I hope I’m posting this in the right place, there wasn’t a Game Room forum the last time I was an active poster and I’m not totally sure whether this discussion belongs here or in Cafe Society.
Anyway! During some recent wanderings on the Web, I came across an article I’d read years before titled A Rape in Cyberspace. It deals with an incident on LambdaMOO in the early '90s where one player found a way to force other characters to perform disturbing sexual acts. This was all text-only, so it’s perhaps more accurate to say he made it look as though these other players has typed out descriptions of disturbing sexual acts, but either way the people involved felt angry and violated.
I’ve been involved in two long-term roleplaying campaigns in the past (one in high school, one in college) and in both my character was raped. Both times this was a decision made by the game master. In neither case was I asked ahead of time if this would be okay, and I would not have agreed to it if I had been asked. It bothered me a lot both times, but I hadn’t thought about it for years until I started looking into joining a group where I live now. I remembered then what had happened to me before and considered stating early on that if the game master or any other players in the new group even thought about raping my character then that would be the last they’d see of me. I wound up not joining this group for other reasons so the issue never came up, but if I were to join another group I would want to be sure I wasn’t going to have to put up with having yet another character raped.
It bothers me that this should even be an issue, but judging from the items linked above then rape scenarios are fairly common in RPGs. It was especially disturbing for me to read about this happening in LARPs, partially because acting out a rape is much more likely to upset participants and witnesses and partially because of the real risk that “now I’ll pretend to rape you” would turn into “now I’ll actually grope you”. But for the purposes of this discussion I’d like to set aside the special issues relating to LARPs and talk about the use of rape as a plot point in roleplaying games.
What do you gamers out there think about this subject? Have you been involved in a game that featured a rape situation? How did you feel about it? Does it make a difference if the rapist is a player character or NPC? What about the victim? Should it be acceptable for a game master to add rape situations to a game without the advance permission of the players involved?
There is an RPG called HellMOO where you can rape other players without hacking the game - it happens a lot. There’s a lot of game-mechanics revolving around overpowering another player and forcing them to perform sexual acts - if strong enough or if you have help, you can restrain a conscious character and rape them, or you can drug them and rape them while unconscious. There are also consequences, you can catch venereal diseases or even get pregnant. It’s all text, but it’s pretty graphic and disturbing.
I’ve played D&D and Champions for 30-some years. I’ve never heard of rape being an issue, even between two NPCs. If a GM intended to have a PC raped, it should not happen without the player’s explicit permission. If the player rapes an NPC or, worse, another PC with his character, that character should suffer severe in-game consequences. And the GM had better take the player aside and explain why it’s a very bad idea. Many people put a big emotional investment into their RPGs. They care a lot about their characters. Rape is such an awful and personal violation that it’d have to be a pretty nasty game before it should even remotely be an option, IMHO. I don’t think I’d want to play in a game where rape was something being bandied about.
Honestly, it seems like sort of a weird complaint. It’s been a while, but IIRC, the average RPG involves mass killing and murder of large numbers of other sentient beings, often with no more justification then to rob them of their valuables or, arguably worse, to gain “experience” in killing, with the objective of becoming more proficient at said mass killings in future encounters. The mere sexual violation of a single other person seems rather small potatoes in comparison.
I figure I might as well describe my two experiences with having my characters raped. If it matters to anyone, both times it was in a White Wolf game.
The first time the game master opened the session by saying that my character woke up and realized she’d been drugged and raped. This was a total shock to me. I can’t remember now what, if any, plot purpose this was supposed to serve. I was very angry about it and said something like “Well, I guess [character] will just have to kill herself now.” This isn’t because I think that’s the typical response to rape, but because this character was an Amazon type who’d have felt deep shame about having been physically overpowered and unable to defend herself. (Also I was a teenager and thus rather melodramatic.) In that moment I was seriously considering just quitting the game for good. This was long enough ago that I don’t really remember what happened afterward, but I think my character did hunt down and kill her assailants.
The second time was in a different game with a different GM. My character had been offered a magical elixir by an NPC. She was told it had healing properties, which was true, but it was also an intoxicant. The GM had me “roll the dice to see if I’m getting drunk”, and I botched. The GM said my character was so drunk she lost control of her actions, and had sex with another player character with whom she’d had a bickering/flirting relationship throughout the campaign.
In this case I responded by having my character seem confused and withdrawn the next morning. I was hesitant to make a big deal about it, because I didn’t want the other player to feel bad. She (this was a female player with a male character) hadn’t been asked if this was okay with her either, it had been a unilateral decision by the GM. And from an in-game perspective, I don’t think her character even knew that mine was inebriated, just that suddenly she was all over him. But this incident was a major factor in my decision to leave this game after another session or two. The GM had (for reasons I never fully understood) developed a personal problem with me, and had been taking this out on my character by refusing many of my ideas and making me roll for stupid things that other players wouldn’t have to roll for. In this case I don’t think the GM considered the situation to be rape, I think she just thought it would be funny if the two characters had sex, but since my character essentially had her drink spiked and since I was not involved in the decision then I consider it “rape by GM”.
It might be tempting to blame both these cases on clueless, geeky guys who were unable to think of a “motivation for a woman that’s not vagina-related”, but in both cases my GM was female. I think many geek guys would have been more sensitive.
Isn’t White Wolf the game with all the vampires? If so, it doesn’t seem to be that surprising, Vampires seem to be a metaphor for rapists for a lot of people, and while I’ve never played that particular role playing game, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some people are attracted to that angle of it. Certainly it seemed that I’ve met a decent number of people (mainly woman, so perhaps your female GM’s are included) that liked vampire games/books/movies in part because they allowed them to explore a sort of dark side to sexuality.
I don’t think such a thing is unhealthy, though I can see where it might be upsetting if everyones not on the same page about it.
There is a White Wolf game about vampires, but that wasn’t the one I was playing either time. I remember there being a mostly off-screen vampire villain at one stage in the first game, but he wasn’t involved in the situation I described. The other game didn’t feature vampires at all.
I have limited knowledge of the rules for WW vampires, but it’s my understanding that they aren’t interested in sex and that most male vampires wouldn’t be physically capable of raping a woman in the strictest sense of the word. But again, this wasn’t an issue in either of the games I’m referring to. I wouldn’t have signed on for a “sexy vampire game” anyway.
I’ll mention that in the second game I described, there was no sexual content at all other than flirting between characters and jokes about the promiscuous history of one of them. In the first game there was some off-screen sex for purely reproductive purposes – my character was under pressure from her clan to have children, but I got to choose the (NPC) father and there wasn’t any kind of sex scene.
I think I get what you’re saying, but this is only a fair comparison if we’re talking about killing NPCs vs. raping NPCs. I’m more concerned with the issue of player characters being raped. To the best of my knowledge most RPGs rarely involve extreme violence against player characters, because if the player characters are killed or grievously injured they won’t be able to participate very well in the game.
Given how common the “Let’s go into the caves and kill a bunch of trolls!” type of scenario is, anyone who is truly offended by such things is unlikely to be playing in the first place. But while I knew up front that my characters might be getting into fights, I was unaware until it happened that the GM considered rape to be all a part of the game. I don’t find much amusement in pretending to have been raped, and wouldn’t have agreed to join a game where I knew this was going to happen.
In my case, neither of the campaigns I participated were even especially violent, and did not feature any troll-hunting or similar. The first game was fairly dark, but the rape was the most serious physical assault my character experienced and was the only situation in which she wasn’t given the chance to defend herself. The second game was pretty lighthearted, and mostly involved solving the theft of a magical object. Our party typically dealt with violent enemies by using trickery and distraction.
The situation in the second game actually bothers me more, even though it was less violent and the in-game “rapist” character didn’t have any malicious intent. In large part this was because the GM was deciding what my character would do, not me. That’s not even roleplaying anymore. (The “Inevitably-Named” article linked above addresses this point.) This GM wasn’t the greatest and had a tendency to railroad players into doing what she wanted, but this was the only time in the whole campaign where she flat-out told players what their characters had done without even the pretense of any player choice. So the sexual situation was forced not only on my character without her consent, but on me as a player without my input or any advance warning.
In a game like A shameful cracka… described where it’s apparently clear up front that players can and will rape each other, then prospective players can decide at the beginning if they’re okay with playing that sort of game. I don’t object to that kind of game existing, but I wouldn’t join one myself.
I started D+D about 30 years ago and still play with the same adult group.
I’ve also run roleplaying groups at schools and colleges for decades.
I have never seen or used a rape scenario and I wouldn’t play in a game that had one.
(I think it says something disturbing about the DM if they use this.)
As for killing, all the adventures I’m involved in use such violence only in self-defence or against totally evil monsters (e.g. Assassins).
Most opponents will surrender and can be persuaded to change their ways. (I remember one group of pupils helping an Ogre highwayman become a pub bouncer!)
Experience is given for achieving goals, finding treasure and defeating monsters (whether violence is used or not).
I enjoy roleplaying which is thought-provoking, unexpected and witty. I have no interest in relentless slaughter.
White Wolf’s a company that puts out a lot of mythological creature-based RPGs. Vampires are one of them, but there’s also werewolves, fey, and the like.
I seem to recall a question being asked along these lines in a conversation about this very topic somewhere else - IIRC, a WW vampire has no sex drive (rather, their various drives are switched into needing blood), and being undead aren’t capable of becoming physically aroused anyway without the aid of a particular skill that forces their body to act alive again.
I think the difference between rape being a big no-no for players as opposed to the light-hearted murder, theft and the like being perpetrated is to an extent the unexpectedness of it. Generally going into an RPG you expect to kill and that your character may be killed in turn, but rape seems to be a pretty rare occurrence. Plus, these things are stuff which generally a good character can do; murder of evil creatures, killing in self defence, stealing from a bad guy or to fund a good cause. There’s no good motivation for rape to occur.
That said, I think it can be an interesting plot point. I personally would be uncomfortable with rape as a throwaway detail, but I suppose it would depend on how the GM played it.
There’s a few different games through White Wolf… Changelings, Werewolves/Changing Breeds, Vampires, Hunters, Exalted, Mummy… I played a lot of vampire actually, but rape never entered into it. The worst that happened was when my character got captured by a hunter and was tortured to death in the crypt of a Cathedral in one game, and another where my character was killed, and died in the arms of her enemy (it was a mix of LARP, dice and storyteller plot… she died defending London against the werewolves and in the end fought beside her enemy… it was a lovely story, and not entirely unexpected by me).
I used to play a lot in chat, and there it was basically a free for all. I did have a character who was raped, but it did and didn’t bother me… mainly because she was a throwaway character that I hadn’t invested much in and was just goofing around. Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t log off, as it was pretty disturbing. My online games I play are generally more disturbing than the online ones in general though.
The GM in the second instance probably should have been slapped. To my knowledge, it’s not uncommon for GMs to have things happen to a player that they can’t control for various reasons, but that involved two consenting (if not sober) PCs.
How many other women were in the group? How were the other players and the GM in terms of awareness, social aptitude, etc. (i.e. basement dwelling nerds who the closest they were going to get to sex was an in game rape, or normal people who played a few RPGs). I haven’t gamed much - mostly because there was a disturbing trend early in my gaming experience where the rest of the players (all male) weren’t comfortable with a woman in the group (I once got killed first session falling off a log into the stream.)
Earlier I was trying to think of something that could happen in an RPG that would be as potentially upsetting and offensive to players as rape, and I came up with abortion. Someone playing Dungeons & Dragons or Werewolf is unlikely to expect this issue to come up in a game, and even a pro-choice player might be upset or offended if their character was forced by the GM to have or to perform an abortion.
I don’t think I’d have a problem with a GM introducing the rape of an NPC by another NPC as a plot point, provided it fit the tone of the game and wasn’t handled in a lurid or offensive manner. I wouldn’t consider that much different from reading a book or seeing a movie in which a character was raped. Same goes for players who wants to have rape in their character’s backstory. But I don’t think this sort of thing should ever be sprung on a player.
She should have been slapped for a lot of reasons, but this was the penultimate straw. (The true final straw came when she threw a fit over my leaving a game that had already run long because I had to go home and take my gland medication.) What’s especially annoying about this situation was that if she’d just said “Wow, that drink packed more of a punch than you expected. You’re feeling much better now…and much less inhibited. <wink wink>” then I could have taken things from there. The in-game result would probably have been about the same, and I wouldn’t have been angry about it.
This also would have given the other player a choice. I never asked how she felt about things, and her character was a playboy type who was unlikely to turn down an offer of sex, but it’s possible she would have preferred not to have him sleep with my character…or at least would have preferred this to happen because he was such a stud and not because an NPC slipped my character a mickey.
In the first case I described the rape situation occurred during a one-on-one session between me and the female GM. There were guys in the game, but none were there that time. The second case took place in an all-female group. The GM had a boyfriend and as far as I know was sexually active, but she was probably the least socially aware person in the group.
As I alluded to before, she had developed some kind of psycho control issues the longer the game went on. By this point she was making me roll for all kinds of stupid things, like whether I could run across a mostly deserted parking lot in broad daylight without running right into a tree. I soon decided that she’d just have to continue her power trip without me.
I typically play RPGs to have a good time. If I play a Call of Cthulhu game set in the United States during the 1930s I’m not going to play to the virulent racism of the era because it wouldn’t be fun. As DM I have the trust of the players to make the game fun for everybody and my DM mantra is “it isn’t my game it’s our game.” Having a PC raped just isn’t cool.
I’ve only used rape in a game once and was very vague about what happened. The PCs had captured a rogue and in exchange for her life she told them the information. Despite pleading with the PCs to allow her to keep her weapons they took them and left her to wander a hostile wilderness alone an unarmed. I had her become a recurring villain to wanted revenge because the PCs put her in a position to be “abused by rough men” and ultimately killed. (She was undead in a Ravenloft game)
Let me lead by saying that I personally wouldn’t use it as a plot device, because I know it makes people uncomfortable (while mass killing is okay, strangely enough, but I can understand the argument against it).
It is by no means common, but I can see it be used in a worthwhile way, however both GMs (especially the second one) executed it poorly. The first one was a lack of imagination, it was just “SURPRISE!” It would’ve made more sense to do it in game. The second one is bad because it gives no control to the character. Personally, on the very off chance I was going to do something similar I would have had a crap load of rolls on top of intoxication. I would have allowed you to make choices, but a roll would determine whether you could do what you wanted or how much “deeper” you would give in to the intoxication. You’d be talking with the playboy and you could roll to resist his charms at every option until you failed x amount of rolls in which case you give in, alternatively you should have been able to take a walk or be able to avoid the other play altogether. However I’m a D&D player and relegate a lot of “lose control of your character” situations this way. However other outcomes could have been possible as well, such as accidentally giving away your entire share of gold to the barkeep and being abducted and held ransom to your group by the local crook (cue adventure). The “playboy” character should have been role playing as well.
I think the GM should never have full access to a player character, but a PC shouldn’t have a vote where the adventure goes. The GM should have good judgment of course, and know their players well enough so that they don’t offend them, but if a rape scenario comes up (which should always be in game, not behind closed doors) the players should be able to get out of it, with rape only being the worst possible result. The thing with pen and paper games is that anything can and will happen, and it’s meant to be an emulation of real world problems, albeit with mythical creatures and magic thrown in the mix, rape is a perfectly plausible scenario but I wouldn’t be comfortable bringing it in unless I knew the players were willing to accept it. I’d probably ask before the campaign “oh hey, there’s a sliver of a chance rape may come up, is that okay with you guys?” And if someone objects, it’s gone, but I certainly wouldn’t ask the PC in danger right before the adventure, just like I wouldn’t ask a PC if it’s okay if the Dark Overlord captured them and tried to convert them To the Dark Side in one part of today’s adventure, in both scenarios it would be a mix of rolling against magic or potions or something and role playing your way out of the situation.
In short, I don’t think the inclusion of rape is a problem, but it certainly needs to be done with as much player chance to avoid it as possible. And a GM should know if it will bother any of their friends they’re playing with, if no one is having fun then what’s the point?
I feel like it certainly doesn’t belong in a lighthearted D&D game, for sure.
However, I can see it having a place in some of the more mindfuck indie RPGs like “My Life with Master” or “Dogs in the Vineyard.” These games delve pretty deep into the power relations between player and DM, and are meant to hit a little close to home at times.
You also had Wraith which allowed ghost PCs with the right skill sets to posses humans or else influence their dreamscapes (so that a person may dream they were being raped). Be that as it may, I never played a Wraith game where anyone tried either. Thankfully.
I played a lot of RPGs spanning from good ole D&D to Shadowrun to the White Wolf games to Twilight:2000 to others. The closest I ever came to having or seeing rape in a game was as backstory to some demon/human hybrid in an AD&D game (whatever the female half-demons were called).