Play Culture at VALUE

[Steering0777]

@Arthilas

You openly accused someone of committing assault when there was no assault as everything happened with the players’ consent

@Steering0777

Okay let’s just get one thing cleared up: I am not accusing you of committing assault in the game.

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?

@Arthilas

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

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.

@Arthilas

If you say you do not consent because your character would not want to get kissed, that is a player consent issue.

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

@Steering0777

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?’

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.

[truecrawl]

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.

[xaosseed]

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

@Steering0777

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.

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.

[shadowsword]

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.

[Tersidian]

This is getting out of hand, everybody please refrain from throwing insults, I’ll close this topic for now

Thanks @Steering0777 for the feedback, we will try to accelerate our efforts on a code of conduct, but from an outside perspective this was a series of minor misunderstandings that spiraled away a bit

Thanks everybody for participating in civil discourse for the most part