Poll: Rating your D&D game based on criteria in Monte Cook's article in Dragon #300

[Shadowdancer]

Was is the tone of your D&D game? Family friendly? Or for mature audiences only?

Using the criteria Monte Cook provided in his article in Dragon No. 300, how would you rate your D&D game?

Our game is definitely mature, mainly for the sexual content. All four members of our gaming group are 40 or older. We've been playing together for about 10 years. All of us are married -- two of the players to each other. We have two men and two women in the group. And the sexual content of our game is fairly graphic, and a constant aspect of the game whenever we're out of the dungeon.

And, in case you're wondering, the person who gets into the sexual aspect of our game the most is one of the women.

How about your game?

 

[S'mon]

I voted 'mature', although it varies a lot - from my current tabletop game which is pretty much 'standard' (I'm running 'Lost City of Gaxmoor' - the evil goblinoids have human concubines) to the vileness of certain PBEMs I've had to abandon.

 

[dren]

I use very serious themes and images, so I voted for vile. Players are good, or neutral based and they fight evil. Sometimes that evil is ugly and distinctly perverted...but a lot of what happens, they see it "off camera" as it were.

There are things I won't touch, such as child abuse or pedophilia. Regardless of what I do, if they don't like something players tell me and I'll tone them down. So far, only one person said something, and it wasn't even the graphic images, but idolatry (He was offended as a christian. I didn't agree with him, but I respected him and his beliefs as a friend. The party choose alternative actions and adventures, and there were times I glossed things over without any details...)

I find, players like this because I don't dumb it down. I don't make cartoon characters, well I do, but those are NPCs used for comic relief. They fight evil and as heroes they are exposed to some of the darkest creatures, rituals and characters in the world.

dren

 

[Bendris Noulg]

"Mature" (as I play with adults) with regular dips into Vile (e.g., the city the PCs are currently in is "Vile" without a doubt).

 

[Fenes 2]

I voted mature. One campaign is more morally ambigous than the other, but both feature more than PG-13 villains and evil acts. If evil people have power in my campaign, then they use it according to their plans and desires, although I often use "fade to black" or leave the exact description up to the players imagination and abstain from crossing certain borders when the PCs are concerned.
Still, when looking at the core material from WotC what pushes my campaigns into mature are - apart from graphic descriptions of violence - the sexual themes, sometimes with a darker tint, which are part of it. I do not play with minors, and I do not cater to the kind of people who want to play PCs who are in the same way anatomically correct as are Barbie and Ken and, as another put it on these boards, only leave the dungeons to restock on supplies. That means that if your Cha 20 PC with the looks of a supermodel gets captured by the average slavers better not expect to be put on the fields or mines to work. Also, do not expect the soldiers sacking a city to only pillage and burn. I do not get graphic in those de-scriptions, but I won't gloss over those things either - I do not want a saturday morning cartoon.

 

[Henry]

Since I don't have the magazine yet, I'm going to do what millions of netizens have done for years in the face of a lack of information: I'm going to wildly speculate, just based on the names alone.

Our campaigns typically fall in the "standard" category. HUman sacrifice, raping and pillaging, etc. do not make common appearances in our campaigns, and when they do, rarely are the details of these things spelled out.

Onec or twice in the past I have introduced a little darker content. (A necromancer leading an army wanted to "have his way" with a PC monk that he captured. The PC escaped her bonds, however, and strangled the necromancer to death with her own chains. The player decided to play it as a fear and loathing of all men the PC didn't know for several months afterward.)

Although the session turned out exceptionally well, and was pretty intense, I don't know if I'll venture the subject again, because we generally play for fun rather than for exploring difficult themes. The point is moot at current because we have a younger player in our group right now who is "learning the roleplaying ropes."

 

[jasper]

how ever during my 20+ years of playing and dm I have ran the whole spectrum. Different strokes for different folks especially at different time of lives and xp with d&d

 

[Pielorinho]

Henry, is there room at the pulling-guesses-out-of-one's-butt table for me?

I'd guess that my game approaches vile pretty often. I avoid rape entirely as a campaign incident: it would absolutely freak me out to have it in the campaign (and once in a game I had a male character nearly raped by a succubus, and it really disturbed me a lot). However, cannibalism, sexual fetishization of children, human sacrifice, drugs, ritual torture, and the like have been pretty important in my games, either as plot points or as window dressing in the bad guys' homes.

I want the bad guys to be bad in a very concrete way. Not, "he's an orc! kill him!" but, "He's killing sailors and making them into a magical stew and feeding them to other sailors so that they turn into ghouls! Kill him!"

Daniel

 

[bwgwl]

i voted "light-hearted" only because the game i am currently GMing is Star Wars d20. i'm trying to keep true to the feel of the movies, so good and evil are very clearly delineated but most of the really "evil" stuff happens off-stage. i'm running a PG-13 campaign.

my normal fantasy worlds would most likely be standard.

 

[War Golem]

I voted standard, although there are occassional forays into mature territory. We are all adults, near or over 30, but several of my players are fairly new to the whole RPG experience and I think it's better to keep things more black and white - good guys vs. bad guys. All of my PCs are required to be good aligned.

They like a little grayness when I throw it in, but I think they also really like knowing they can go stomp the "Bad Guys (TM)" without any moral or ethical qualms.

I make use of some mature themes (slavery, torture), mostly off-camera. Rape exists, but I can't recall it ever coming up in the campaign yet.

As a DM, I would never use rape in any way that would impact a PC directly (no raping the PC, the PC's wife, the PC's sister, etc...). Unless the player specifically requested it as part of their character background or something, and even then I would probably try to talk them out of it.

Cheers,

-War Golem