Consent

This post is going to include references to sexual assault.

Consent in gaming. I've a fair number of discussions about it recently, a lot of which have been people, mostly men, discussing hypothetical situations which largely seem to predict the doom of tabletop gaming through censorship and the death of creativity.

There will be no hypotheticals here.

One question I've seen more than one person bring up is why rape is not OK in a game but murder and theft are. Which I feel is being a bit disingenuous, given that 'kill monsters and steal their stuff' is literally the whole point of original D&D. But let's go with it for a moment. While I've never been murdered, I have been the victim of both theft and sexual assault, so I feel I have some kind of perspective on this.

Being burgled was horrible. It wasn't so much what was stolen (I have insurance) as the knowledge that a stranger had been in my house, touching my stuff.

Being assaulted was horrible. It was the fact that someone that I knew and thought I could trust had ignored every 'no', verbal or non-verbal and had been in my space, touching...yeah.

Not comparable. Not to me.

For a while, coming into contact with media that brought back memories of that and similar incidents was extremely distressing. I had to temporarily stop reading a book by one of my favourite authors because the content was upsetting me too much.

I don't want to do that to anyone I'm at the gaming table with. Games are supposed to be fun! Which isn't to say they have to be fun for the characters, if you're playing a horror game where terrible things are going to happen to them, but the players and GM should be having a good time.

Content warnings are a great idea. Whenever someone's run Kult Divinity at Concrete Cow it's come with an age rating and a mention of specific things that might be a problem for people. I'm working on a convention game scenario that includes children being endangered or harmed, so that will be mentioned in the blurb. I'm not going to suddenly spring that kind of thing on people who might be upset by it. I want a group of players who are going to enjoy my game.

I've seen arguments that content warnings spoil the plot in advance, but if your plot hinges on shocking your players with potentially distressing content, maybe you shouldn't be running that plot at a convention with a bunch of strangers? Save it for home games where you already know everyone and what their limits are.

Ultimately the game is not more important than the people playing it. This shouldn't even be a debate.

(And if anyone's concerned about me given what I said above, don't worry. I'm fine. I can talk about it because it's so far from where I am now, it has no power to hurt me.)