Quote from: Simlasa;322489My old WFRP campaign had a Gilles de Rais based character... with details straight out of the trial testimony... and that guy wasn't anything but a toady of bigger swarms of corruption.

We had a character in our COC game who went nuts and made some snuff films...

But the guys I play with for Earthdawn/Deadlands would, I'm sure, have none of that and I wouldn't dream of pushing it on them.
It just depends on the tastes/interests of whoever is playing.

Dude, you've got the freakiest scariest looking avatar pic I've ever seen.  WTF is it?

No rape, no child abuse. I will and have kicked people out of my games for it.

Quote from: 1989;322637Anyway, that's my lame story. I just wanted to see if other people have these sorts of thoughts.

I had a moment of clarity while working security at a resort hotel and responding to a very violent domestic abuse call. Now, security work (and I'd guess police work, having never actually been a police officer) is mainly reactive - you get the call to respond only after some evil crap has already happened. After the call was over and the reports all filled out, I kept thinking that if this was a RPG scenario and I a character then I would have had warning that the abuse was going to happen and would have had the chance to prevent it from happening.

That is the line for me. While I have some absolutely horrific things happen in my games, the Players have a chance to see them coming and prevent those absolutely horrific things from happening. Excessive violence and brutality is handled off-screen (my games are not SAW movies). No need to open up the Abortion Debate or any other political football in a game that is suppossed to be fun, because that cheapens the issue and derails the fun.

My games are escapist entertainment also, and that is my lame story.

Here the deal. In my games we are not there to push each others buttons. Sometimes interesting questions pop up like they would in any other entertainment medium. If it interests the group we carry on otherwise we just shrug and say it's not for us (or most of us, as is normally the case)

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Soylent Green;322857I trust in TV. There are a while bunch of conventions and standards that sci-fi and adventure TV shows like Star Trek, Buffy, Stargate, Firefly have stuck to for pretty much my whole life and those conventions generally mean that no one is forced outside their comfort zone. If shows can deliver good quality entertainment without getting too nasty or unpleasant, so should I.
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Soylent - lets be honest here.
 The three shows I bolded may have seemed "safe" or within a comfort zone - but they DID touch upon scary messed up topics - it was just off camera or during the commercial breaks.

 Hell, "Firefly" had a bastard that ran a town who forced a young lady to publicly do oral sex on him whiole a crowd watched them - as he preached about male dominance. Granted the actual 'act' was outside the frame of the camera - but we knew that what was happening. Also, thats one of the unaired episodes.
 The trick I think is that we KNOW that guy is the bastard of the story ...and we pretty much look forward to our heroes dealing out some kind of punishment to him.

BUFFY had an episode where a young man kept turning into a Jekyll & Hyde kind of monster and it was how the show dealt with abusive boyfriends abd relationships. It was very implied that he had smacked around his girlfriend. Since a character we care about - Oz the good guy Werewolf was set up being worried that HE might be monster  - we the audience felt that much better when Buffy kicked the bad guy's ass.  After all  he was a character meant to represent abusive men.

Classic STAR TREK had an episode where we could hear Uhura screaming off camera - "Gamesters of Triskelion". They were definitely NOT screams of joy, plus we saw Kirk's concern for her possibly dangerous situation.

Again...the RPG equivalent of all of this would be how its all handled by the players and GM  - and how carefully. Sometimes a hero (or heroes) is shown to be good in contrast to how scummy and screwed-up their adversaries are.


- Ed C.

I don't think I have any hard-fast rules (probably harm-to-children), but we don't generally try to push the envelope.

Basically, if you're going to do something edgy, the quality of the game better justify it, and then some -- using something that feels like real-world evil in an exploitive or half-assed way would bring the game to a screeching halt.

So -- in general -- violence stays at around an R rating, with more reprehensible acts described clinically and at a distance. I've run, maybe, a couple of games where I felt potentially offensive material I wanted to talk about could be handled appropriately.  My guess is that most people would find even those fairly tame if made into a movie or book.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Koltar;323660Soylent - lets be honest here.
 The three shows I bolded may have seemed "safe" or within a comfort zone - but they DID touch upon scary messed up topics - it was just off camera or during the commercial breaks.

 Hell, "Firefly" had a bastard that ran a town who forced a young lady to publicly do oral sex on him whiole a crowd watched them - as he preached about male dominance. Granted the actual 'act' was outside the frame of the camera - but we knew that what was happening. Also, thats one of the unaired episodes.
 The trick I think is that we KNOW that guy is the bastard of the story ...and we pretty much look forward to our heroes dealing out some kind of punishment to him.

BUFFY had an episode where a young man kept turning into a Jekyll & Hyde kind of monster and it was how the show dealt with abusive boyfriends abd relationships. It was very implied that he had smacked around his girlfriend. Since a character we care about - Oz the good guy Werewolf was set up being worried that HE might be monster  - we the audience felt that much better when Buffy kicked the bad guy's ass.  After all  he was a character meant to represent abusive men.

Classic STAR TREK had an episode where we could hear Uhura screaming off camera - "Gamesters of Triskelion". They were definitely NOT screams of joy, plus we saw Kirk's concern for her possibly dangerous situation.

Again...the RPG equivalent of all of this would be how its all handled by the players and GM  - and how carefully. Sometimes a hero (or heroes) is shown to be good in contrast to how scummy and screwed-up their adversaries are.


- Ed C.

Excellent point. I guess what that really illustrates is it's not so much "what" happens but "how" it's represented. So for instance though the body count in
the original Star Wars is appallling, but we never see any gore nor do we see the grief of those left behind.