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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kahuna Burger" data-source="post: 464882" data-attributes="member: 8439">How 'bout some Vile Defenses?What was going on in LOTR? high fantasy regularly includes the idea of rape, torture, slavery, etc in an "off camera" way, and the 'luck' of main characters in not being exposed to it is taken for granted. In a mature D&D game, (IMHO of course) such things are acknowleged in the world at large, but simply not inflicted on PCs. Why? Its interactive storytelling. You create the character whose story you want to tell, and the DM provides the world that story takes place in. When running D&D there is an implicit assumption that such a story will involve heroic characters in control of their own lives. Unless there is clear and ADVANCE communication that one party or another wants to make this a 'darker' story, throwing in story elements such as rape or torture is simply the DM running a power trip over their players, and making it their story that the players merely must survive. If you like this style of play, fine, but I work for more cooperation between DM and Players.The other issue is that because (to get to the main point) rape is not a standard part of the high fantasy/D&D "story", neither are defenses against it. There's sneak attacks and criticals, so there is fortified armor. There's poisons, so there are feats for better fort saves and spells to detect and nullify poison. There's scrying and other magic spying, so there's nondetection and mindblank. If the DM is going to have rape as part of the game, my character is going to have a Dentata. (see Snow Crash, a book that actually dealt with such subjects maturely). Spells, psionic abilities, feats and magic and mundane items would all exist to provide defenses. I flipped through the BoVD in the vain hope that Cooke would be mature enough to know that, but sadly, he deals with it the same way most DMs do - radically change one part of the story without including any other changes that would happen as a result. One DM refered to a story where an female assassin NPC was raped by mutual enemies. She had poison use, some spells and the skill points to spend on craft traps, and she was running around completely undefended? (Sure in such an unballanced situation she could have been raped eventually, but where's the unlucky first guy who put himself into a fishhook trap?) This is not realism. Any DM who is throwing in "vile darkness" without some realistic "vile defenses" is honestly just out to put a power trip over the PCs, or is not thinking through the changes he is making in the system.Kahuna Burger</blockquote>

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