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Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There's a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community's tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It's really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people's no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.
A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it's just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a'la Alien is don't even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.
Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There's good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.
Let's not forget that no one on-screen in that specific scene other than the host (John Hurt) was aware that the character was swapped for a neck-down prosthetic, so every single reaction by each actor was genuinely horrific in that they each "saw" a prop explode out of a human body. IIRC, the director went on to pay for counseling for most (all?) of said actors after the fact.
Did not know this. That makes it way wilder, and also a much better movie. I do feel bad for the actors in this situation, but also no better method acting than watching your costar literally explode next to you as a chestburster comes out with zero knowledge that it was carefully planned by the special effects team. Also, big gamble. If someone broke character, they would have to redo the whole thing. Shock value is gone, all the special effects prep work has to be redone, everybody already wants to vomit, etc
While this is true, I want you to go back and rewatch that scene with special attention to Parker (Yaphet Kotto, also the first black Bond villain!) and tell me that guy didn't catch some serious trauma from that "gamble". 🥹
He was the first one to pop into my mind while reading about that. That looks..
I don’t often get a chance to talk about it, but Lover in the Ice is a fascinating, well regarded module that dives directly into the sort of sexual horror you’ve correctly pointed out as way off all but the most extreme table.
I’m certain, to my bones, that I could run a life changing version of Lover in the Ice. It will never happen. Even my few players who have given me the green light on that sort of content would I suspect tap out pretty fast, and I don’t blame them. I don’t think most people who just play realize how far TTRPGs can go.
I’m okay with never running that story. I get a lot reading modules like that for perspective; when GMs recoil at the thought of running that content it shows them how much more vulnerable they, and their players, are to that sort of horror relative to a shoggoth in the basement. That should prompt them toward creativity in looking for or writing other scenarios.
I do wonder what proportion of people who buy modules like that play them.
I am usually just kind of unphased by the idea of reproductive or sexual horror when it's not directed at my PC's personally but being ace and with no history of sexual assault I find it doesn't affect me any different than any other kind of horror? Like I have read my share of true crime and awful shit and I can see how it just segments into something just genuinely horrific but my brain just treats it as a straight up no different than a torture theme. I can find other people's reactions to it waaay more unsettling though so I could never run it myself and I know a number of people in my cohort who have been in domestic violence and sexual assault scenarios irl and it would break my heart if any of them were triggered at a table I was at.
I've definitely been at tables which used sexual horror themes in lazy, trashy ways that made me think poorly of the GM but I have seen it used thematically well twice and only once where it didn't cause an X card tap out by someone who honestly thought they would be okay.
High risk TTRPGs can be ridiculously rewarding and some of the best games I've played were ones that danced really close to the wire of being not okay.
Not sure how much it fits online but I've never played a horror TTRPG and I'd love to try it! I like extreme stuff!
Dungeon master and Dungeon Mommy is 100% the exact same job
Wow is that ever insightful. And interesting.
Why does anyone need to survey players on their tolerance for sexual violence in the first place? Like are there that many DM’s trying to put that in their actual campaigns?
Fiction is a really good way to "safely" explore horrific things.
However, it's easy to accidentally overlook how important the "distance" between the storyteller and the person reading/viewing/experiencing it is. When you move from writing a story in text and putting it in a book to verbally narrating something to people in person, a storyteller can stumble if they didn't take into consideration how in-person context might make change power dynamics enough that something okay in other contexts can suddenly become bad.
Let me give you an example. Bestselling romance writer writes a best-selling novel about Hunky McShirt'sOff that all the fans adore. It subverts tropes, it turns ideas on their head, it uplifts men and women alike. Anyone who wants to read it can buy it off the shelf or gets it from the library. This is cool, because the one reading it has agency about being exposed to it. They choose to leave their home and use their time or money to go find it and bring it into their life. Because they have agency, they can engage, or stop engaging, with the content as they wish.
Now imagine the same writer cornering their teen son in their bedroom and breathlessly narrating their bestselling romance book to him, in a situation where he is physically prevented from leaving, and the person narrating has full control over his food, shelter, education, access to travel, etc.
Same story, same book. And, funnily enough, it's not actually the book that is wrong. It's the power dynamics between people that take the situation from fine into abusive. The second example is a case where the teenage son has things that affect his well-being in a pragmatic way potentially imperiled if he doesn't sit there and listen to his parent tell him a sexual story, because the balance of power is in the adult's favor, because of the parent relationship and the dynamics between them that puts the storyteller in direct control of the listener's basic survival needs.
That's a VERY different situation than a book sitting on a shelf in a bookstore where every reader is free to pick it up or put it down with no real consequences for choosing either way.
Tabletop RPG stuff is also in person, and that changes the storytelling dynamics to some extent. Most people are socially-aware enough to realize you aren't going to do a horror or erotic tabletop RPG role-play with your parents or your kids or siblings. But when you're among peers, it can get trickier to navigate what's okay and what's not, and what the dynamics are.
Directly surveying players on what they can handle in a really up-front way is a way of giving people agency to tap out of something. It restores agency, which makes it safer for everyone.
Sexual violence in storytelling is a tricky thing. But it's important to realize fiction is not reality. It can be influenced by real things, but the character on the page is not a real person and never will be. Nor will the reader magically transform into the characters on the page--even if they might see aspects of themselves reflected in them.
People distill discourse about these things into black and white terms where somehow a story involving a difficult topic is suddenly 100% equivalent to the thing in real life...but it's NOT. In reality, a reader/viewer's interaction with dark topics is much more complicated and nuanced, and there's just as much a spot for healing to come from telling stories that are dark as there is for anything else.
One of my favorite authors is Anne Bishop. Her breakout series was the Black Jewels Trilogy. Practically every character in the series, though, is a survivor of sexual abuse, and a bunch of that is described vividly on the page.
Despite that, the series overall is sort of a "cozy dark fantasy", if I had to give someone an idea of how it "feels".
Why?
Well, because the theme of the whole series is kind of unflinching acceptance that people live through HORRIFIC things...but can still obtain found family and peace afterwards.
Honestly, I've never quite found another series like it, that combines unflinching renditions of horrific violence, then turns around and gives a big chunk of those characters warm loving families with unicorns and loving spouses and dogs and kittens running about. Most cozy fantasy seems to think you only deserve cozy if nothing all that bad has happened to you. As if "survivor of terrible shit" is incompatible with "happy ending".
Anne Bishop is the only author I've read serving up stories that say, "Yeah, what you lived through is royally fucked up and we're going to look right at it and not gloss it over--but also, have some puppies and a unicorn, you've earned it." And being able to see those horrible things spelled out hits differently.
But the folks who have decided that "violence and sex in stories is always bad because--" seem to have missed the memo that storytelling is how REAL HUMAN BEINGS process and come to terms with fears and trauma. And conflate storytelling with the actual act, and conflate story characters who are given stories full of pain with real people who have actually been through pain. (Which I personally think is some mental scarring from the religions that tell you if you even THINK something you're going straight to hell and will burn forever.)
Anyway. My point is that when it comes to storytelling with dark elements, the actual in-person power dynamics between storyteller and reader/listener matter MUCH more than the content of the story. One's agency to partake or not partake in fiction has a bigger impact than the content of the story--especially since dark stories can help us kick around ideas and figure out how one wants to respond to them.
(Plenty of people read a story they don't like and say "Fuck that shit!" in the end...reading something doesn't necessarily mean you'll slavishly accept it without thinking. The point of reading and storytelling is to think about things, and you won't always agree with the author!)
Yeah it’s not that I find the idea of surveying player sensitivities a problem, so much as it’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around the desire to inflict something like that on a player’s character in a roleplaying game that’s supposed to be for entertainment at the end of the day. I think of myself as an open minded person and I’m trying not to judge here, I’m just having a bit of trouble with this concept. In the context of an inherently erotic roleplaying game it doesn’t really bother me as I respect other people’s kinks as long as everyone is consenting and comfortable, even if it’s something I’m personally uncomfortable with, because you’re walking into something where you as a player know the subject of kinks and sexuality is inherently part of the game. But the idea of using it as a device in a roleplaying game simply for inflicting horror on a player through their character is a struggle for me to understand
Horror play is a different beast than your run of the mill ttrpg crowd. You are trying to ride a line where you get under someone's skin but not enough to actually cause them to tap out. Flirting with the darkness is the point. Sometimes themes of sexualized violence find their way into horror, particularly if you are aping off of old school horror tropes. It is a gold standard rule to never impose sexual violence on a player character generally and it is safer over all to just exclude it entirely from games that are not an excersise in giving you the actual chills.
Most gothic horror stuff D&D modules pass for horror is actually pretty calculated. It still follows the curve of a power fantasy but with a Halloween haunted house-y coat of paint. Curse of Straud for instance will give you all manner of tropes you would find from R. L Stien novels from Goosebumps to the stuff targeted towards young adults but it's still designed to be overcome. You gain more powers as you go and become more capable and expect to have a fair shot of surviving because you are heroes.
The hard core horror players look for a different curve. You are never more capable than you will be at the start of the story. Some things are designed to give you odds of survival where the question is not if someone will die but when. You might be fortunate to lose half the party... It is sort of a trust exercise. Going into a table that seeks to spook you properly you let people know your weaknesses because your DM is trying to hit you in a way that is disturbing but tolerable. Coming away from that kind of experience actually can make for pretty solid friendships because sharing a faux traumatic event allows circumstances for you all to be vulnerable together provided it is done in a space where everyone knows they are safe.
While I still find it odd, I suppose I was thinking of it more in the sense of a traditional D&D campaign than a horror driven one despite the original comment saying such. I still feel like even in most horror video games the threat of your player character actually being raped or sexually assaulted is extremely uncommon as opposed to a movie or book because you are playing the role of the character, and so even in the context of a horror rpg the idea of putting that into a campaign just seems strange to me. I’m not judging people who play that way as long as everyone consents and knows what they’re getting into… I suppose I just don’t understand the desire to do so
This is a valid question, which could also be asked of Alien. It’s as simple as some people like to be scared, whether to explore personal feelings on a specific type of fear or purely to be scared. For some players, that a game addresses a fear they rarely explore is an enormous bonus.
Your confusion is understandable. Games that directly address the same themes of sexual violence as Alien are a minuscule niche inside an already small niche. But I can tell you as a horror GM that even a whiff of an exotic, earnestly held fear, as long as the player is willing to engage, cuts deeper than hours of classic slasher horror. It doesn’t have to go as far as even Alien, just a little taboo horror as seasoning, but even that needs consent.
I love Alien and it doesn’t bother me personally though I can understand and respect why some would not feel comfortable about it. I meant specifically in a game or roleplaying scenario and honestly misunderstood the comment to mean a DM inserting literal rape or sexual assault into their campaign as something that could actually play out against player characters and that’s my bad
D&D is very poorly weighted for hardcore horror. I don't think I mentioned D&D in my original comment but I could be wrong. Other ttrpgs are way better. Shadows of Esterun, Call of Cthulhu, SLA Industries and Dread would be better options if you want to dip your toes in.
It's way more common for aspects of sexual violence to be sort of more alluded to in the past tense and almost NEVER happen to a PC unless the player themselves makes it an aspect of their character that happened in the past. It's damn near never something graphically described at the table in real time.
Inclusion realistically often looks like small references made by the NPC living victims of serial killers being held captive who speak a little about the horrors they've experienced but trail off before they get graphic... A bit of somebody's backstory or allusions to the weird monster that kidnaps and beheads it's victims is doing it because it of weird reproductive purpose... but it is a rare table that actually will not call a FULL stop to play if someone starts full on beat for beat trying to describe a detailed rape scene in progress or a monster basically doing weird reproductive stuff to an NPC in present tense much less a player.
Most of the time with something like that you employ "veils" where something as an idea is introduced as a factor to make something more horrible but you don't really describe it in detail. You let the abstraction make it tolerable.
I personally might consider use of extremely mild themes of reproductive horror in a game but I personally draw the line at targeted sexual assault being any part of that. I neither want to risk triggering somebody's PTSD or anybody's weird anime porn related kink by accident so it's not something I would personally run. I am not personally triggered by their inclusion but with straight up rape it's easy for the way things play out to be in poor taste and only a few GMs I have played with actually used the themes for anything that felt thematically poignant and not just trashy. Most of the time the risks just outweigh the rewards by magnitudes and in a safety focused culture that shit flies like a chunk of lead.
Mind you old school tables were pretty brutal, even your average D and ;D campaign not billing itself as a horror might have had a rape situation thrown in as window dressing for a sacked town or female prisoners in a camp. I remember a couple of DMs I used to play with really thought nothing about chucking it in just to make stuff feel gritty and "realistic". The culture of tabletop has moved into a much kinder place in the past decade for which I am personally quite grateful. What was once the domain of horror gaming safety techniques have been adopted by regular players now.
Yes I misunderstood, I thought the commenter was referring to an “unveiled” scenario that could play out against player characters themselves and was disturbed. Admittedly the concept of a Xenomorph reproduction cycle or something similar doesn’t really bother me so much as live people being literally raped and being forcibly impregnated by innsmouth fish folk or goblins like Lovecraft inspired stuff or Berserk. If it’s referred to in past tense or alluded to like in Shadow Over Innsmouth I can move past it usually, but if it’s straight up depicted like in Berserk or Necronomicon by Alan Moore then that’s just way too far for me personally, but I still enjoy other aspects of those universes and try not to make any judgements on the authors or people who aren’t bothered by those things.
I... am the original commenter? Good gods I hope that was not the general takeaway of my original post. I have heard far too many horror stories of GMs using sexual violence on PCs and it is just...
I know rape fantasies are a thing some people are into but I feel like bringing that wholesale in to a TTRPG setting is more the domain of like the extreme edge of BDSM culture.
Sorry I just got several replies and didn’t notice is all
They're dungeon masters not middle school chaperones