How the Rules Should Read

Before I start, I want to warn my readers that this isn't going to be an easy post for some to read, because it involves domestic violence.  I would recommend that you approach this post cautiously for that reason.

Yesterday, on his 'Crossing the Verse blog, Ozymandias quoted a dialogue, that I'd like to post here as well.

We are all seeing a lot of stuff like this now, and not just connected to role-playing games.  I have no specific things to say about any of the posts above, except that they are more or less representative of a growing number of people who believe that the means to making their own lives easier is to create rules that they themselves feel that they're able to live by, and that ~ they feel ~ others ought to live by too.  All this, we are told, is so that everyone can feel "safe." Because "safe" is the most important thing there is, especially in any sort of group activity.

Now, let me take a step back.  I am going to talk about D&D again, but first I want to explain about something else.

When I was young, my father hit me.  I have talked abut this on this blog before, but about a month ago I had a revelation about it.  See, my father did not hit me when I was an infant, or when I was a child.  I remember that I was 14 years old the first time my father hit me with his fist. I had been given spankings, and I had experienced my father's belt, but as far as I knew, those times were not done in anger.  Growing up in the 70s, most kids had stories of being hit with a belt and that wasn't unique.

But at 14, my father made a connection in his head that a belt wasn't controlling my behavior.  I wasn't growing up the way he expected me to grow up.  I wasn't working hard at school.  I wasn't pursuing a future in science or engineering.  I wasn't speaking politely to my mother or my sister, mostly because they weren't speaking politely to me.  And I wasn't afraid of a belt.  In fact, I was getting to the point that I'd rather take the belt than kow-tow to an agenda that did not fit my interests.

So my father got desperate, and he lost his temper, and he hit me with his fists.  I had said something to my sister that was inconsiderate, and my father found me in the laundry room.  I can remember him coming right at me.  And me putting up my arms to protect my face.  And being hit in the face and the body.  And then it was over and I remember being told that I better never speak badly to my sister again.

That didn't happen very often.  But it did happen, and no, I didn't feel safe.  It happened right up until I was nearly 20.  But before I explain what stopped it, I want to explain what caused it.

When my father was hitting me at 14, my father felt SAFE.  I was just a young teenager, about 120 lbs, less than half my father's weight, and I was a nerd.  I avoided fights as a kid because I lost fights.  My father had worked as a forest fighter.  He had worked as a roughneck around oil wells.  When I was 14, he was 42, and a big man.  He had big, beefy hands.  I wasn't gonna do anything to him.  He didn't have to hesitate before rushing in to beat me up.

At 19, I was out of high school but still living at home.  I was bigger.  I had worked construction jobs.  My hands were harder.  My shoulders were wider.  I had played football and I had grown.  That's where I was when my father got his last try to learn me something.

I remember I was in the basement rec room.  And it was really late.  Something had pissed him off but I don't remember what.  I heard him coming down the stairs and I must have known why then, though I've forgotten now.  He had his fists closed.

I had my fists closed too.  And I remember I said, "Come on, old man.  You wanna fight.  I'm ready for you."

And just like that, my father backed the fuck down.  We never did fight.  And he never closed a fist in my presence again.

He didn't feel safe any more.

That's the center point of this post. I had a relationship with my father after that, and it was never what I'd call satisfactory.  Towards the end, it became fucking impossible.  But not because he hit me.  No.  We settled that business.  And settling that, for a time, there were things we were able to sort out between us and I did have some good times with him.  He's in an old age home now, with Alzheimers, and I don't visit him.  I stopped visiting him casually in 2007 when he was healthy and well.  I saw him at my mother's bedside in 2012 before she passed.  And at my daughters wedding in 2016.  Not since.  Because not all parents are good parents, and not even family deserves an infinite number of chances.

Beware of people who make a crusade out of feeling safe.  Asking to feel safe by controlling what other people say or do, or by what emotions they display, is not a good thing.  Any policy that begins with what other people have to do is a road to persecution and the abuse of power.

I did not treat my daughter as my father had treated me.  I did spank her on three occasions, all of which my daughter remembers. Those spankings consisted of her bending over my lap and being smacked one time.  And not hard.  Because I learned as a child that the worse thing about being spanked isn't the pain.  The pain is nothing.  The pain is choosing to be hit by the wrench by your father because fuck him.  The worst thing about being spanked is the humiliation that it is happening.

One spank just makes the message stick.  The first time I spanked her was to stop her from touching burning wood in the fireplace.  She was, I think, four.  I don't remember why the other two times.  It seemed to matter at the time.  But I felt safe too, didn't I?

I was not going to be my father.  And that's what matters.  It isn't about what people do to us. We can't, and shouldn't try, to control other people. That's my father's crime.  Not that he hit me.  But that he refused to understand me, or try to understand me.  I could stand here today and talk about how I didn't feel safe ~ and I sure didn't ~ but it was far, far worse that I wasn't understood than that I didn't feel safe.  I'd have taken a hundred beatings if it meant my father would have asked me a fucking question about what I wanted, and believed me.

But he never did.

People who want to feel safe aren't listening.  They don't want to listen. When someone raises a voice in their presence, from pain or confusion or from frustration, they don't want to hear any of that.  The safety people don't want to reach out.  They don't want to forgive anybody, anything.  They just want everyone to bend, to make them feel safe.

And once they feel safe, believe me ... that isn't going to end well.

I want to say that D&D shouldn't be about any of this.  It shouldn't be about people making rules about the behaviour of other people. If you don't like other people, then don't play with them. Or find a way to speak with them, and understand them, and forgive them.  There is no kindness like forgiveness, and no cruelty like shame.

Forcing others to quiet themselves for the sake of safety is shaming.  It is ritualized humiliation for people who don't fit it, who don't toe the line, who are too passionate, or too high strung, or too stressed for reasons that have nothing to do with a D&D table.  I am ready, as a DM, to ask someone who won't speak kindly to others to leave my table.  But I won't take a part in shaming them.  I won't make rules that enable them to stay on if they act as I dictate.  And I will let them join my game again, if we can talk and discuss things, and make room for our forgiving one another.

If we want to make rules, let's make that one.  Let's demand that if someone has an issue, if someone has raised their voice and gotten upset, that no one is allowed to speak with superior judgment that a role-playing game is THIS, or that people have gathered for THIS reason, or that for the sake of EVERYONE, an individual is disposable, or that the right to play somehow justifies a right to dictate how other people should present a game, or check-in because we say so, or kowtow to the lines we draw for ourselves, or fail to be acknowledged because, while they're of some kind of race, they're not of a certain kind of passively accepted personality.  How about the rule reads, "Everyone has a right to be heard, and acknowledged, and forgiven, even if that doesn't make everyone feel safe."