Okay let’s just get one thing cleared up: I am not accusing you of committing assault in the game.
I am saying that the way the kiss was depicted, with the NPC kissing the PC without getting the character’s consent, is a depiction of assault. The NPC is the one who did the assault, not you.
If you are choosing to read this as an allegation about your behaviour personally, that’s on you for failing to distinguish between what a character is doing from your own actions and behaviours.
Literally all my point is is that a more considerate way of handling this would have been to have the NPC seek consent first. For example, how I might have run the same scenario as you might have been ‘the dragon completes the last letter and it says kiss, the dragon looks at you with a longing gaze, as if it wants to kiss you, do you let it? Yes? okay, how do reciprocate the dragon’s desire? Cool, it kisses you. Now roll a Wisdom save’ as opposed to just ‘the dragon kisses you, roll a wisdom save’.
Would having a code of conduct have helped in specifically this situation? I think it might have, if for example the CoC made communication tools mandatory, and we had a lines & veils exercise at the start because depictions of assault would have been a line for me. And were this to then come up, I would have hit the X-Card and talked about this, saying ‘hang on, I’d asked for a line on assault, is there a way we can edit the narrative and how we stage the fiction to make the kiss one that characters consent to? Like I know we as players are okay with the kiss, but can we maybe have the NPCs seek consent first?’
From how this conversation has gone, I don’t think I would have been wise to trust you as a GM to listen to that.
The reason I didn’t bring this up at the time the way I did the other things was because I was really creeped out by it and needed time to process this as it affected me directly. Any form of non-consensual affection is assault. And while I as a player was okay with kissing in the game, I was not okay with seeing a scene play out where a character was kissed without the character having given consent. And this is another reason why I didn’t want to talk in detail, and wanted to talk more generally about play culture, because this is was a narrative beat that made me really uncomfortable and I wanted to forget it happened and move on because spending too much time on it then and there would just make me feel worse. And I have genuinely tried to talk about this in abstract terms with some amount of distance, but the extent to which you have made this so personal and so focussed on that moment instead of a wider issue on how we could have just been more considerate going forward has made it difficult for me not to bring that up.
And yes, D&D is a violent game where terrible things happen to characters against their will. Hell, I’ve had characters who have been killed, maimed, disintegrated, cursed, and a whole manner of things against their will. But there is a degree of editorial control we need to exercise when we facilitate TTRPGs where we make sure that the themes and content that come up in the stories that we tell. If someone has a line on sexual assault, we do not depict sexual assault, even though it is possible for it to happen within the rules and the setting of the game.
And there is a big difference between things that are abstract and magical (like being paralysed by hold person, for example) and things that are real-life occurrences for people (being kissed without consent). Equating the two and saying just because one happens because you fail your saving throw means the other is okay is missing the point: one of these is more likely to be something people at the table have more direct experiences of. And having said that, there are loads of situations where unpredictable things might happen. I make no secret to my players that Feeblemind is one of my favourite spells for villains to have because it is both mechanically devastating to spellcasters, and narratively shows the cunning cruelty of a shrewd and malicious villain. But I had a player ask me one session to draw a line on that spell as well as all spells involving memory manipulation or erasure because they had a relative with dementia they were seeing over the weekend, and they weren’t in the headspace to deal with that in the game.
I mean, yeah the spell exists in the game and characters failing their Wis saves have their mind shattered. But out of consideration for a player’s boundaries, I’d just swap it out for a different spell (in fact, I re-wrote the villain considerably on the fly because the villain was themed very heavily around consuming memories to gain knowledge; rather than consuming memory, it was consuming ‘vitality’ and a few other on the fly tweaks).
I am not saying that characters never get kissed in D&D without the characters’ consent, nor am I saying that terrible things never happen to characters against their will. I am saying that the considerate way of running that scene would have been as described earlier, show characters seeking consent before acting.
And you know what, I genuinely find it hilarious that you are telling the guy who showed up at the event ready to run PF2e, the guy who has played D&D for nearly a decade, and who has given you several examples of how he has run D&D games with some really sensitive content, that D&D isn’t the game for him. I mean, I prefer other games to D&D because I think other TTRPGs are better, but that doesn’t mean this game isn’t for me.
And likewise, what you say about Lines & Veils in VALUE games being impossible because of timing, and likewise not being able to just check in with players regularly over the course of the game because of a lack of time. Honestly, I have never found this to be an issue when I have run games. And checking in with each other or doing lines & veils every session has never been an issue in any of the games I have played in any of the communities I’ve been in literally ever. I have even seen GMs GMing for the first time do a phenomenal job of this. It’s possible to learn how to manage time effectively and incorporate this into sessions.
But what I find appalling is your veiled threat for me raising an issue with something that made me feel uncomfortable on Friday. I explained why I was uncomfortable about that scene, how the depiction of a kiss without consent is assault, and it would have been better if we handled the scene differently. And this was met with you getting defensive because you thought I was accusing you, and now saying that had this been about a different GM you would have warned me and closed the thread. If a player raises a concern about something that made them uncomfortable, and your response is to deny that that’s an issue and then warn them, that is a spectacularly bad look for a moderator and utterly obliterates any form of trust or good faith you would have from the person in question.