Play Culture at VALUE

Hey folks,

I was at the last meet up at die Requisite for my first time at VALUE. I was just visiting Vienna for a week, so it was just a one off. But in hindsight I realised there were some things I found quite difficult, especially because of the difference from the kind of play culture I’m used to at public play events back home and in the convention scene generally. I’ve been involved in running conventions, similar TTRPG gaming clubs, and running online TTRPG communities for a few years now and I thought it might be worth raising this.

The first thing that I struggled with was communicating and getting in the same page about the game we were playing. The GM gave us a brief pitch on the thread and there was some talk of the kind if humour it entails. But we didn’t really talk about other expectations, like what boundaries we want on content or what material we want to avoid engaging with. This is especially difficult when playing with complete strangers, but even with people we know we can never tell how someone is feeling on the day, so it might help if we used communication tools like lines and veils.

Secondly, there was a moment that got a bit tense in the game and we didn’t have a script to just hit pause and talk about stuff to deescalate the tension. We kinda chugged on by just saying ‘let’s not keep arguing about this and move on’ but situations like this using an X-card to pause the game and talk out of character to resolve any issues first, and then resuming the game, might help things flow more smoothly.

In all the public play spaces I’ve run, we’ve had mechanisms in place to promote a more considerate play culture, like having a code of conduct that makes use of communication tools mandatory (but leaves it to each table to decide which tool they use, at least an X-card but other options also available). Then we also have very clear lines on what kind of behaviour is acceptable and not, including bullying or vexatious conduct, inappropriate comments or behaviour, derogatory or discriminatory remarks or behaviours, etc. And when it comes to enforcing this, really the ideal we all strive towards is the whole community keeps everyone accountable rather than specific people in authority roles policing it.

So yeah, as VALUE events get bigger it might be worth putting some structures in place to promote a positive play culture so it can be welcoming to newbies and fun to everyone alike.

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Hey!

As the DM of friday’s game, I never realized that there was any tension. No player spoke up, and the game I ran did not involve anything even remotely close to NSFW, horror or other problematic content that usually would require an X-card (the “most extreme” things were a 420 joke and one slur/insult from the Bag of Scolding).

When I run a game that involves problematic content (like body and gothic horror in the CoS Death House) I post an appropriate content warning in the thread and tell players about that before the game starts to esure they are comfortable with that.

During our breaks I even asked (at least most) players if they like the game so far and got only positive replies. I am genuinly curious about what made you feel uncomfortable?

If a player had spoken up during the game or approached me during a break, I would have certainly tried by best to resolve the situation - after all, I want everyone to have fun at my table :slight_smile:

Furthermore, the situation was quite unique, as you planned to play/DM at a different table and only joined last-minute, when I wanted to get the game going to avoid a late finish or even adjournment. If it was a difference in style (like preferring a RP-heavy game and ending up in a combat-heavy dungeon crawl or vice versa) this unfortunatly can happen at VALUE, especially in an usual situation like this friday where a DM canceled last-minute due to an emergency, leaving some players “DM-less” who we then had to distribute across the other tables.

At our Night of the Rolling Dice events we always use X-cards and a Code of Conduct (and one of us holds an intro speech, telling everone to respect each other, reminsing everyone of the CoC and explaining what the X-card is for) as these events are much bigger and full of new players; while a lot of VALUE players are veterans and know each other already. I also had used an X-card in the past in some VALUE games too, but noone ever tapped it. In fact, in my five or so years at VALUE, I never had a player state they felt uncomfortable after a game due to triggers or other content issues - neither when I was a player myself, nor when I was a DM.

I’ll bring up the topic of X-cards with other DMs though :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your reply! Great to hear people use warnings for content they know in advance will be problematic, and X-Cards in genres where this might be more necessary. But the point is these should be standard across the board and the play culture needs to be more considerate.

I only mentioned things in broad, general terms because I wanted to focus more on play culture rather than litigate any specific instances or make it personal. But I can be a bit more specific if that can help.

Regarding tension at the table, I’m actually surprised you didn’t pick up on it when I remember a moment when one person got really adamant re-checking and recalculating again the rolls someone else made, and I and another person stepped in and said ‘let’s leave this, because us redoing an entire turn at this rate will slow things down and make everything drag longer’ as a way of deescalating the tension. Voices and body language were starting to get more agitated at that point, so I’m very certain there was tension and not me thinking a situation is tense when it isn’t. This situation is one where, for example, I might have X-Carded and said ‘I think we’re getting a bit hot under the collar, let’s all take a moment to cool off’ had we had an X-card in place. But at the time I did directly say to that player, along with someone else at the table joining me, that we should just move on in the interest of time.

As for what made me uncomfortable, well there were a couple of things. The first is when one of the players asked for a rubber and you said that you could have handed over a condom instead. I did say straight away that that would have been very creepy and another player at the table said that that would have been uncalled for. And I did interrupt someone else at the table from making a transphobic joke straight away. The reason I didn’t bring it up over the break is because I brought it up to you in the moment with someone else.

As for the other thing that made me uncomfortable, this happened after the break, and again this is one of those that was very much on the line and hadn’t crossed it because it seemed to be just at the edge of what the table was fine with. This was when an NPC kissed a PC without the character’s consent, and without a conversation with the player before. The conversation with the player before could be okay because it seemed to be something everyone was already leaning into because of everyone spelling out the ‘power word’ kiss, and so in this case it seemed like everyone was cool with it. Although generally with stuff like this it’s always better to ask first explicitly if people are okay with something. But the rub was in how the NPC just went and kissed a PC’s character without the character’s consent. That’s assault. Also it was weird that the PC that was kissed wasn’t the one who completed or tampered with the power word.

The issue here isn’t whether players should have spoken up to ask you to resolve the situation. The situation should not have happened and we could have explicitly talked about boundaries and consent. But yeah the point here isn’t to litigate one particular table, it’s to address a wider culture of play.

Thanks for offering to raise X-cards with other DMs. But the conversation around play culture doesn’t end at X-cards, and I know some more experienced veterans of the scene will have a lot of insight on this like codes of conduct and stuff. So looking forward to see how they get on with this.

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Thanks for the reply!

Regarding the rolls checking, I don’t think that is what X-cards are meant for. X-cards are for problematic content in the game or when a player does something problematic to another player (including making a transphobic joke). Checking one’s own dice rolls does not fall under that in my opinion - from my perspective he was checking his own rolls, not someone else’s. The only tension I perceived was players getting annoyed about an unnecessarily long turn, so I wanted to move on - but before I could say that, someone else already asked to move on. I’d say there is a big difference between getting annoyed by a long turn and feeling (or making others feel) uncomfortable.
If an X-card gets used too often (like for long turns), it loses its value as a tool for players to get out of uncomfortable situations, people will pay less attention to X-card taps.

I am sorry about the rubber joke. I did not realize it could be considered creepy. I never said I could have handed over a rubber though, I did not even have one. I just had an eraser, which as I realized at that moment, was still in my bag and not on the table with my other stuff, so I had to retrieve it.
Others made the same pun at least once when I was rather new at VALUE and asked for a rubber instead of an eraser, that is how I learned about that… and noone back then, me included, thought it was creepy.

Regarding the kiss, for me everyone was fine with that because you all spelled out the “KISS” word, interrupting the dragon’s attempt to spell “KILL”. I just picked someone who was in melee with the dragon for that, that’s all - ranged kisses aren’t possible. I wouldn’t consider that assault and the player in question was fine with the kiss from what I saw during and after the game.

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I don’t entirely agree with you on the X-Card. The tool has seen many iterations, and the one most popularised in the American convention circuit is definitely the one that is just a ‘remove this problematic content’ signal.

However, different community groups and different game rules interpret the X-Card more broadly, including a much broader ‘hit the X-Card to pause the game and talk out of character about any issue, whether it’s content, inter-personal conflict, or literally any other issue that is affecting your enjoyment of the game’. And speaking in my experience as having once been a safeguarding officer for a gaming convention, a safeguarding officer for a local gaming club, and currently being on the admin team of my local indie gaming club and an international south Asian gaming community, I have observed over years that, contrary to what you suggest that this devalues the X-Card, this normalises the X-Card as a channel of communication and makes people more likely to use it. The X-Card doesn’t then become just a tool used in acute situations, with people having to adjudicate whether or not their discomfort is severe enough to merit an X-Card, but everyone feels comfortable to hit the X-Card to have conversations they want.

Also using the X-Card as a signal to talk about the issue and figure out a solution that works for everyone rather than a hard veto means that people don’t feel like they are undermining or penalising others, just raising issues for everyone to discuss. And once again, different tables interpret the X-Card differently (I know for one that my interpretation of the X-Card is way more loose than the one the rest of my club uses because I integrate into it some of the safety protocols baked into the game that I run). This is why it helps for everyone to talk about this in advance so the group knows what the protocol is.

Also if anyone disregards an X-Card, that in my book would be a code of conduct violation for disregarding a safety tool and direct feedback from a player. If you seem to be suggesting that anyone would disregard an X-Card being tapped because they feel the X-Card was tapped too often or for something too trivial, I would have a very serious conversation with that person.

Now regarding the dice roll situation, the player was checking another player’s rolls and nearly to the point of backseat driving doing the maths. It wasn’t that people got annoyed over the long turn, it was that I found this kind of domineering to be disruptive, especially when the player whose turn it was was okay with the rolls and outcomes as they were and wanted to move on and this person kept insisting on re-doing all the numbers for that turn. This would be an instance of player conduct towards another player (and not just getting irritated someone is taking too long) which is something I as a GM or as an organiser in a community would encourage people to use the X-Card to draw attention to.

But once again, I want the focus to be on play culture, not individual events from Friday, because the point of this discussion should be the bigger picture at stake, not individual instances of who did what. That’s the thing you’ve highlighted with the rubber pun, it’s a crude joke and isn’t inherently creepy. But context matters. The reason it came across as creepy was that you made that pun unprompted at the only female player at the table, and then doubled down and asked ‘can you imagine if I actually did bring out a condom?’ Like yeah it’s a pun people have made. But reading the room is important.

And finally, as for the kiss incident, I realise I wasn’t as clear in my previous message. I don’t think, in this instance, anybody at the table was not okay with a kiss/romance/seduction in the game because everyone leaned into the rewriting of the power word. That’s not the issue. It would have been better to ask first just to get explicit confirmation, but it was kinda clear that folk were fine with it because of how everyone alluded to it beforehand.

The issue wasn’t that there was a kiss, it was that the way the kiss was depicted was one where the NPC kissed the PC without the PC’s consent. So what we depicted was an instance of assault in the fiction because while players consented to having a kiss in the fiction, the way it played out was one where the NPC just kissed the character instead of any indication of asking or receiving consent. What I meant by ‘that’s assault’ was ‘the way the kiss was depicted looked like the NPC assaulting the PC because of a lack of consent’. In hindsight, we probably could have played out the scene differently, even if it’s something like ‘the NPC leans in to kiss you, how do you respond?’ But that’s what I mean by focussing on the culture. All of us could have done this differently, and establishing lines of communication before and after, then checking in as the scene plays out, would all have helped this.

So yeah, there’s a lot of conversations to be had, awareness to be developed, and hopefully codes of conduct and communication tools put in place to further reinforce this.

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It seems we have different cultures of play then? I know the X card as a tool to stop the game for players who feel uncomfortable with the situation and as a tool that allows them to do so in sitations they do not want to communicate the reason for why they feel uncomfortable in the open (there could be a situation that seems completely normal, but triggers PTSD for a player, and they do not want to say that in the open).

Regarding the rubber joke - "and then doubled down and asked ‘can you imagine if I actually did bring out a condom?’ " is not correct. Honestly, I can’t say for sure, but if I said anything more, it was more like “did you really think I would give you a condom instead of an eraser?”.

Regarding the dice roll situation, I might have mistaken it; but even if he checked the other player’s dice rolls, the two (@Tequila_Sunset and @polina) know each other very well, so I doubt they would have issues with each other checking their dice rolls. Hence I was more hesitant with stepping in.

Regarding the kiss, please don’t lay words into my mouth I never said. All I said was “The dragon kisses you. Roll a Wisdom save against charm.” And one the wisdom save failed, I said “you are now charmed” and looked for the ‘charmed’ condition marker (we were in combat at that time). I did not say anything more than that. I don’t think the situation could have been more harmless, especially considering the players at the table made the dragon kiss in the first place, by writing that word in place of KILL… And because it was nothing more than that I did not consider the need to ask the table for consent again.

Also, you already saw the mechanic in action multiple times before the kiss. The dragon spelled FIRE, the characters took fire damage. It tried spelling ICE, but that got changed to NICE, resulting in the characters receiving a heal and free bless. It tried spelling WISH, but it got changed to DISC - and it launched a disc, bionicle-style, to attack (but an Uno reverse card was shown to make the dragon shoot itself).

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I think the fact of the different play cultures is obvious from the title of this thread. Anyway, as previously I’m not interested in arguing over what happened on Friday. But in the interest of focussing on the bigger picture, I will underscore the point about the kiss: I didn’t put any words in your mouth. When I said ‘the kiss was portrayed as an assault’, and when I said there was a lack of consent, what I meant was exactly what you did: ‘the dragon kisses you’ is all you said, and you said nothing to establish any sense of consent being sought by the dragon, nor did you give an opportunity for the player to show consent being given. Going up to someone and kissing them unprompted is assault. Players being okay with there being a kiss in the game isn’t the same as characters in the fiction consenting to being kissed. The way the kiss was portrayed was one where there was a lack of consent being given. And seriously, the fact that we have to go into such precise detail on the meaning and definition of consent, the fact that we need to split these hairs in the first place, is indicative of the lack of consideration and understanding that I started out talking about to begin with.

I don’t want to either, but I have to, because you are saying things about me in a public forum that are simply false.

“The dragon kisses you. Roll a wisdom save.” does not include any graphic description of what is happening. Nor did the dragon say anything. Nor did the kiss have any further effect except for imposing the charmed condition for like one round - which by itself does not do anything except for not allowing the player to attack the creature they are charmed by. You literally cannot do less than that when a monster kisses a player during combat for some reason.

And, as I said and you said yourself, the players consented to the kiss by - as a group - changing the dragon’s word KILL to KISS. Everyone was on board. They know or can at least assume that this will make the Bookwyrm kiss someone. The kissed character’s player @polina seemed to have no issues with that, she told me afterwards she loved the game.

What would you do if… an enemy casts Dominate Person? X-card this? A vampire charming you? X-card that? Mind flayers sucking out your brain (for which they have to touch your head with their mouth, even though no DM makes such a graphic description?) X-card them?

Honestly, that is the vibe I am getting right now.

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Okay I think you’re missing the key distinction here: yes, the players consented to there being a kiss in the game.

That is not the same as, in the fiction, the characters consenting to being kissed.

The way you described the scene, ‘the dragon kisses you. Roll a wisdom save’ does not show consent being sought from the characters prior to the kiss. The way the scene was framed did not show the character being kissed previously showing that they consented to being kissed. And kissing someone without their consent is assault. It doesn’t matter how graphic it is or what is said, and the fact that you’re clutching at these straws is telling.

And once again, the point isn’t whether players were okay with there being a kiss. The issue is the way the kiss was framed was one without establishing consent, and that scene could have been handled better.

And I’m really glad you asked about all of those utterly non-sequitur hypotheticals because I think those can be useful illustrations of what a more considerate play culture looks like. So as someone who’s been GMing for what’s nearly a decade now, what I learnt to do is, for example, from the Mind Flayers game I talked about on Friday which ended in an absolutely brutal and horrific TPK:

Pre-Game: Establish Lines and Veils. Check in if anyone has hard lines around body horror, mind control, or any other theme that would make this game entirely unsuitable for them. I said to my players ‘this is a level 8 game, and enemies and spell casters have access to instant kill abilities that prevent revivify, and things like dominate. Are we okay with that?’ If a player would have said no, I’d have either changed the adventure entirely or if it was immutable, suggested the player switch groups. In my case the players were fine with it, and I’d have been willing to change the material entirely.

Later in the session

‘You walk into the lair and discover that this is a mind flayer colony.[description of cavern with elder brain]. Let’s take a short break.’

After the break when everyone is back at the table,

‘Hey folks, I said earlier in the abstract this this game could contain these themes, but now that you know this is about mind flayers, it’s a lot more real. So just want to review the lines and veils, and any issues?’

One player asked to minimise gore and not go into graphic description of brains being eaten, so we agreed to just say ‘uses eat brains’ and leave it at that.

As for dominate, one thing we had long established at the start of the campaign was a line around sexual violence. If any creature is dominated into any kind of sexual contact, that is coercion and not consent, and hence it is assault, and so we wouldn’t do something like that. And when a PC is under the effect of dominate, I check in with the player if they’re okay with what’s happening. Like the Sorcerer who got Dominated: I said ‘you’re under the effect of dominate. The mind flayer would command you to maintain concentration on Polymorph so the Fighter still has a -4 to Int from being an T-Rex and cannot mathematically succeed the save against the stun. How do you feel about that?’

The player funnily enough said ‘fuck, that’s clever and really evil!’ And actually was cool with it.

The vampire charming someone is actually a really good question because that’s the one that is explicitly seductive in nature and needs more attention to these boundaries. We already established people were fine with romance and they were fine with sexual content as long as it was veiled. What I had done in the game I ran involving vampires was a similar pre-game and mid session chat as before. But every time there was an attempt at seduction, what I said was ‘the NPC tried to lay on the charm really thick. What would be the kind of thing your character would find charming or attractive?’ (You might see overlaps with themes from my collaborative play style post earlier.) Player and I talked, and then I said ‘cool, the NPC starts talking to you about interesting facts about history and lore. They’re clearly flirting with you. Do you reciprocate this, or do you try and turn them down?’ One of the things I said earlier was a similar example: later as the flirting got more intense, ‘the NPC leans in to try and kiss you. Do you pull back, or do you lean into the kiss?’ Player says ‘yeah, I lean into it’ ‘okay, so the NPC kisses you’.

So to emphasise, rather than ‘the NPC kisses you’, where there’s no clear seeking of consent, I set it up as ‘the NPC leans in to try and kiss you, how do you respond?’ To show the NPC giving the PC an opportunity to say yes or no. Ideally, in hindsight, I could be a bit more precise here. Maybe ‘you can tell from how the NPC looks at you they want to kiss you’ in case the directly leaning in might already be crossing a boundary a bit. But there are so many effective ways of handling this situation.

Like I’ve run Monster Hears and Masks and games that involved frequent sexual activity between PCs and NPCs and we always had ways of handling situations like this sensitively and considerately. And I have used vampires, mind flayers, aboleths, liches, and a bestiary of monsters that can bring up challenging material. I genuinely do not understand why you’d assume I’d just X-Card things instead of, I don’t know, handle the content in a considerate and thoughtful manner?

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I thought I’d point that we are currently in discussion over a rules reset which will likely include a code of conduct, seeing as the current statement to that effect is essentially “don’t be a jerk” and we have seen some situations where that hasn’t been enough.

For clarification, what is a safe-guarding officer? We have no organised structures beyond unlocking the locations and making forum posts, so I’m curious if this is something that should be considered.

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Back when I was at uni we had a uni gaming club that had a safeguarding officer role which involved developing and implementing policy and procedures to promote a positive play culture and dealing with any issues that came up. I also helped organise a local convention where I had a similar role. These were roles defined in the club constitution so we kinda had a named point of call etc.

The indie gaming club I’m in now is far more flat in its organising structure. In many ways the only organising structure is a discord chat where we take it in turns to book venues, set up and facilitate sessions, run stalls and hand out flyers at cons, etc. but we all collectively take responsibility for safeguarding and play culture rather than having just one person. Usually the point of call is whoever is there hosting the meet up on the day but we all share this responsibility between like seven or eight members of the admin team. And more importantly, we have a load of GMs who lead by example. All the techniques I described above I learnt from GMs I played with who set an example.

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Also from my experience, ‘don’t be a jerk’ is never adequate as a code of conduct because what constitutes being a jerk isn’t clear to everyone.

Also, does anyone have Will and Patrick’s handles? They asked me to DM them a few things when I met them on Fri but I havent put real names to handles.

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Maybe you could help write some suggestions for the new cose of conduct in the post I linked.

I can send you the CoC we at my club and a rundown of some of the scripts we use at events. I’ll do so when I get on my computer.

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Sure!

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Could you send them here? I’m very interested in this whole discussion because it reminds me a bit about the whole “Rule Zero” thing in commander in mtg, so I’ve just been reading along and would like to know your suggestions too. And I’m sure I’m not the only one

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Will do! Realistically it’ll be tomorrow because quite frankly, I’m tired of this thread.

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Again, as long as the players consent, it is fine. And they did it here. I have never heard players differentiating between player and character consent. As long as a player consents, it happens. That was always the case ever since I started playing and never was an issue. D&D is full of things happening to characters the characters would not be fine with. In fact almost everything a character has to roll a saving throw against is something they do not consent with - otherwise the saving throws would be pointless.

If we were to stop the game every time for that, we would not be able to finish any session and all tension would get lost; and the game would, simply, not work.

A character might not be fine with getting kissed, but when the player consents, it happens. A character might not consent to getting paralyzed, but if they fail their save, this happens. A character might not be fine with becoming enthralled by an aberration, but in an eldritch horror game, things like this are bound to happen. A character might not be fine eating human flesh, but in a game with a lot of body horror, they might get tricked into doing it.

There is a huge difference at the table between going “Stop here. This is human flesh. Is your character fine with eating it?” or “the meat’s taste and coloring is rather unusual. Roll a Nature check/Sanity check/Wisdom save.” or similar and only giving out the information that it is human meat once a roll for that is successful or when it is the right moment in terms of the flow of the story and tension to reveal it…

(That is, of course DMs should not take control of player characters and be very careful with domination effects in particular; that indeed is something that can be problematic and make players feel uncomfortable).

It sounds to me that D&D simply is not the right game for you?

By the way, it’s also not polite to openly - and wrongly - accuse someone of committing assault in the game. If I wasn’t involved in this thread as I am, I would have acted in my role as a moderator, closed it and warned you - but I am of course not moderating in a thread about me and my game.

In my campaigns I always establish all necessary veils and lines in a dedicated session zero, but in a VALUE game this does not work, at least not in all depth, for time reasons, especially when a player joins last minute like you did. An X-card would help, as would an established Code of Conduct - but I doubt it would have changed anything about the kiss, considering it happened with the players’ consent.

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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.

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I still don’t understand why you are always talking about “character consent”. As I already said, consent was established. The players were fine with it, they wrote the command word in the first place. In particular, the kissed character’s player was one of those who wrote the word or at least suggested it.

Character consent is irrelevant in D&D, things happening all the time against a character’s consent. This is part of the game, and dealing with those things is part of the roleplaying experience. The important thing is that everything has to happen with the players’ consent. If you say you do not consent because your character would not want to get kissed, that is a player consent issue.

Experience does not matter, there are enough r/rpghorrorstories involving players and DMs that have countless years of “experience”, and there are enough awesome DMs and players with little to no experience. All I can say is that I have been a happy community member of RPGVienna for five years and that there never have been issues with games DMed by me. I always got only positive feedback. Same goes for games I was a player in - there were never any issues with game content that made others feel uncomfortable (there was just one instance where a player’s behaviour made someone else feel uncomfortable, but that got cleared up and was not related to in-game content).

The tone makes the music. It is as simple as that. You openly accused someone of committing assault when there was no assault as everything happened with the players’ consent, and doubled down on that when I explained the situation and why there was no assault. That is not something one should do. I am sorry if my replies got too harsh; but you should know that this is in fact not the first time someone openly accuses me of a crime I have not committed in this forum. Getting accused of something I have not done makes me feel uncomfortable.

If you had just suggested an implementation of a Code of Conduct and X-card, there would have been no issue whatsoever. As you might have seen, the community generally agrees with that - so do I.

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