The SA In Games Thread (Good Luck)
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And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
This has to be one of the most buckwild paragraphs I’ve ever read on any RP forum. I’m actually more weirded out by this than the opinions on SA stuff which is very much not my kink.
Why do you want people’s experience of a hobby to be bad?
Seek help.
A story can only really work when characters are allowed to react to things in believable ways.
I don’t want the player’s experience to be bad. I want characters to sometimes have bad experiences because conflict and adversity are what make stories interesting.
Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.
I play antagonists all the time. The scenario where everyone is having fun and enjoying the story, even as their characters are screaming, is absolutely the ideal. That’s my dopamine hit, knowing how much fun everyone is having and that I could facilitate that. What enjoyment do you derive out of knowing your fellow players aren’t having fun?
I think we’re just looking for different things from RP. I don’t want wish fulfillment where everyone gets the scenes and outcomes they were hoping for. I want uncertainty, conflict and consequences. That lack of control is part of what makes the story feel real to me. This is probably not something I’m going to change anyone’s mind on. I think we’re starting from fundamentally different ideas of what RP should be.
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The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.
Point not exactly made. It just turns it into a collaborative story effort.
I have RPed several things things that I have no fantasies for or inclination toward. OOC consent doesn’t usually mean “wants that” it just means “is willing to experience reading / writing about that”.
The obvious question is why would you WANT to RP an SA scene, or inflict an IC SA scenario, on another player who would not opt in?
You say an OOC opt-in is ‘negotiating a rape fantasy’. Ok… So what do we call deliberately imposing SA on a player who didn’t agree to it?
And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
It starts functioning as a … game? Entertainment. Holy shit. How awful! Literally putting the ‘G’ in RPG.
That also doesn’t mean someone has to sit there and explicitly RP an assault they don’t want to write. Fade to black exists.
But they can’t retcon it or act like it never happened moving forward, I’m guessing? How exactly are you going to police that?
Player A decides their character SA Player B’s character. Player B doesn’t consent OOC and fades the scene. Afterward, Player B decides to simply declines to acknowledge it moving forward. Now what?
Is staff going to come in and force the SA as canonical and compel Player B to incorporate it into their RP or get a ban?
I completely understand the argument for banning SA outright. I think that is a coherent policy. I also understand allowing it as part of a setting where players know what they are signing up for.
I just think “SA is allowed but only when everyone involved wants SA RP” produces something very different from either of those things.
Yeah. It produces consensual collaborative story telling about non-consensual fictional events. Which is how we handle a large amount of RP already.
I think we’re just looking for different things from RP. I don’t want wish fulfillment where everyone gets the scenes and outcomes they were hoping for. I want uncertainty, conflict and consequences. That lack of control is part of what makes the story feel real to me. This is probably not something I’m going to change anyone’s mind on. I think we’re starting from fundamentally different ideas of what RP should be.
Consenting to RP about subjects and scenarios doesn’t mean you get the scenes and outcomes you hope for. It just means you get players who want to play that aspect of the game. The rest will either just not play the game, or will FTB and then ignore it ever happened and won’t talk about it on screen, or will subsequently quit the game and disappear randomly from the grid in a most “unreal” fashion.
“Lack of control making the story feel real” doesn’t exist in what you are arguing for. People who don’t want to RP that scenario are just going to FTB. In which case, there is no story produced for you to “feel real” at all.
Just because you didn’t acquire OOC consent, doesn’t mean you don’t need OOC consent. You can’t ever force the person on the other end of the line to type a single pose or even a “fuck you”. The more I think about it, the more it seems this conversation is pointless. You can’t get the content you want without consent whether that’s clearly stated or implied by the fact that it’s being RPed at all.
So if the fact is that it’s only the people who do consent OOC that will stick around to RP it in any form, why not just save a ton of headaches by identifying them up front?
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This is probably where I’m going to bow out because, yeah, you’re right about the fundamental disagreement.
What I’m going for isn’t really collaborative storytelling in the sense you’re describing. I don’t want every major outcome negotiated between the players involved. I want a game where the world, the mechanics and other characters can impose outcomes on you that you didn’t choose.
That is not going to be for everyone. I completely accept that.
I think collaborative RP where everyone is making sure everyone else gets the kind of story they want can be lovely. It just isn’t the experience I’m trying to build.
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I want a game where the world, the mechanics and other characters can impose outcomes on you that you didn’t choose.
Okay but you are avoiding the question of how you as a game runner think you are going to actualize this ideal on your game?
Given that any RP at all can only be accomplished by the OOC consent of the players involved (the act of RPing alone indicates the fact of consent): how would you police the inevitable scenario of someone who didn’t want SA as part of their character’s history simply choosing the FTB option and thereafter just refusing to acknowledge that anything happened - effectively retconning it for themselves and others?
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the act of RPing alone indicates the fact of consent
I’d only majorly quibble on this statement. I don’t have anecdotes to share, but I can absolutely see a situation in which one feels compelled to ‘follow through’ on RP they don’t want to do in order to satisfy another person. Much the same as in any “was it really SA…?” situation.
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The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.
I feel disgusted for even having to ask this, but let’s follow this to the conclusion you seem to be hinting at: Do you want players of your game to feel like they’re being r*ped?
If not, please describe the what you’re hoping players experience when someone r*pes their character.
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This is probably where I’m going to bow out because, yeah, you’re right about the fundamental disagreement.
What I’m going for isn’t really collaborative storytelling in the sense you’re describing. I don’t want every major outcome negotiated between the players involved. I want a game where the world, the mechanics and other characters can impose outcomes on you that you didn’t choose.
That is not going to be for everyone. I completely accept that.
I think collaborative RP where everyone is making sure everyone else gets the kind of story they want can be lovely. It just isn’t the experience I’m trying to build.
What you want is PvP. You can just say that.
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I don’t expect shy to come back and engage with the thread. I feel like they’ve stated their position and dipped.
But what I’m not clear on is if people will actually know what they are potentially signing up for when they join the game.
Not knowing is wild to me. I don’t think you can responsibly engage with SA, *isms, etc. as content in RP without people fully knowing what they are signing up for and consenting to engage in it. That is so foundational to how I engage with games. Even in PVP games. Even in Limited Consent games. Even in Non Consent games. You know what you are signing up for.
I don’t think you can responsibly RP about these things without that.
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I don’t expect shy to come back and engage with the thread. I feel like they’ve stated their position and dipped.
But what I’m not clear on is if people will actually know what they are potentially signing up for when they join the game.
Not knowing is wild to me. I don’t think you can responsibly engage with SA, *isms, etc. as content in RP without people fully knowing what they are signing up for and consenting to engage in it. That is so foundational to how I engage with games. Even in PVP games. Even in Limited Consent games. Even in Non Consent games. You know what you are signing up for.
I don’t think you can responsibly RP about these things without that.
I’m pretty sure you get some kind of warning about how bad things might happen to your character when you create a character, but I don’t recall how explicitly it’s stated.
My gut instinct (mostly because Shy posted this to an Armageddon forum, and just refused to answer the question someone posed about if there’s S.A. in the game) is that it’s probably not explicitly written out that your PC might get assaulted like that, and that you have to make the connection based on a general “this is a non-consent game” policy and the coded capability to do the thing.
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Calling it wish fulfilment is wild. I had my character attacked at sea, drowned, swallowed by a whale, and kept trapped in an underwater dimension for a week at one point, none of which I wish to experience IRL, nor did I require control over the story, or need to know what was going to happen in order to enjoy it.
But I went along with it because a friend of mine was running the story, I happen to trust them, and was feeling fatigued enough with the main grid at the time to say “hey fyi if you wanna see this through don’t feel bad about keeping me off-grid for a bit, I could use a break anyway”.
On a separate occasion, a friend of mine actually killed my character. It turned out neither of us actually intended the outcome, because they’d emoted attacking, I’d mistakenly interpreted their intention as killing the character (which would’ve been a rational consequence for the action I’d taken), so I emoted dying, they OOCly went “wtf I didn’t mean it like that”, I responded “lol oops”, they said, “hang on I can contrive a way to resurrect you” and I said “nah dw I’m good, this is a good ending for the character”.
The wish being fulfilled here is for a good story that everyone involved enjoys. Everyone should wish for that, it’s the point of storytelling! It’s actually super not necessary, even in a story where the outcome isn’t predetermined, and conflict between characters is permitted without prior consent, to have any party involved be OOCly miserable.
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@Shygaming said:
Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually secretly into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.
buddy i don’t know how to tell you that the CHARACTERS are not the same thing as the PLAYERS. the CHARACTERS are not secretly into it. the CHARACTERS are experiencing a horrific nonconsensual trauma.
if you think that a player cannot happily RP a thing that their character is horrified or traumatized by — sorry, but that’s a skill issue.
and, again, you are still going to be attracting players who are into the CNC aspect! you have built tools for it. they will still have their kinky fun. CNC refers to the PLAYERS engaging consensually with the topic, not the characters. it’s non-diegetic kink.
it’s just that this overall perspective actually prioritizes players who are into inflicting stuff specifically on those who don’t want it. they want the other PLAYER to feel violated, not the characters.
so it’s just like — you are disdaining the players who might enjoy this together but in a way i guess you find icky?? But you are enabling the players whose goal is actually OOC harm.
you should much prefer having the CNC kink players to the latter.
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