Seriously though, I gloss over sex (She takes you upstairs, you have some fun, and pay your money. You’re busy for the night. What’s everyone else doing?), torture, rape, and bodily functions. I describe poverty in a cursory manner using simple examples without delving into the horrific misery of it.

It’s a game. Should be fun. Lighthearted. We’re not wearing mascara and fangs here.

I actually had an experience where I thought a taboo was inappropriate. I’m a man playing a female character, and in one adventure our whole party was captured. We were taken to a torture chamber and tortured by demons. Then the demons possessed our minds and threw us in the dungeon. Throughout the whole affair, my character was the most rebellious, and ended up getting some special treatment: she was poisoned (still haven’t cured it! -4 str and con!) and had one of her eyes torn out. Pretty brutal, yes.

We were under the care of various humanoid guards (bugbears and the likes). Before we were released to go perform the duties of our demonic captors, my character mouthed off again at the guards. They beat the living daylights out of her.

But they didn’t rape her.

Now, why would I want this to happen? I certainly didn’t like bad things happening to my character. It was quite abhorrent to me. But looking back on that scene, and thinking of how it would have played out with real PoW’s, I thought “They would have raped her.” Am I being a stickler for realism? Yes, but more than that, I think I’m being a feminist. When we make a game about war, we try to depict that war is horrible. When we make a game about the slave trade, we try to depict that the slave trade is brutal and dehumanises its victims. And when a woman character is captured and beaten, surely we should acknowledge the suffering that women undergo in those circumstances.

Now, I can understand the DM holding back on this note. Perhaps it didn’t occur to him, perhaps he did it for some of the reasons listed above. But we had just been tortured, in a pretty extended and gruesome scene. I wouldn’t have needed such blow-by-blow for a rape scene, but to acknowledge that it would have happened? Sure.

My biggest worry about this would be whether I could play a rape victim without the kind of juvenile behaviour displayed above. But we’re now all playing victims of torture and demonic possession, without having experienced those either. One of the things I like about roleplaying is the challenge of getting into another’s mindset, and I can assure you all that I would have taken that quite seriously, although perhaps not seriously enough. Could a rape victim go on and have an adventure 24 hours later? Maybe not, but then could a torture victim? We assume they can. The world can be ugly, and gaming can be a way of talking about that.

I’ve had players commit genocide in one of my campaigns, but again context is all. This player wiped out a medieval town with weather magic in an Ars Magica game because he didn’t want to stand up to the powerful archmage that asked him to. He later on got to see first hand the misery he had caused in the city and this made him eager to atone for his crimes. He turned against the archmage and eventually saved the day.

I don’t like the idea of PG-13 games in general, when my paladin lays waste to a bandit camp he should be aware that he is slaughtering sentient beings who may have complex reasons for falling into a life of banditry. He might still kill them but he should be aware its not always a case of black and white.

I’m lucky enough to have reasonably mature players (usually who can handle these kinds of issues. To my mind they make games more believable, they provoke emotion which can be a great aid to roleplaying and they make the players think about their actions.

Quick example. In one DnD game i had the players go under cover as slaves in a fire dwarf (azeri) camp. They needed to scout the fortress the dwarves were building and gather some intelligence about the dwarves plans. They ended up working under a slave driver dwarf who has become their most hated NPC ever. This dwarf distinguished himself by wielding a severed and sewn up giants penis as a club/cosh (i freely admit to stealing this idea from a Neal Stephenson book). During the course of pretending to be slaves, these characters (who were all high level) all got a few whacks from the giant penis to encourage them to work harder. They did not like this, not one bit. Once the mission was complete they all swore revenge on the dwarf. Sadly in the war that followed they didn’t find the dwarf and he escaped retribution. To this day my players talk about that dwarf. Their characters hated him, but my players loved to hate him. Not at all PG 13 but it made for a memorable character.

That said, a player whos character indulged in wanton cruelty, rapine, murder, etc would definately get a few funny looks if they wanted to go into it in detail.

I’ve played evil characters before, in fact in DnD i usually play evil guys. Ranging from arsehole to evil genius. My evil genius has happily tortured people but always in a “hand wavy” fashion. e.g.

Me : “I go torture the captured paladin, just for kicks”
GM: “Ok, you do that for a few hours”
Me: “Then i get ready for the govenrors ball”
GM: “Ok, going for the hooded, sinister look again?”
Me: “Yeah”

Actually exploring what my character was doing during those few hours of torture is something that interests neither I nor the GM, hence we skip it. Just like one does for most travel in game.

1. The behavior is consistent with the PC’s alignment.

2. The PC understands the range of potential consequences for such behavior.

3. The behavior doesn’t require other PCs to sacrifice play time.

4. The behavior is described in no greater detail than any of the PC’s other behaviors.

If a moderator would like to fix the doubling that would be fine. I’ll take my lumps on the spelling.

Later.

Just came across this site recently and want to start by saying I am really enjoying it. Thanks!

After reading this article I developed a juvenile need to register and relate a role-playing story of my youth.

It was just myself and two friends in a small, side, pick-up campaign in which I was a female anti-paladin (80′s Dragon Magazine version), my one friend an evil cleric of some sort and the other DMed. We were having a good time and both into our characters which inevitably meant that our characters were getting upset with each other as we went from room to room in an old abandon keep. Needling and picking on each other and having a blast doin’ it. “When this is over I’m gonna separate your head from you body!” “Oh yeah? Well, not before I burn your insignificant little temple and make your god beg for mercy!” That kind of stuff. We were 16.

I’m being very cautous as we loot the place, careful to not be overly disruptive of clothing items that we were coming across as I was just sure one of them was gonna be covered in some mold or fungus that would mess me up. Unfortunately, as room after room became territory was taken from the goblins and such that we were finding there and I was cautiously inspecting all the loot and booty I found my character becoming more and more desirous of ridding herself of her companion and began to secretly look for opportunities to fullfil my desires.

Then it happened, we had just cleared a room of monsters had gotten into an arguement about some matter that was unimportant. What was important, however, is that I had decided at that moment my character could stand no more and resolved to get the loot from the room and then set about attacking my partner as he was somewhat weakened after the fight, whereas I was in pretty good shape. Truely evil. Wonderful.

But, I was an idiot and in a perfect storm of distraction due to our arguement, excitement that I was about to get into some player on player combat, frustration with my companion’s not seeing the obvious truth of my character’s superior command of the situation , and youthful indesretion I say, “FIne! The hell with it! I walk over to the closet and take out the cloak and shake the dust off it!”

I mean, I don’t think I got from the “i” to the “t” in “it” before I went through the whole “I may have made a mistake here.” to “Awww CRAP! What was I thinking!” inner dialog thing.

Sure enough the DM smiled and said, “Roll save.” Fail. Instant death.

I deserved it and it was a great death for that character. But death isn’t always the end and before I could even recover from my stunned realization that I had just put my head in the noose and jumped off the deck, my battered, still living, and evil partner said, “I get her while she’s still warm.”
Hi all,

Just came across this site recently and want to start by saying I am really enjoying it. Thanks!

After reading this article I developed a juvenile need to register and relate a role-playing story of my youth.

It was just myself and two friends in a small, side, pick-up campaign in which I was a female anti-paladin (80′s Dragon Magazine version), my one friend an evil cleric of some sort and the other DMed. We were having a good time and both into our characters which inevitably meant that our characters were getting upset with each other as we went from room to room in an old abandon keep. Needling and picking on each other and having a blast doin’ it. “When this is over I’m gonna separate your head from you body!” “Oh yeah? Well, not before I burn your insignificant little temple and make your god beg for mercy!” That kind of stuff. We were 16.

I’m being very cautous as we loot the place, careful to not be overly disruptive of clothing items that we were coming across as I was just sure one of them was gonna be covered in some mold or fungus that would mess me up. Unfortunately, as room after room became territory was taken from the goblins and such that we were finding there and I was cautiously inspecting all the loot and booty I found my character becoming more and more desirous of ridding herself of her companion and began to secretly look for opportunities to fullfil my desires.

Then it happened, we had just cleared a room of monsters had gotten into an arguement about some matter that was unimportant. What was important, however, is that I had decided at that moment my character could stand no more and resolved to get the loot from the room and then set about attacking my partner as he was somewhat weakened after the fight, whereas I was in pretty good shape. Truely evil. Wonderful.

But, I was an idiot and in a perfect storm of distraction due to our arguement, excitement that I was about to get into some player on player combat, frustration with my companion’s not seeing the obvious truth of my character’s superior command of the situation , and youthful indesretion I say, “FIne! The hell with it! I walk over to the closet and take out the cloak and shake the dust off it!”

I mean, I don’t think I got from the “i” to the “t” in “it” before I went through the whole “I may have made a mistake here.” to “Awww CRAP! What was I thinking!” inner dialog thing.

Sure enough the DM smiled and said, “Roll save.” Fail. Instant death.

I deserved it and it was a great death for that character. But death isn’t always the end and before I could even recover from my stunned realization that I had just put my head in the noose and jumped off the deck, my battered, still living, and evil partner said, “I get her while she’s still warm.”

We’ve been giggling in childish glee for over 20 years since.

If someone starts describing something like rape or torture in vivid details, I’m very likely to end up walking out on the game. If the players in the group have their PCs start to do all kinds of raping and murdering, then I will walk for sure. I like my PCs to crush NPCs that are doing that kind of stuff, not be a party to it.

@Alan De Smet – Please don’t use the phrase “hamfisted insertion” ever again in a discussion of taboos.

Shock is a powerful tool, but it quickly grows dull with overuse. “How does this contribute to the game?” is the question I ask myself when it gets close to the edge. And sometimes, it needs to get a bit graphic: I recently watched “Tears of the Sun” (no, it’s not a very good movie), and the atrocities in the village made me want to gear up and go tango-hunting.

I ran a session revolving around a violent rape/murder of a young woman (17-18 or so). I treated the subject very seriously, almost clinically. When the perp was caught, and died in the fight, I could tell that the group really felt a sense of relief and success at doing something good. Would I do this with every group? No, but it definitely worked with this one.

Personally, I don’t deal well with sex at the table; romance is fine, so long as there’s an NPC involved. As a father, I’m not keen on young children getting hurt or killed; I try to follow the “don’t kill kids on screen” rule that Hollywood seems to have forgotten. Other than that, I can pretty much deal with it so long as it contributes to the game.

Yeah, the whole in-game sex thing really puts me off, especially since it always seems to be more about the player’s sex life than the character’s.

I’m not a prude by any means. But the few times I’ve run into it, it was basically some juvenile (or juvenile-minded) sleezebag abusing the game to get their wank on and force other players to facilitate their elf-fetish sexual fantasies by laying it all on “I’m saying it happens in the game, so you have to play along.”

Many who are this type don’t even try for subtlety or the thin cover of in-game story requirements. For example: Recently, I was looking at hooking up (no pun intended) with a local gaming group that was starting a new campaign. The GM sounded great and the campaign he’d created sounded really awesome.

But about a week into the yahoo group open call for players, before the game has even had it’s first player audition game, some guy just comes right out and asks if the GM is going to allow sexual role play in his game because he felt it necessary to be able to role play sexual encounters for game-world verisimilitude and he felt that it was wrong to suppress such things because sex is a part of life that really happens, and thus should be publicly and openly represented in the game.

Uh, well, yeah it is a part of life. But so are going to the bathroom and getting stitches after combat, and nobody seems to be screaming for more realistic potty play or live-action wound cleansing demos in their dungeon crawls. (Said gamer also continually whined about being unfairly kicked out of several other campaigns because other people falsely accused him of being antisocial and basically just mentally farked. Go figure.)

That email totally deflated my interest in the game. Suddenly, I went from “I can’t wait to play!” to “Uh, thanks but no thanks…and ewwww, no, I really *don’t* want to borrow your dice.” I never did attend any of the games and have since unsubscribed from the list altogether because I kept getting tense and squicky every time I saw one in my inbox.

I can understand off-stage, intimated sex and romance as part of character background and game development (I’ll be in my bunk). But for the most part, in-game sexual role playing just feels to me like bordering on sexual assault of the other players, who are coerced into playing along with someone else’s sexual fantasy in the name of RPGing or risk having their gaming groups break up because of the arguments that saying no creates.

My players and I can get pretty weird sometimes *if* (and this is critical) the game rules and the GM let the players do it. If the GM cracks down and shifts their alignment, or strips away some of their Sanity, they tend to rein it in.

One of my friends once GM’ed a session where a PC had to harm a child NPC in order to become a Blackguard. The other people hated it (as PCs and as players!), but it redoubled our resolve to punish the demons responsible. So it can work, sometimes, albeit in a limited context.

Just recently, I was pondering a plot line with a disturbing adult subtext, but I realized that I wouldn’t feel wholly comfy GMing it and it could certainly vex a few players. So I won’t be using that one.

I also have a “taboo” against doing “adult” things for childish reasons.

For example, I have a very low tolerance for doing shocking things for the sake of doing shocking things. If it’s really adding to the game in some way, be it story or characterization, I wouldn’t have a problem with sex with a corpse. But really, how often is it adding to the game, and how often is it the player being a jackass? I’m not telling you to stop because I’m offended, I’m telling you to stop because it’s stupid and childish. (The Book of Erotic Fantasy has some moments of brilliance, but is 90% “Look at how shocking we are!” “Yes, yes, you’re shocking. My worldview has been shaken. Would you mind helping me carry the groceries in?“)

This also comes up in depictions of violence against helpless people. It can be an important part of a game or story, but too many authors and GMs use it a lazy technique to grab at the heartstrings or a shorthand to show that a villain is really bad. One relatively strong LARP I played (and have since read) featured a child molester. Unfortunately it wasn’t well integrated with the rest of the game, and as a result it ended up feeling like a hamfisted insertion to 1. shock me and 2. as a lazy shorthand to mark the character as a villain.

This also goes for people who think that mental illness means “wacky.” No. If you’re going to play a mentally ill character as an excuse to play chaotic zany (but oddly, never in a way that is self destructive), or chaotic stupid you no longer get to play such a character in a game I play. If your character’s “mental illness” never hurts your character, is it really a mental illness, or just an eccentricity? If your character’s “mental illness” never leaves other characters uncomfortable, is it really a mental illness, or are you just a comedian? It’s this problem tainted the old World of Darkness Malkavians, one of my favorite clans.