Gaming and Contentious Subjects
Oct. 20th, 2014 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqDiscussion of rape and murder in a role-playing game context. You have been warned. Also note that it is very easy for me to come up with evil ideas that I would never advocate.
My super hero universe has grown to three different eras. Each era is rich with role-playing potential, but is also risky because the issues of those eras lead to lots of unfortunate implications.
There is a single source for super powers in the game, Gunk, which is basically a magical fluid that gives the user powers. It's kind of like the Wildcard virus, except without nearly as many horrible side-effects. Gunk isn't disfiguring.
The problem I had was figuring out how to get a roughly even gender split of people exposed to Gunk despite the fact that in the late 1930's, the governments of the world were uniformly sexist - they weren't going to giving this stuff to both men and women in equal numbers. Note when one of the governments in question was Nazi Germany, and they were invading Czechoslovakia with a battalion of super soldiers.
In the end, I decided that Gunk treatment conferred a brief "infectious" period that the governments didn't immediately figure out. And it had to go from men to women, but not vice-versa (otherwise some sociopath would conclude they could get more supers by injecting one woman then having them a parade of would-be soldiers fuck her). The end result was that a there were a lot of "secret supers" among the wives and girlfriends of the men who were treated. Also at the local brothels. This gave an option for female characters that was easy to write into the background of the character. A little too easy, since there's whole tropes about it.
Thankfully the female players in the game are smarter than that, and demand that I be smarter than that. One character concept we came up with (but never played), a British nurse, who was monitoring the first Guinea Pigs. At first she was going to get her powers by "nightengale fucking" one of her patients. The player was game for that, but on further thinking, we came up with two other options: Stealing some Gunk and using it on herself deliberately; Accidental exposure due to a sharps accident. We haven't settled on one yet and I still hope to play with her.
WWII is touchy in general, because it was a harsh, sexist, racist era. Hell, at some point the characters are going to come across a concentration camp. Not sure how I'm going to deal with that. I'm less worried about the sexism though, simply because the PCs are all exceptional people and make their own rules. That's true for every PC in every game though. Nobody wants to role-play the meek.
The next era being played is the 60's. I really wanted to set a game in San Francisco during the counter-culture years. They're not quite there yet - it's 1965, but the game will get there fairly soon.
The PCs in that game are going to have to deal with the hippy movement - especially it's more violent aspects, and also the Vietnam War and the Gay rights, civil rights, and women's liberation movement.
Most recently they failed to prevent the assassination of Harvey Milk by time travellers. Unfortunately, in 1965 nobody knew his significance except for the time travellers. If the PCs had prevented it, they'd have had some clues as to the time traveller's motives.
But hell, I killed, arguably, the LGBT community's first leader. For a game. That's kind of a dick move right? I can think of quite a few people who would get mad at that. I do have an obligation to the players to not do anything triggering (aside, I knew a game master once who actually wanted me to tell him my - not my character's - phobias, se he could make the game more exciting. I flatly refused, since he wasn't my therapist, wasn't qualified to be my therapist, and gaming isn't therapy), but at the same time the game needs consequences, or we'd just play board games.
I could have had a fictional NPC play the role of activist-killed-before-their-time, but one of the things I wanted to do in this game was have the PCs interact with famous people. Plus, it being a real person, the players understand what is lost, even if the characters do not. Apologies to Mr. Milk's descendants.
The final era is the late 90's (leading up to big things in the year 2000). I've tried to make it a mix of mundane teenager adventures, along with the more fantastic plots of comic books. That being the case, the teens got into it with a bunch of super thugs, then went and crashed a house party.
Which gets us back to lazy plots. The very first thing I thought of was to have some of the mundane kids attempt a rape with roofies.
Now I had no intention of letting them go through with it - what I wanted was for them to attempt it, then get caught by the PCs. As I thought about it, the less I liked that idea. First, it broke the 90's teen movie vibe I wanted to go for (which was problematic by itself. I'd never been to such a party when I was a kid, so I had no fucking clue how to role-play it). Secondly, the PCs were so above the NPCs in terms of power that there wasn't really a conflict at all. Literally any one of the PCs could take out the majority of people at the party by themselves. Think Teen Titans and you'll have an idea of their level of abilities (also a good analogy in general since the PCs have a near one-to-one correspondence to the members of the Teen Titans).
So if the party wasn't going to have a handful of evil fuckers for the PCs to use as piñatas, what was I going to do for conflict. I decided that nobody at the party was evil. It was just a normal, if somewhat loud and boisterous, teenage house party. Sure, there'd be some jerks there (there always is), but the goal of the PCs was to just have a good time.
And my goal was to out them. If they did something that exposed them for who they were, like pick a fight with a bunch of jerks, then conflict would ensue. And if they didn't? Well, RPGs don't have to be all about the fighting - I figured any PC who wanted to have some perfectly consensual sex could do so. Two of them took me up on it.
The PCs didn't take the bait (for conflict), though they still managed to out themselves (one of them is a minor celebrite).
Still, I didn't go for the lazy, triggering, disrespectful-of-the-players plot. I'm happy about that.
My super hero universe has grown to three different eras. Each era is rich with role-playing potential, but is also risky because the issues of those eras lead to lots of unfortunate implications.
There is a single source for super powers in the game, Gunk, which is basically a magical fluid that gives the user powers. It's kind of like the Wildcard virus, except without nearly as many horrible side-effects. Gunk isn't disfiguring.
The problem I had was figuring out how to get a roughly even gender split of people exposed to Gunk despite the fact that in the late 1930's, the governments of the world were uniformly sexist - they weren't going to giving this stuff to both men and women in equal numbers. Note when one of the governments in question was Nazi Germany, and they were invading Czechoslovakia with a battalion of super soldiers.
In the end, I decided that Gunk treatment conferred a brief "infectious" period that the governments didn't immediately figure out. And it had to go from men to women, but not vice-versa (otherwise some sociopath would conclude they could get more supers by injecting one woman then having them a parade of would-be soldiers fuck her). The end result was that a there were a lot of "secret supers" among the wives and girlfriends of the men who were treated. Also at the local brothels. This gave an option for female characters that was easy to write into the background of the character. A little too easy, since there's whole tropes about it.
Thankfully the female players in the game are smarter than that, and demand that I be smarter than that. One character concept we came up with (but never played), a British nurse, who was monitoring the first Guinea Pigs. At first she was going to get her powers by "nightengale fucking" one of her patients. The player was game for that, but on further thinking, we came up with two other options: Stealing some Gunk and using it on herself deliberately; Accidental exposure due to a sharps accident. We haven't settled on one yet and I still hope to play with her.
WWII is touchy in general, because it was a harsh, sexist, racist era. Hell, at some point the characters are going to come across a concentration camp. Not sure how I'm going to deal with that. I'm less worried about the sexism though, simply because the PCs are all exceptional people and make their own rules. That's true for every PC in every game though. Nobody wants to role-play the meek.
The next era being played is the 60's. I really wanted to set a game in San Francisco during the counter-culture years. They're not quite there yet - it's 1965, but the game will get there fairly soon.
The PCs in that game are going to have to deal with the hippy movement - especially it's more violent aspects, and also the Vietnam War and the Gay rights, civil rights, and women's liberation movement.
Most recently they failed to prevent the assassination of Harvey Milk by time travellers. Unfortunately, in 1965 nobody knew his significance except for the time travellers. If the PCs had prevented it, they'd have had some clues as to the time traveller's motives.
But hell, I killed, arguably, the LGBT community's first leader. For a game. That's kind of a dick move right? I can think of quite a few people who would get mad at that. I do have an obligation to the players to not do anything triggering (aside, I knew a game master once who actually wanted me to tell him my - not my character's - phobias, se he could make the game more exciting. I flatly refused, since he wasn't my therapist, wasn't qualified to be my therapist, and gaming isn't therapy), but at the same time the game needs consequences, or we'd just play board games.
I could have had a fictional NPC play the role of activist-killed-before-their-time, but one of the things I wanted to do in this game was have the PCs interact with famous people. Plus, it being a real person, the players understand what is lost, even if the characters do not. Apologies to Mr. Milk's descendants.
The final era is the late 90's (leading up to big things in the year 2000). I've tried to make it a mix of mundane teenager adventures, along with the more fantastic plots of comic books. That being the case, the teens got into it with a bunch of super thugs, then went and crashed a house party.
Which gets us back to lazy plots. The very first thing I thought of was to have some of the mundane kids attempt a rape with roofies.
Now I had no intention of letting them go through with it - what I wanted was for them to attempt it, then get caught by the PCs. As I thought about it, the less I liked that idea. First, it broke the 90's teen movie vibe I wanted to go for (which was problematic by itself. I'd never been to such a party when I was a kid, so I had no fucking clue how to role-play it). Secondly, the PCs were so above the NPCs in terms of power that there wasn't really a conflict at all. Literally any one of the PCs could take out the majority of people at the party by themselves. Think Teen Titans and you'll have an idea of their level of abilities (also a good analogy in general since the PCs have a near one-to-one correspondence to the members of the Teen Titans).
So if the party wasn't going to have a handful of evil fuckers for the PCs to use as piñatas, what was I going to do for conflict. I decided that nobody at the party was evil. It was just a normal, if somewhat loud and boisterous, teenage house party. Sure, there'd be some jerks there (there always is), but the goal of the PCs was to just have a good time.
And my goal was to out them. If they did something that exposed them for who they were, like pick a fight with a bunch of jerks, then conflict would ensue. And if they didn't? Well, RPGs don't have to be all about the fighting - I figured any PC who wanted to have some perfectly consensual sex could do so. Two of them took me up on it.
The PCs didn't take the bait (for conflict), though they still managed to out themselves (one of them is a minor celebrite).
Still, I didn't go for the lazy, triggering, disrespectful-of-the-players plot. I'm happy about that.
