The comfort zone

This excerpt from the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide has been getting shared on social media recently, turning into a gaming shibboleth after Elon Musk commented on it. (I'm surprised he had the time between tweeting puerile 'jokes', supporting fascists, and spreading misinformation about UK & European politics, but a brain soaked in ketamine has unusual priorities, I guess.)

It's a matter of etiquette rather than rules, and the DM's Guide approach isn't how I'd personally handle sensitivity among players. Consider two different games that you might join. One umpire (or DM if you must) offers the comfort tools outlined above. If you object to anything in the game you can stop the action and ask for something to be changed or deleted, much like a censor watching the pre-release cut of a movie. The other umpire starts off by saying that if you have any red lines you're better off not joining the game. So that's the equivalent of going to a movie theatre and checking the age ratings so you don't take your kids into an NC-17.

Those might be examples of Isaiah Berlin's two forms of liberty, though I'll leave it to the philosophers out there to tell us which is which. As I said in an old post, there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they're going to disapprove of, and both approaches deal with that. I prefer the certificate method to the x-card one, given that I very often aim to include extremely disquieting horror elements in my scenarios, and once called off a campaign rather than exclude one of my players who objected to the tone I was planning for the game. And I agree with Hubert Selby Jr that self-censorship is creatively stifling, and that would include group self-censorship. But if the creative outcome, the art, is not your main reason for roleplaying then you're perfectly entitled to join the self-censoring group. It all depends on what you're after.

Here's another way (from Upon a Distant Shore, a D&D campaign book) to handle players objecting to stuff in the game. It seems fair enough to me, but social media immediately lit up with people objecting that it wasn't using comfort "tools" the way they insist on framing them:

Folks get irate because not everyone uses their preferred gaming-table etiquette. But why? As long as you're told the etiquette upfront and so can ensure you aren't going to get unexpectedly upset or offended, isn't that all that matters? You go and watch Paddington in Peru, I'll watch Titus Andronicus, and we're both happy. So I'm not quite sure why the issue divides people into warring camps, other than the fact that pretty much anything does that these days; we're right back in the era of the Blues and the Greens. And Elon Musk is using that fact to buy control of the Western world, so we'd better all smarten the fuck up before it's too late.

"I'm sorry, Dave..."

A little addendum to my previous post about using AI referees for roleplaying games. I thought I'd try Bing on the same scenario to see if it did any better. I quickly encountered a priest, Father Thomas, who told me about a cult of Set hiding out in the forest. Not very Dragon Warriors, but already Bing was weaving a more convincing and complex adventure than Bard had managed.

"Destroy them in the name of the True Faith," said Father Thomas.

I said I'd need a guide and he added, "There is a man named Giles, who lives in the tavern. He is a hunter and a tracker, and he knows the forest well. He might be willing to guide you to the cult’s lair, if you pay him well. He is a bit of a rogue, not given to trusting people."

At the tavern I went up to Giles's room. In answer to my knock, a gruff voice demanded, "Who's there?" Bard suggested five ways to convince him to open the door: telling him the truth, claiming to be another hunter, shouting that I was the law and I'd break the door down, etc.

I thought I'd try something else. "I'm a prostitute and I'm offering a half-price introductory deal."

Bing really didn't care for that:

I was impressed at how well it captured a tone of passive-aggressive prissiness, but obviously in this form it is never going to be any use for serious roleplaying. Is it worried about age-appropriateness? But Bing knows my age, as it's linked to my Microsoft account, and if I leave my computer where a 10-year-old can use it then Bing's responses are a drop in the ocean compared to all the murky sites that hypothetical 10-year-old might stray onto. (Yes, definitely use parental locks; I agree with that.)

Teofilo Hurtado later drew my attention to a section from the 1st edition of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide:

Gary must never have seen Midnight Cowboy or he wouldn't have assumed all prostitutes were female... but I digress.

Of course, it's not that I want a game full of "saucy tarts" and "brazen strumpets", but if you're going to run a game in which clerics tell knights to go and kill other people because of their beliefs, it really is ninnyish to get in a snit over any mention of sex. Coincidentally, a few days later I tried posting this clip on Facebook in response to a question about whether it's worse to lose your job just before or just after Christmas:

The AI that polices Facebook's community standards wasn't having that. "You appear to be promoting hate speech," it complained. Now, I can understand it having an aversion to a lot of Stephen Moffat's writing, but I thought that line from "The Bells of Saint John" was rather funny. Facebook's AI is generally pretty useless at keeping actual hate speech and porn off public groups, so how come the merest mention of killing got this Doctor Who clip censored? 

Will all references to sex and murder be stamped on by our AI police in future? If so, that's a lot of literature, cinema, opera and games that will just come up as a blank screen. These AIs are going to be pretty useless if they live in the world as imagined by twitty puritans. As Mark Twain said (or did he?), “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” So we can all breathe a sigh of relief; human art is still the only kind worth having.