V.A.L.U.E. 2024 Code of Conduct

General/Looking For Group
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We (some DMs) made a preliminary Code of Conduct for VALUE which we want to adopt for several tables and then review for the next season.

  • This is just provisional. If you wish to have some things added or some questions please ask them.
  • This document is supposed to be rather short in order to be easily readable for new players.
  • We will create a “Sage Advice” thread where we will answer questions in more detail and go into edge cases

V.A.L.U.E. 2024 CODE OF CONDUCT

RESPECT OTHERS

This is a cooperative game and you are all trying to have fun together. Respect your neighbour whether it is GM/DM or player in all aspects from origin to sexuality, culture and body type.

Theft or aggressive behaviour is not tolerated. Aggressive behaviour includes threats of or actual physical aggression, using racial, gender, or cultural slurs and otherwise harassing others.

RESPECT THE GAME

Respect the rules and the effort of DM/GMs and Players. Don’t intentionally try to derail the game, attack other characters (without consent), destroy plot important items.

Follow the DMs lead, avoid prolonged arguing with the DM or other players over rules. Avoid excessive cross-talk that is not relevant to the adventure being played.

Discourage others from using social media to bully, shame, or intimidate other participants.

Avoid phone conversations at the table. If you must take a call, please excuse yourself from the table until your call is completed.

COMMUNICATE BOUNDARIES

If you have a personal boundary, such as a trigger (something that will upset you, or make you very uncomfortable) please tell the DM beforehand. If something triggers or offends you during the game communicate with the DM/GM either private or openly. Don’t suffer in silence.

RESPECT BOUNDARIES

If you have a character with difficult and problematic aspects such as Body Horror, Abuse (both physical and mental), Racist, Cannibalism, ect. Tell the table beforehand and understand that the character might not be accepted on the table.

If you see problems at your table don’t hesitate to reach out to the DM/GM or other DM/GMs.

THE DM/GM IS NOT YOUR ENEMY

The DM/GM is playing the antagonist but is not your antagonist. Allow everyone to have fun.

COOPERATE WITH EVERYONE ELSE

Be considerate, pay attention to others and allow them to shine as well. Make sure that the atmosphere is comfortable even if the game is tense.

CIVIL DISCUSSION

That safety doesn’t end at the gaming table, or with formal safety tools. We ask when in our spaces you consider your words and their impact

CONSEQUENCES

Breaking of these rules can lead to a temporary or a total ban. DM/GMs are also empowered to ban people from their tables if they feel uncomfortable with them.

FOR DM/GMs:

YOU ARE EMPOWERED

If someone breaks these or your table rules, you are able to act. Request the offending party to stop their behaviour. If they don’t comply/are aggressive or else you are empowered to ask them to leave. If you are unsure ask an experienced DM/GM or write in the DM chat on Discord.

Just because another DM/GM did allow something doesn’t mean that you have to do the same. For example: Allow Homebrew, certain interactions, certain character quirks.

ENSURE SAFETY

You can run the adventure you want but if it has problematic and dark themes, give a short content warning and warn players of the content again before you start.

Explain and incorporate some form of tools for safe play (e.g. X-Card, Lines & Veils, etc) into your game

Respect player autonomy and practice regular check-ins to affirm enthusiastic agreement of game development

Here is the pdf of the form

Code of Conduct.pdf (38.6 KB)

Here is the preliminary Suggestion and Complaint form. Note this is just an attempt. If you are more familiar with google forms and can make it better please contact us.

docs.google.com

Suggestions and Reports

This Form is for suggestions for the RPG Vienna forum and discord. Also if you had a bad experience and wish to report it to the community of DMs/experienced players, post here.

As always suggestions and criticisms are welcome

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Love to see that quick action is taken, and even though provisional this is something one can work with. Hat’s off to you peeps.

I’m speaking as both a long time member of this forum, an experienced GM, as well as someone who is on the board of a quite big sports club. So I’ve been in many a meeting concerning this kind of stuff.

There’s two things I stumbled over when reading, which I would like to see addressed further in a future version:

Discourage others from using social media to bully, shame, or intimidate other participants.

This might be a minor point, but the phrasing makes it sound like the act of bullying, shaming and intimidating itself is not a bannable offence? So here I was just taken aback by the fact that this is not followed up by something like “And please don’t do these things in the first place.”

COMMUNICATE BOUNDARIES

If you have a personal boundary, such as a trigger (something that will upset you, or make you very uncomfortable) please tell the DM beforehand. If something triggers or offends you during the game communicate with the DM/GM either private or openly. Don’t suffer in silence.

This is good. But it also goes both ways. This paragraph seems to imply that people will be heard when they speak up about their boundaries. I’d like to see that stated more specifically.

Lastly I can offer some insight on the “Suggestions and Reports” form and how that would work in Sports. The first line of communication when someone feels uncomfortable is of course to the people immediately involved. But then the second is not generally the other trainers or the board members, but a seperate and ideally more neutral body within the club. This is important, because the people most involved with the clubs daily activities are not well equiped to respond to fundamental critizism.

Such a body also solves the old “if everyone is responsible, then noone is.” conundrum, by having one or several people who explicitly keep an eye on what’s to do. Once you have people who step up and fill this role, the community can also choose to pay for additional education on the most important matters. Being a good listener is key, but it’s not the end of it.

I hope this is helpful. Keep up the good work!

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Oo, no more fudging! :b

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Love to see this - I think it’s a really really valuable thing to have written out and printed out.

I definitely agree with the points ohmi is making, especially about a neutral party within the club. I feel like there should be a good rule where if someone is directly involved with feedback/a complaint, they shouldnt be the people immediately dealing with it. It could be brought to them to respond after it’s gone through the official channels.

As a further note - I feel like it could just be renamed RPGVienna Code of Conduct, and that any game organised through this forum should be held to these standards :slight_smile:

Love your work team!

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while true for clubs, we are (at the moment) explicitly not a club, we are a loose association of people that share a hobby and try to be somewhat organised

for the same reason I would not call it RPGVienna Code of Conduct, at most something we recommend for anything publicly organised through the forum

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We can still set up a more neutral body within RPGVIenna to handle CoC violations (and to be contacted via the forms if one wants to reach out anonymically) - such as the forum and dscord moderators.

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The reason why I/we didn’t call it RPG Vienna Code of conduct was simply to not step on peoples feet, who simply want to use the forum to find players. Also I didn’t want to overstep boundaries with other DMs or players, simply because DnD can be pretty diverse.

@Arthilas

Can a group to rule these things be made? Probably, but in my opinion it has to be made up of players and DMs. Simply to keep different perspectives and we would have to make separate rules in how to rule this. As in multiple people have to vote on it and the people connected to it cannot vote. Also the person in question both the victim and the potential perpetrator has to be contacted in order to see if this isn’t just a misunderstanding or see the different side of the story. That means that role actually has effort behind it because you need to have a small investigation so that it is more than just word against word. Meaning it takes time, effort and the people have to be very active on the form. But that’s my opinion

I would also be careful in using this for game problems like “the dm killed my character”. I don’t think this is for these sort of incidents.

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I totally see your point - I think though if people are agreeing to use your forum to find games, its not too much of an ask to ask them to respect these rules. Then players can also feel more confident joining up to those games because they know theyll have a structure to expect!

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Also see your point. In my opinion if the others are alright with it we can rename it. But things like these is why we posted the form. Especially for me since I wrote like 75% of it and I am not an expert in these things. So I appreciate the perspective.

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Well thank you for your hard work on it! I know the community will really appreciate it :slight_smile:

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You called?

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This looks really good! And it’s great to see this come out of the momentum from GMs coming up with this organically.

One thing I’d say is that there doesn’t seem to be a way of dealing with a situation where the GM is instigating the problem. Most of the issues that came up in conventions I went to involved GMs being the dick. It might be worth adding to the GM section a clause that emphasises this goes both ways. So for example, ‘GMs, you are facilitating your table and have a responsibility to make sure everyone is having fun. Listen to your players’ input, and don’t act like you’re their enemy’ or other words to the effect.

Regarding this, the earlier point about aggressive behaviour has this covered already that this behaviour will be unacceptable, and this point here reads like an additional ask to get everyone to discourage this kind of behaviour. I like this approach of making safety everyone’s responsibility. But maybe tighten the language earlier on unacceptable behaviour? Include behaviour that’s verbal or physical, online or in person, and include all kinds of harassment or discrimination, including use of slurs, dog whistles, and other derogatory remarks? This admittedly is one of the most annoying clauses to write because you can’t define everything. But from my experience, precision and clarity help because it shows punters you are aware of the language and will take it seriously.

Also, personally, I’m not a fan of ostracism and exclusion as a way of dealing with conflict. I might suggest adding in consequences a whole range of options from ‘You will be asked to stop and anpologise any behaviour that violates this code of conduct or is hurtful to others. For very serious offences, or if you refuse to cooperate when asked to address problematic behaviour, you may face a temporary or permanent ban’. Personally, I always want to make allowances for good faith mistakes and give people a chance to do better.

Overall though, this is great. Had this been in place and clearly signposted previously it would have made me feel a lot more confident that concerns would be taken seriously when participating in VALUE.

The big challenge definitely will be implementation, but this is an amazing step! Thanks so much to all the folks for all your work on this!

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This is a really important point. And it’s a tricky one. But I agree with you entirely.

You can’t really take responsibility for all ‘third party’ games and stuff that happens on your forums, especially when they might happen at different times or venues outwith regular VALUE meets where some of the mods and GMs have some degree of control. Despite that though for most punters, these interactions will shape their views and expectations of the community. The online TTRPG forum in India I help run ran into this issue when post-pandemic in person meet-ups started up again.

What we did was make clear that any game advertised through the forum would have to abide by the CoC (explaining the point above re wanting to make this safe for punters as they would still associate the game with us), and while mods/admins won’t be around to respond immediately should there be any issues, we will look into the matter and if people don’t abide by the rules they won’t be allowed to advertise look for games on the forum. And players and GMs can walk away if they feel the CoC isn’t being followed at the table.

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Fun can neither always be accomplished, nor is it always the goal of DMing.

This is a diverse group that has played a wide variety of games. Let’s at the very least not impose any restrictions on what a game should be.

(That goes for ‘This is a cooperative game’ as well.)

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I think it depends. “The DM killed my character” can be perfectly fine. However, it can also be a problem or part of a problem that needs to be adressed. A DM could be killing characters not because the dice decided it, but e.g. out of spite, for not liking a particular player, or as part of a bigger problem.

Such a case should be adressed and any unfair/problematic character deaths reversed - because a character death is not just relevant for that particular guy’s table, but means the character cannot be played at any other VALUE tables either unless they pay for resurrection (which in our current rules is prohibitively expensive anyway, especially when the character got disintegrated - something we should adress in the rules for next season).

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I disagree, I think fun should always be the DM’s goal. It might not always be achievable, but it should always be the goal. Of course, thereare other goals too that can conflict with it, such as the goals of challenging the party and delivering a thematic, immersive experience (e.g. getting frightened by an otherworldy eldritch horror absolutely makes sense, but might not be fun for a barbarian’s player).

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Just to add to your point, when done right (ie when played with buy-in from players and handled well) challenging or scary experiences can still be fun for the player. I love a good cosmic horror game and existential dread. I don’t think that conflicts with fun, it’s part of it!

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I agree :100:

if done well, and with player consent (that also could be revoked at at any point even at a later date) those can be a lot of fun

it just has to be an environment where everyone is as well as feels safe

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I’d be curious to hear what you mean by this? I don’t want to misunderstand you here, so could you elaborate on what you mean by the goal of games not needing to be fun or cooperative?

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I disagree with the “The DM killed my character” should be part of this

… but if you feel that a GM “is or was a dick”, you should be able to bring that up obviously^^

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