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Comment by hooverd | Hacker News Reader

> The company now suggests that extended Dungeons & Dragons campaigns begin with a session in which players discuss their expectations and list topics to avoid, which could include sexual assault or drug use. Dungeon masters are encouraged to establish a signal that allows players to articulate their distress with any subject matter and automatically overrule the dungeon master’s own story line.

This got a lot of flak. But I can see why they did it. Many such cases of DMs, especially the game store kind, using DnD as their own sexual assault simulator. RPGHorrorStories has a lot.

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I see why it gets a lot of flak too. People are becoming increasingly neurotic and fragile, and coupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise. We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session? And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?

If you're playing with close friends, you probably wouldn't railroad things to their character that would damage your friendship. If you know your friend is touchy about something traumatic do you rib them about it?

You can use whatever rules you like with your friends. When I play Monopoly with my friends we like to put fees and fines on "Free Parking," then if you land there you can take the money. We all agreed it's more fun this way.

> When I play Monopoly with my friends we like to put fees and fines on "Free Parking," then if you land there you can take the money. We all agreed it's more fun this way.

Listen, your game, your rules 100%

But I will say, the Free Parking house rule is why most games of Monopoly take so freaking long. (And if you're fine with that, then that's fine too!). The fees and fines are meant to take money out of the player's pockets and drive them closer to bankruptcy so the dang game CAN end.

Unfortunately, it's a game that just feels bad. You either play as-is and it feels bad to go broke. or you house-rule and the money keeps circulating until someone builds all Hotels and completely obliterates someone when they land on the third and fourth-edge properties

But it's just so much fun you never want it to end!

> People are becoming increasingly neurotic and fragile, and coupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.

Another way to interpret this would be that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with telling people they're not comfortable with something, and leaving when others at the table are refusing to take the feelings of others into consideration.

> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?

D&D isn't always played with friends. Not that many of my friends play D&D, or are interested in; most of the people I've played with were strangers to me when we first began playing.

> Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?

You likely have this list in your head already for your friends; it's not necessary to explicitly rehash it because you've built a relationship with these people, and you know not to brag about your awesome trip with your dad in front of someone who's dad died last week.

But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.

> Another way to interpret this would be that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with telling people they're not comfortable with something, and leaving when others at the table are refusing to take the feelings of others into consideration

Yet another way to interpret this is we’re increasingly catering to narcissists who think that their personal feelings and sensitivities should override the norms and conventions of the group. Your example highlights the problem. You don’t need to tell people to tip toe around someone’s dad having died because that’s a generally recognized social norm.

That’s what it comes down to. People want to just be able to target their behavior to a general, objective social norm, without customizing it for myriad individual sensitivities. That’s a good approach. Don’t do anything that transgresses the social norm. Don’t be offended by anything that complies with the social norm.

> You don’t need to tell people to tip toe around someone’s dad having died because that’s a generally recognized social norm.

No, but I do need to tell them that my dad died in order for them to know. Otherwise, the GM just might bring my PC's dad up out of the past, and kill him in front of my PC again.

That's all that "the form" or Session Zero is. It's explicitly laying out things that you may be sensitive to, so that the rest of the group can continue to behave in that general, objective social norm you're talking about. It's a way for them to let me know that their dog died last week, so that I know that the first combat of the first session shouldn't be fighting a bunch of guard hounds.

> People want to just be able to target their behavior to a general, objective social norm

But herein lies the problem. There is no general, objective social norm that covers the range of topics necessary.

Social norms are regional, cultural, familial, situational, etc. If you were to optimize for some universal standard, the result would be pretty boring. Think: “what would be appropriate in a corporate workplace?”.

Learning to navigate this as a group seems like a rather reasonable and necessary social skill for everyone involved. People who bristle at those with certain sensitivities seem to be masking sensitivities of their own and would prefer to just avoid a potentially uncomfortable conversation.

And I’ve gotta be blunt: many gamers (tabletop and otherwise) are often all too eager to blow right past norms or are unaware of them completely, which leads to recommendations like the above being helpful/necessary.

> But herein lies the problem. There is no general, objective social norm that covers the range of topics necessary.

I’m pretty sure people happily played board games together in the recent past without these conversations.

A lot of people did, and a lot of people were made to feel extremely uncomfortable and unwelcome and ended up leaving the game/community because of their bad experiences with DMs who don't understand that it's not okay to have NPCs sexually assault a player's character just because they're a woman.

Now that we're laying out these kinds of guidelines, maybe the people who legitimately don't understand why that's bad will stop and listen to what others have to say, and the ones who don't will be showing that they're deliberately ignoring how they make other people feel.

Some nerds need and appreciate formalization of what you’re describing as a social norm being made explicit and spelled out for them. Besides, most DMs I’ve played with already do this kind of “ok what kinda stuff is everyone thinking about for this campaign?” conversation already, so these guidelines are just a reminder for players or DMs to include this stuff in that conversation too.

>But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.

Personally I find it useful when I first meet someone because I can mark them as someone to avoid. Life is far too short to voluntarily walk on eggshells all the with emotionally crippled people who are constantly looking for things to be offended about. This goes double for when it comes to playing long sessions of D&D or any other sort of free-form game.

Not only did new management make these ridiculous changes to the core structure of the game, they recently threw Gary Gygax (who had more creativity and talent in his pinkie finger than any of them) and other founders under the bus. Fortunately nobody is prevented from getting old editions of D&D and playing a worthwhile game, or simply moving to GURPS or Runequest.

>But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.

Personally I find it useful when I first meet someone like this because I can mark them as someone to avoid. Life is far too short to voluntarily walk on eggshells all the with emotionally crippled people who are constantly looking for things to be offended about. This goes double for when it comes to playing long sessions of D&D or any other sort of free-form game.

I think you're trying to force a narrative that doesn't really fit. This change isn't in response to "everything is woke now", it's in response to people playing with strangers more.

> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?

First, it's not a "boardgame." It's a Role Playing Game. It's much more unbounded than a board game and you are actually playing. Not just rolling dice but acting and imagining and adding to the experience. You play your character and you decide how that character acts.

> do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?

You could have one. Generally cover strong NOs and decide on hot-topics that often make people uncomfortable:

racism/slavery, romance/sex, phobias, etc.

Then setup a system to halt if anything new comes up.

People throw around "trigger" and "safe-space" like they're above feeling anything but sometimes it's just being considerate. It's not just about language but situations.

We play D&D to have fun. For some, that means "leaving politics out of it" but for others, those "politics" impact our actual daily lives. To pretend they don't exist or to have to interact with them in a game can be just as un-fun.

> And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?

Now you're being facetious. You communicate like people. That's it.

If someone was recently mugged in real-life, you probably wouldn't have their character get attacked by a rogue. If someone had arachnophobia, you probably wouldn't drop down the RPG-cliche giant spider. If someone has to deal with real-life racism, you could probably understand why "knife-ears" wouldn't feel fun. OR maybe they're all okay. It's all about opt: opt-in and opt-out.

> oupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.

I think that's a YOU-issue. My friend group is a complex group of people, and yet we find a way to have fun every week with D&D while also respecting all members of the game.

TTRPGs are only superficially similar to board games, especially the direction that D&D has evolved (it grew out of fairly mechanics heavy wargames but has slowly moved to have a much higher emphasis on the roleplay). That makes it a) much more free-form than a board game, and b) makes the players much more emotionally invested in the story that's being told. In addition the setting is much more likely to involve more detailed focus on dark topics, death especially (not just in a 'that unit's dead' way, but 'my brother just died' way). It's far more likely that someone's going to stop enjoying themselves because of the topic in such a game than in a board game.

(Also, it's far more common that you will be doing this with a group of people you've only just met, but in general I think such games should lean more towards the lighter side)

So don't play with those ones?

This is why these types of initiatives do far more harm than good. They hide problems rather than address them.

> This is why these types of initiatives do far more harm than good. They hide problems rather than address them.

How do these initiatives hide these problems?

But this "initiative" suggests addressing the problems through dialogue.

D&D is supposed to be a collaborative effort, "My way or the highway" isn't how a table should be run.

Those people typically don't tell you ahead of time. I wouldn't do this with my close friend group either, we know each other. I think we can all agree on "hey this is touchy for me could we please not" and it works as a filter for people who get upset about it.

Presumably you've had different experiences, but from my personal D&D experience I've had zero people who abused the "distress signaling" and seen multiple cases where people were a bit uncomfortable and didn't really say anything other than snarky jokes (e.g. a player's backstory culminates in them graphically torturing an NPC to death while everybody else at the table is weirded out).

"Don't play with them" strikes me as impractical advice compared to communicating. If you're 6 months into a campaign as opposed to establishing a protocol to be able to say "hey this is kinda much for me, could we take the gruesome details of this offline?"

Communicating a tone for the setting early would have also helped.

Agree, only issue is sometimes it's difficult to leave if the game runner or the players spring this type of sh** behavior on you. Especially if you're not expecting it, and then players / runner do almost nothing other than try to in some way entrap you in a miserable experience. Like noted below in a different comment, happens when you're trying to run a game also. Players do the same, trying to act out their disgusting fetishes, while forcing you to run the experience. Many horrible experiences over the years from the show runner side of the table.

May be your only social group. Usually people who are this far down in the nerd / geek hierarchy don't have that many friends anyways. It usually implies you already failed most of the ideas human society prioritizes anyways. Often means the only people to hang out with are other nerds and rejects. NY Times (frankly really mean) chart on the subject from 2008 [1]. Course, what do you expect from the company that wrote this article being discussed?

This (somewhat) less mean (although still about the same) chart [2] has approximately the same view on the situation. You're already down with people who watch children's shows and go to Ren Faires. Probably the type that sit around on New Years Day arguing about Dungeons and Dragons annoying PC rule changes rather than having friends to party with.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/09/opinion/09opa...

[2] https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...

> > which could include sexual assault or drug use

Wouldn't any potion, including potions of healing, be considered "drug use"? Howabout excessive drinking by dwarves at a tavern in the canonical DM party formation ritual?

In the western world, a potion of healing is more akin to taking antibiotics, and imbibing alcohol has been agreed to be just a Regular Thing People Do, not a drug thing.

And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.

If you need to go through a HR exercise at the beginning of a game perhaps you need to find a different group of people to play with.

Why do you frame it as an "HR exercise" when it's just the people who are about to play a game talking about what they expect out of it?

And how would I find a group of people whose playstyle is compatible with what I'm looking for without actually talking to them?

> Why do you frame it as an "HR exercise" when it's just the people who are about to play a game talking about what they expect out of it?

Because they're so incapable of considering other people's feelings that they think the only time anyone ever does so is because someone cried to HR about something and HR is making you sit through a meeting to cover the company's ass legally, and not because anyone actually cares about how they make other people feel.

So what if your dad died last month, and the DM decides it'll be a cool twist for his BBEG to abduct your character's dad gouge his eyes out and try to kill him?

It's good to be able to explain these things, and IMO a lot of D&D players aren't comfortable being the first one to say that stuff without an "HR" exercise to give them permission.

Well, if my dad had died, I would understand the DM has no clue, until I say something.

If I say something and that scene plays out, things are understandably ugly.

If I don't and find myself uncomfortable, that is on me to manage, nobody else at the table.

How are these things so damn hard for people to understand?

All that was true when I played years ago. People would intro the game, have chat about stuff and then get into it. I recall having tough conversations, and I recall just being a good human to the other humans as a given.

I don't get the discussion today.

I'm not sure which side you're arguing for, but I do agree with what I think I'm reading - that you should be able to tell the table what you are and aren't comfortable with. And the new rules encourage that.

You are reading it correctly. The before game meet n greet was where everyone caught up with everyone else.

Maybe being pre cell phone has something to do with it all.

Where and when I came from, the idea of having to do a "might trigger" rundown did not need to happen because of the dynamics I put into my prior comment.

How about this mess:

Say one chooses to not talk about a dead father confident the game will play out fine. Basically omit the father in the pre-game rundown of potential triggers.

Then the scene happens, and major trigger!

Now what?

Seems to me one falls back on the very basic rules above and acts accordingly.

Nobody else would be blamed. How could they?

The result is the talk didn't solve anything, which us my point and lack of understanding.

Another POV:

DM runs a scene that is a major trigger for someone. Bummer.

Pause game, help that person, right? Take a bit and figure it out? Do they want to end play? Is there something any of us can do? Etc...

Blame and shame aren't the answers. Being a good human is the answer.

Seems like someone is trying to write be a good human rules. Ah well. They tried I guess.

The point, I think, is that a lot of people pathologize "this is just a me problem" to the point that they don't want to bring things up at all, particularly if it's not someone they're very familiar with, because while some people react reasonably to, for example, "please do not include a graphic description of bugs crawling around, I had a really bad experience once and it still bothers me to think about", some people will also very deliberately introduce things for that reason.

Or perhaps you say "I don't like it if X" when you really meant "I am going to have a full blown trauma flashback if you surprise me with X", and they think that you meant what you said, and it's something they would do with all the maliciousness of hanging a "boo!" sign on your front door one day.

The goal is, I think, to recognize that a lot of people are bad at being the first one to bring things up, as well as a lot of people being bad at "reading the room", and set up an explicit normal structure to reduce the friction of doing so.

(Whether they succeeded or not is a different question, but I think that was the goal - to try and make it feel more normal and part of the structure and expectations, and thus have lower friction to bring things up a priori and in the moment, rather than people feeling like "I'm the problem" if there's no explicit moment for it and they have to ask.)

Yes, you can't make people be good people, but you can try to provide tools to make it feel more like the normal part of setting up and running your game to leave explicit room for them to say something. More or less the difference between saying "you can call us after filling out the paperwork and have us add manual edits to what you filled out" and "you can just include a form 412 and check the boxes for which things apply, and fill out an other box at the bottom if it's not covered".

Ah ok.

In the case of someone being malicious, many just would no longer choose to play in their campaigns. Incentives to NOT fuck with people seemed plenty high enough.

Apparently that is no longer the case.

It was never the case. In my experience, we can partition people into three groups: (a) "Why would anyone do that?"; (b) "What's wrong with doing that?"; (c) "People obviously do that." People from groups a and b tend to consider members of group c "sensitive", because members of group a don't recognise members of group b (considering them members of group a, if they even think about it) so believe group c are overreacting to imagined slights, and members of group b don't care because they don't think group c's objections should be sustained. Members of group c can usually distinguish between members of groups a and b, but it's such an uphill battle to convert members of group a into members of group c that it's rarely worth doing. (Members of group c often find it hard to empathise with members of group a, because "how can anyone be that obtuse?" – and members of group a often consider it the responsibility of group c members to do all the work of teaching them, because "you're the one with the extraordinary claim: that requires you to provide extraordinary evidence".)

I try to be a member of group (d): "I suspect that might be a problem, so why don't we talk about that?". This behaviour is very annoying, but it's clearly better than groups a, b or c. (In practice, though, I'm usually a member of group a, occasionally a member of c, and probably group b about loads of stuff I've never thought about.)

Part of the problem is a "boiling the frog" situation - if you're invested in the campaign, or in the social circle, just burning the bridge in the moment is a very high cost.

I'm not the type of person who wouldn't say something in the moment, but I've had a lot of friends who were in longstanding campaigns well past the point of the people involved dreading going to sessions because some interactions had turned the group dynamic into a shitshow, and some conjunction of the social ramifications of being the one to blow it up and sunk cost fallacy meant that they kept going even as it poisoned their friendships.

Ugly times there!

Neither am I. Perhaps the game value is different these days.

No game is worth my friendships. Would have to speak up, then follow it through and adhere to the golden rules to treat people right while it all gets sorted out.

Anyone not on board with sniffing something that toxic out is just going to have to go their way, best of luck, etc...

Maybe these things help people. Hope so though I do feel it all is a sort of dodge around people both being more direct in their interactions, which absolutely do include benefit of the doubt being given where necessary. And having just a bit thicker skin, that being derived from "we are as offended as we think we are" basically mandating everyone managing how they respond to potential offenses.

There just are a whole bunch of ways to do that which leave others the outs needed to bring the conversation to a reasonable place and more of us need to use them more of the time.

Put another way, the people burning an hour trying to figure out who is the biggest asshole deserve to have that conversation.

Maybe that just isn't so important?

Thanks for an interesting exchange everyone. I will read final responses on my way out.

Let's look at another media: movies. Do you ever look at reviews or the advisory notices to see if a movie will be appropriate for someone you're watching it with? This is the exact same thing but since the story hasn't been written yet, you need to agree with all the story tellers (DM and players) what your story rating will be.

Do you skip this step when it's your closest pals who can handle a gory mature story? sure!

Is it good to have a system for others to use or in public settings? Definitely.

Hypothetical situation: someone had an abusive alcoholic father, and discussion of drinking and alcohol brings up a lot of unwanted feelings, including anxiety, unpleasant memories resurfacing, etc.

You're suggesting that the person in that scenario should either suffer those feelings in silence or should just keep trying new groups until they find one that just coincidentally doesn't bring up those topics?

Or someone who was sexually assaulted should keep that to themselves, and if discussion of the topic comes up in the game and makes them uncomfortable they should just leave and go find a new group without telling anyone why?

Are you suggesting that you could just say "hey, these are things that bother me so I'd rather not be part of the game if these topics are going to come up", and either the DM can exclude those topics, or they can refuse and the player can go somewhere else? Because that's exactly what is being discussed.

Lay out your ground rules. If there's no way to reconcile, go elsewhere, but it saves people getting blindsided halfway through the game and then having to deal with it while surrounded by other people and potentially feeling very vulnerable.

Why would the DM put something in their game that actually traumatizes people?

While I'd generally expect this to be naturally rare in dnd, this isn't the case in many other games.

Monsterhearts deals with unhealthy sexual relationships at its core. Night Witches deals with sexism at its core. Bluebeard's Bride deals with straight up sexual violence at its core. These topics are heavy and its worth having some systems in place to help people navigate them.

This is especially true with con culture, where people are likely to play ttrpgs with total strangers.

Some people just don't understand social norms and, you know, other people's feelings, and use these sorts of games as their own personal power fantasy.

There have been a kind of gross number of threads I've seen where women join a group, make their character, and then spend the entire first session having their character abused, belittled, sexually assaulted, impregnated, etc.

Worth noting that not all D&D groups are among close friends; sometimes you get invited to a group because you're looking for people to play with and your friend group (if you have one) doesn't play. No different than joining a frisbee golf team, except with a much greater chance of a bottom-tier caliber of people.

It's not hard to do inadvertently, especially if you are going for a game that deals with heavy topics. Something that feels to be about the same level of seriousness to the DM may hit too close to home for a player (and one reason for X-card like systems on top of discussing stuff before the game, is that the player themselves may not realise themselves until they're in the moment)

Because they're manipulative, mean humans.

Players do the same. Try to run a somewhat normal game, and your players will purposely try to act in some of the most reprehensible ways imaginable just to try to force you to run their disgusting fantasies.

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