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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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...