I was asked, “Have you ever run a game that needed safety tools? Have you ever run a game that verged on the edge of inappropriate? In all my years I've never had a game come close.”

Yes. (Short thread)

In middle school we (all young boys) ran games where crude humor and sex would very rarely (but sometimes) come up. At that time, we were unaware of how this could be problematic. Fortunately, I learned enough to avoid making this mistake as I played with others.

Some men never learn, and continue behaving that way long after leaving middle school. And it shouldn’t be in middle school either. I’m glad my kids don’t play this way at our middle school game. Progress.

In the times after high school, I’ve been at many tables that had problems. Sometimes, it’s the adventure. A DM at Gen Con running Arcanis asked (fortunately) before the game started if we had problems with various aspects.

That adventure goes into the subject of rape, as a past crime. I didn’t think it should be in the adventure. We had a woman at the table who said she was okay with it. I wasn’t. And I was concerned she was acquiescing you fit in. I stopped it when it it came up.

I’ve run tables where players have wanted to make checks to force themselves on others. It’s often done in a way that’s hard to label that way if you aren’t thinking it through, but that’s what it is. And I’ve always stopped it when I’ve seen it. No check, doesn’t work, stop.

I’ve been a player at tables where a player wanted to force themselves in some way on an NPC. Always a male player, always a female NPC. I’ve not always been the best at stopping this, and I’m still bothered by the last time and how I tried to curb it in character...

...instead of out of character forcing a discussion and full stop. It bothers me all the time that I fell into the scene and gave the player some benefit of the doubt when I should have called it out loudly. I’ll try not to repeat that mistake.

It’s hard to think back on those times and not see how gender played a roll in what happened and how. Both as men being always the ones causing the problem, and on how we sometimes fail to act if the players are all men.

But, men have trauma too. Men are almost always the problem, but they can also be victims. And thus we have to always take a firm stand and prevent such situations from happening in play without prior consent.