D&D 5E Player consent required -spoilers for new adv book

[Micah Sweet]

And that’s great if you only play with friends.

A lot of us don’t. We play with strangers. Lots and lots of gamers play with strangers.

So this kind of explicit instruction is needed.

Does that instruction talk about playing with strangers, or does it paint with a broad brush?

 

[dave2008]

Does that instruction talk about playing with strangers, or does it paint with a broad brush?

D&D should almost always paint with a broad brush. Detail brushes are for DMs and their players

 

[bedir than]

Does that instruction talk about playing with strangers, or does it paint with a broad brush?

Does it matter?

Is it ok to hurt your friends? Is it ok to hurt strangers? Why would you want to hurt either group of players?

 

[MGibster]

Is it ok to hurt your friends? Is it ok to hurt strangers? Why would you want to hurt either group of players?

Nobody is hurt by a game of D&D. Back in the 80s, it was the likes of Patricia Pulling and William Dear that claimed AD&D was psychologically damaging and a contributory cause of the suicides of Irving Pulling and James Eggbert, III. Do we need to apologize for them for mocking them all these years about their claims of role playing games being harmful? It's just weird to hear players these days claiming the game can be harmful.

 

[bedir than]

Nobody is hurt by a game of D&D. Back in the 80s, it was the likes of Patricia Pulling and William Dear that claimed AD&D was psychologically damaging and a contributory cause of the suicides of Irving Pulling and James Eggbert, III. Do we need to apologize for them for mocking them all these years about their claims of role playing games being harmful? It's just weird to hear players these days claiming the game can be harmful.

Nah, having met people who were sexually abused or worse, forcing them to face that history at a D&D table for my own pleasure does in fact hurt them.
Forcing slavery onto people with slavery in their past hurts them.
Psychological damage is real.

Be kind to the people at your table. It's not hard.

 

[LordEntrails]

Only when it gets to the point of abrogating people's own responsibility to sort themselves out.

It's more that I expect people to, as far as possible in the knowledge it isn't always, leave their baggage at the door when they show up to the game. And if they don't happen to pick that baggage up on the way out because the game has made them forget about it, so much the better.

Also, IMO a benefit of roleplaying games is that if someone has a fear of something they can play a character who specifically doesn't have that fear. I mean, I've got a pretty good fear of heights unless there's a guardrail, but I can still play characters who make their living by scaling sheer walls at risk of falling very long distances.

Wow! This is awesome. You should become a professional therapist, or maybe you already are? You could solve the issues for so many people. Just leave their baggage at the door! How revolutionary!

That is simple not how psychology works. And we'll just leave that there.

 

[LordEntrails]

Nobody is hurt by a game of D&D.

Yes they can be. Words can cause real and lasting harm to others. Especially when those words come from friends. When friends sitting around a table playing a game and their words are careless or ignorant of others, they can cause harm, intentionally, knowingly, or not.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Why not?

Why presume that just because you’re groovy with it, everyone else is too?

See because there’s the side of this that’s getting ignored. If I speak up and say, I don’t want X in the game, several folks have said that I would be ejected from their game. Not welcome at the table.

That certainly creates lots of pressure to not say anything. On top of the huge amount of pressure on people to never admit to any sort of weakness in the first place.

I find it utterly baffling that people put a game ahead of the real feelings of real people but there’s an awful lot of that in this thread alone.

So why shouldn’t there be a conversation about character death? Heck 5e DnD is set up that it’s really hard to kill a pc unless the DM deliberately does it.

Taking death off the table was done in DnD in the eighties. Not sure why it’s an issue today.

I can only say we all make basic assumptions about what an adult player would tolerate or expect.

We all do. Mine may differ from someone else’s.

Do you ask if people are ok with their characters falling? Do you ask if characters carrying weapons are upsetting? Why not?

You might ask in general if someone has a problem with certain content before you start a game and let them fill in the blank.

I just find turning into a tentacle monster to be a thing I would never guess would freak someone out. I am sure that person exists somewhere.

If someone was upset about it, I would cut that part out, make a work around or whatever.

If I am being honest, I would avoid playing with someone who has a lot of restrictions. A particular thing can be worked around. But a laundry list of limitations would not work for me.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

That is so true @Vaalingrade. And people might not even know that they find something uncomfortable.

We had this regarding drowning come up in my gaming group. Apparently one of the players, a good friend, had really buried back memories of losing a friend to drowning. And that's not always a topic that comes up in Session Zero.

I've had to swerve mid-session during my Eternal Winter game when the party was beset upon by starving children... I realized, and changed it fairly quickly to they were murderous halflings who disguised as human children to better catch and eat humanoids. From there, I could get into the grosser aspects, like when they searched the bodies and camp, the PCs could tell they'd been cutting strips off themselves to make a broth to attempt to survive on

 

[Vaalingrade]

Can we just not invoke the Satanic Panic as a shield for harmful behavior?

No, the game isn't hurting anyone. The person inflicting psychological harm using the game as a medium and excuse is.