with the great idea of using this list in interest posts! Include this list with your game, checking off what it will or will not include, and that'll let potential players know if your game is for them.

 

[DWChancellor]

I've been in odd uncomfortable situations at the table enough times to know I want to see someone else's perspective. Looking forward to reading this.

Dunno how useful it will be but a good DM is always panning for gold! I could swear there was an essay on this in one of Kobold Press' guide books too.

 

[Retreater]

I'm in my 40s, and I've played a lot of stuff that could be deemed "mature" content. Now granted, that was mostly when I was a teenaged edge-lord, but I didn't give a lot of thought about comfort level.
I have a transgender player at my table. I don't think about her as a different player. But while we were playing a dungeon that had that classic curse trap of gender swapping, I took pause. I didn't want to make it a joke. I came up with a different cosmetic change trap.
But I never thought there would be something that would offend me. I'm pretty lax and have a bawdy sense of humor.
Then I played a con game revolving around investigating a cult that kidnapped pregnant women for the sole purpose of killing them and letting their fetuses die in womb. I was sitting next to my best friend, whose wife just had a miscarriage. It was awkward, insensitive (especially for the GM to continue after we asked him to stop), and it cast a dark tone over the rest of the con.
So yeah, a year ago I might've laughed over the idea of this kind of book. Now, I can see its purpose.

 

[Zardnaar]

Seems weird such a book gets written and then you hear the horror stories.

Common sense rarest element in the universe.

I've basically run a closed game for 25 years this year is the first I've started gaming with relative strangers so never really experienced the nasty gamers.

 

[S'mon]

Consent in Gaming - Monte Cook Games

Tackle Mature Content with Confidence! From fending off an attack by bloodthirsty pirates to delving into dank caverns, roleplaying games […]

www.montecookgames.com

Sean Reynolds and Shanna Germain have a free book on Monte Cook's site that is worth a look. It is a worthwhile read, whether you're in the camp that thinks it is going overboard or the camp that thinks that tools like this are desperately needed.

I thought it had some good advice, some over-stated. First 4 pages good. But the quotes from 'Your Best Game Ever' not so much. Few RPG sessions are analogous to a BDSM session. And it ignored the nature of RPGs as a group activity - this is not a Dom/sub relationship. Each person has an obligation to the group to behave decently. This may mean not introducing unpleasant material. It may mean gracefully recusing yourself from a game the rest of the group are enjoying, if it's not for you. Social situations always require some degree of tact, sensitivity, and an attempt at mutual understanding.

Hopefully that won't get me red-texted as an 'Alt-Right Edgelord'.

 

[Celebrim]

I used to be a Caver, NSS subscription and bat decal on the back of my car and all. One of the rules in a cave that is a very good rule is that if anyone in the party feels the need to leave the cave, then everyone leaves the cave. It's a good rule because caves are super dangerous places and someone is feeling uncomfortable, it's just better to leave the cave than to risk the lives of everyone in the party. And honestly, caves are serious business and this will happen to you at some point. Everyone will get claustrophobia in a cave at some point. Everyone will get in a situation where it's not good at some point, and you've got an injury, or an equipment failure, or your fighting hypothermia, or you are too fatigued to think straight, and now is the time to be done and everyone goes out together 'cause you don't split the party. (Just like in the Dungeon.)

But I'm not sure that this is a useful perspective on a game. If a game is as dangerous as a cave, perhaps the game shouldn't be that dangerous. Or if you are acting like the game is as dangerous as a cave, why are you in it? Or if you are assessing a game to be as dangerous as a cave, is that even remotely rational?

Like I get people can get out of line. I get that there are jerks, and that what constitutes being a jerk and how much jerkiness one can tolerate can be very subjective. But I also get that there isn't a victim card that you get to play all the time and whoever plays it first or the hardest has the moral authority. Could be that is in itself a jerk move.

I mean sure, everyone that caves knows what it feels to be fatigued and suddenly the dark which you've dealt with for 200 hours, and the fact that you are three miles back in water up to your chin is something you aren't comfortable with any more. Been there, totally have my empathy with that and many similar situations. But if that happened to you on every trip, especially after you were told what you were getting into, probably we'd just stop asking you on the trip, and we wouldn't feel like jerks for doing it.

And heck, cavers are an elitist bunch. Far more elitist than gamers have any right to be because cavers unlike gamers have really good reasons for their elitism and insularity. If in fact these games are comparable to caves and caving rules apply, maybe we ought to accept that there needs to be gatekeepers. I don't accept that there needs to be, precisely because I don't think of a game as being much like a cave.

It's hard for me to look at absolute guidelines about complex human social interaction and think that they are in any way workable. Surely anyone that has ran an RPG is aware how hard it is to write rules that cover all the situations that can come up? So why would anyone decide that the even more complex thing that is life is amendable to absolute rules?

And honestly, I think I'd go from a lot of sympathy to not giving any in a hurry if someone pulled out a book like this and said, "But these are the rules. It's not up for debate."

That said, I do think that conventions need to do a better job of setting guidelines for how tables are ran, how tables are advertised, and how violations of those guidelines are handled. And I would think it a mature thing for there to be some sort of standards that conventions could agree to and adopt. Unfortunately, from what I can tell of reviews of this product, no useful and practical advice is provided on how to do that.