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@junipersky This sentence caused my IT-addled brain to glitch when I got to the word Ansible.
I was very confused as to what school was teaching children how to administrate servers through playbooks and felt sad that you had to deal with 5 year old plus computers for that class.
The kid can’t be OOCly annoying
Don’t tell me the kid is cute, like don’t say "does x cutely’ or whatever. I dunno why that’s specifically so irritating to me. Show don’t tell, I guess?
The kid has to actually act like a kid. There was this scene once that was otherwise a pretty well done scene, but it had a bunch of little kids in a choir that were singing angelically and playing instruments (or maybe just drums, I don’t remember), and I was thinking “those are not children, those are some sort of shapeshifting imposters” because there is no way you’re sticking a bunch of little kids up on a stage with instruments without a drum stick going up someone’s nose. If they’re singing, some of them are going to be shouting, others are going to be singing so quietly no one could hear them, some are going to be ducking their heads behind the ones waving enthusiastically or jumping up and down. If you haven’t taken the drums away from them yet two are going to start sword fighting.
It can be a pretty fine line.
When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
90% of the time, yeah, that’s it exactly.
If your setting includes the option for living PCs to become undead… maybe not?
When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
I’m built different.
I think it is blind to ignore the ways in which these experiences can cause real harm to players, both through other players and their own choosing. A couple examples:
- A player writes a fantasy in which his adult character engages in incest with an underage character. This is repeatedly training his mind to associate sexual desire and arousal with the fantasy of an underage family member. It’s not his fault if these fantasies already lay dormant, but it is his fault and his choice to reinforce and further explore them. I cannot be convinced that this is unlikely to cause future harm to his ability to maintain an appropriate view and relationship with his own underage family members.
- A game has a skewed gender ratio, more female than male. Because of this, male characters are in high demand by partner-seeking heterosexual female characters. This gives the players of male characters an advantage to pit female characters against each other in competition. It encourages the players of female characters to seek to prove themselves sexually above other female characters, to settle for unequal nonmonogamous arrangements, to ignore mistreatment by the players of male characters, to alter their characters and storytelling for male approval, and to blur IC/OOC boundaries in order to retain their attention. I cannot be convinced that a male-led harem on this game can truly be assumed to be fully consensual, on the part of potentially lonely players using this game as a source of self-esteem and validation, or that it fosters healthy dynamics. I don’t think it’s good for men to ride this kind of ego trip, and I don’t think it’s good for women to vicariously experience this erosion of self through a sexual fantasy that isn’t even really her own.
I’m going to do the really, really stupid thing and put myself in a position of defending stuff I find incredibly repugnant, because while I agree with a lot of what you say, some of the stuff I disagree with and why I think can lead to a lot more harm.
Okay so the first example I find has a few problems. First, from what I’ve read, it just isn’t true about immersion in something necessarily causes someone to adopt that sexuality. Like, we are talking about really gross things illegal for very good reasons, but I don’t see how this is any different than conservatives arguing about people being ‘turned gay’ or becoming trans or any other kind of sexual identity that’s been demonized, and people are marginalized to… well, not infect people. We’re talking about something really bad, but the argument makes me acutely uneasy because it basically embraces a lot of the most harmful ‘nurture, not nature’ beliefs imo. Yeah I mean nature and nurture are really complex, and those things are really bad and we want to prevent people being victimized, but to me this really comes across as ‘gross thing is super gross and I want to find a real harm irl as a reason why it must be banned’ and I think that’s not true, and endorses things most of us would find really bad.
The second example has really huge problems and let me talk about why. Putting people in positions to try to protect consenting adults from themselves leads to Not Great Places really, really fast. Like I do not think the way we solve the Critical Top Shortage is by implying those tops are abusers, or that bottoms are bad because they enable them. I know that wasn’t what you were getting at, and yeah absolutely if someone in a position of authority on a game is actively trying to limit other people that could try to break up their harem, that’s really fucking bad. But I one thousand percent think it will be MUCH more common for ‘protecting’ people to come from a place of resentment and intense dislike of anyone involved, and use that as an excuse to attack them. Because this is something we see in this hobby like, daily. Everywhere. Constantly. Bitches eating crackers. It is vastly, vastly more common for people to decide that one person they dislike is evil because they got locked out of RP, and go after them with righteous fury to protect every lamb that has been duped by them.
And that’s why they gotta spam every newbie warning them off, and try to isolate them from RP. For their own good, ofc.
Anyways, I have no interest in allowing deeply traumatic themes like that or supporting them by code, and sure they gross me out, but I am just not comfortable like ascribing morality to it anymore than thinking everyone that PKs someone is a closeted serial killer irl.
Now if that same player does a reeeeeeeeally graphic murder and talks constantly in ooc about how much they are into it and really wish they could do it and it is what they live for then uh, yeah, maybe a red flag there. But I do not think that is exactly the norm.
There’s something to be said about the fact that we are more comfy with killing someone.
When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
I think that child NPCs are like salt in food. The right amount of it makes everything richer and deeper, too little of it can be bland, and too much of it is disgusting–and of course, everyone has a different definition of “the right amount,” “too little,” and “too much.”
I’ve had great scenes with kid NPCs (the one with @Faraday’s character’s daughter definitely counts), and I’ve had scenes where it was definitely wish fulfilment with the perfect kid who we were all supposed to coo over.
I think that in most games with physical stakes (whether it’s a game set in wartime, court intrigue, post-apocalyptic, whatever, not just slice-of-life play), they need to be used very rarely, because there are definitely folks (myself included) who don’t want to see kids seriously hurt in their RP. But they can make great “why we fight” scenes if played sparingly and well.
I like having them as off-screen motivation until there’s the time when you get a break from the constant action and a cameo by a kid NPC can be used as a reminder to all of these hardened badasses that a) not everyone is like them, and b) the people behind the lines are (hopefully) worth fighting for.
@hellfrog No!!! I could watch the Cher show outfit reveals for hours.
y’all, Bob Mackie died yesterday 
what an icon
My opinion on this is pretty simple: I don’t see a need for sex in my RP (I much prefer stories about solving mysteries, fighting bad guys, and disassembling corrupt social structures), so I definitely don’t see a need for SA in any of it.
