Play Culture at VALUE

General/Looking For Group
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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.

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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.

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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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Look, I get how uncomfortable it must feel to think someone is accusing you of something. I want to make it very clear to you that I mean what I said, I do not think you assaulted anyone. Literally all I am talking about is an editorial decision about more considerate ways a kiss can be depicted going forward. Why are you so adamantly refusing to see that?

I mean, this is literally a thread where someone said there was an issue in a game DMed by you that made them feel uncomfortable. And none of this is intended to be a personal attack on you or some kind of criminal allegation. So there is no reason for you to get this aggro and threaten me with hypothetical warnings if this would have been about a different GM. Just take it for what it is, feedback about how your game ran.

Um, yes. That’s literally what I said earlier:

The reason I am talking about ‘character consent’ is because ‘character consent’ for romantic/sexual activity could be considered, I suppose, a ‘player consent’ boundary for me. What made me uncomfortable at your table was that character consent was disregarded by the NPC. When I consented to the kiss happening in the game, I had, perhaps incorrectly, assumed that it would be handled in a way where the NPC would seek consent from the character. But that was on me for assuming that because I’m used to playing with considerate and sensible GMs in a more communicative and proactive play culture. And I know it is unfair to blame you for something you didn’t know about and acted on in good faith based on the consent you had at the time, because at the time I had consented to there being a kiss in the game. Which is why, and I cannot repeat this enough, I am not accusing you of anything, I am simply suggesting a more considerate way of handling this in the future, and having frameworks in place of having communication tools and codes of conduct to make sure this is consistently adhered to, where people can bring up lines around non-consensual kissing between characters, etc.

Thank you for telling me that it makes you feel uncomfortable when people accuse you of things falsely and telling me about your past experience, and those are indeed terribly distressing and harrowing experiences. But maybe lashing out at me because of that and projecting your discomfort about allegations about your conduct on messages that are about fictional people doing fictional things isn’t helpful or constructive, or for that matter becoming of a moderator of a community when someone is trying to raise issues they have had at the event?

But whatever, man. This is your circus. Do with it what you will. I’m likely not going to be back there for a while anyway.

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I have read through this public discussion and, fully knowing that I will catch flak for this, have observations to make. None of them in uncertain terms. People usually avoid directness like the plague, but that way more pain is invited than progress is made.

Anyway.

@Steering0777 you have been very active in this thread. In fact you authored it. What have you been doing with all the effort that words can express? Most of it was literally stating that you wish that things had been different. Okay. But then there is the detail that you seem to happily gloss over: Stating that “your club’s way of running games is superior to VALUE’s way of running games”. You were adamant about this and even tried on several occasions to “educate” us all on the whys and the hows in which your ways are better. No. You don’t get to do that, especially not while discussing a game’s content with the DM.

It is a modern-bred style of tearing others down which you emulate. It will not fly because it holds no weight.

I can say that DnD fundamentally is a game about engaging with monsters and experiencing adventures that cannot possibly happen in real life. (Just how World of Darkness is a game system about being monsters, etc). This comes with several expectations that are clear to all who arrive for a game.

DnD games have a “normal” that is different to any other game’s “normal”. Heightened tension and people becoming livid or suddenly worried or washed over with glee is actually…rather the point of running the game or participating in it. It’s why players want to make characters and delve into weird and horrible dungeons. The subject matter is of no consequence here, but any DnD game is very much its own brand of thing. Always has been since its inception in 1974.

So, why do you keep going on and on about how a “kiss” by a dragon was “controversial” or uncalled for? Dragons usually do a lot worse things to adventurers, that’s for sure. If anything, that was a great outcome and might also invite a sense of whimsy at the game table.

What’s the reason for your insistence here? You wrote many paragraphs, trying to get a point across but you never once plainly state your point.

I am sure that @Arthilas tried his best to steer the game through just enough trouble to be fun while also keeping it on course.

X-cards and most other forms of “I want out of this experience!” aids cannot substitute for growing up. If you really disliked the situation, you could have done something about it in the now. Instead, we get this thread that evidently upsets a DM. I think that is unnecessary. Please enlighten me for why it needs to be like this.

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His point was right there at the bottom of the first post?

Your own point here about expectations of play culture are exactly aligned - what should folk expect when they sit to a table?

It is a very different set of assumptions that a group of Lake Geneva wargamers in the 70s are going to sit down to the table with compared to what we have now - is the table you are running drawing from that or from Critical Role or from Baldurs Gate 3 - or something completely different again?

Given the huge amount of new folk we have coming through the doors of late, getting more explicit on what to expect might well be helpful.

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Edited because the previous version was flagged.

I’m sorry if people felt offended by my post, it wasn’t my intention. I just thought some random stranger coming in here and telling us how to do things without being a part of the community for long and seeing how things work is really offensive and patronising.

Just because they do things differently somewhere else doesn’t mean we have to do it exactly like them. And if people don’t like it they can go somewhere else, instead of telling us their club is superior and we should be like them. Just let us game in piece without constantly making it about who is offended by what.

Like let us game in piece without constantly dealing with censorship. That’s all my point was.

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