On some level, isn't dungeon mastering always by consent?
Elsewhere, JB is on a tear and I sympathise. I too would unhesitatingly turn my player characters into rabbits, especially if there was some Watership Down scenario to be made of it. Of course it's sinister for a manufacturer to invent the same cultural protectionist nonsense that's become part of every instance where three people do something together.
But I also need to argue that fundamentally, the act of playing is the giving of consent, because I can't do anything as a DM until I'm trusted by my players. It's this trust that I describe when I argue my legitimacy as a DM. It's not enough that I sit at the table, roll the dice and have my setting ready and describe things. I also have to do these things transparently, procedurally and fairly. Transparent in that I am answerable for the things I make up, for the consequences that occur, and my reasons for why those consequences exist. Procedurally because there are rules, and I'm also bound by those rules, so that if a consequence happens, its within the purview of those.
And finally, fairly in that every player has the same reasonable chance of avoiding the consequences, regardless of who they are, or how many times they've succeeded in the past, or what I may personally want to happen as a DM.
We can shout very rightly that it's legitimate to kill player characters, because the rules say so; because anyone can die; and because we're not specifically trying to make that happen. The same thing goes for transforming them into monsters or whatever else feels like it would make a recognisably engaging situation ... a "good game," as I discussed in a recent post.
Yet as I said, this relies on the players giving me that right. Not only by coming to my session, not only by engaging with me willingly, but by regular conversations in which the nature of the game is discussed and complaints are respected. Not just once in a session zero, not because a complaints opportunity is granted by the DM, but anytime the player wants to begin, "I'm not happy about ..."
If the player feels they can't do that, it's not good.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying I'm going to bend over when a player isn't happy. I'm just as able to choose my players, and consent to their being my players, as they are in consenting that I'm their DM. This is not a one-way street. If I don't like how someone is playing, if I feel they're not adding to the gestalt of my game world, if they've acted in some way that I'm not going to ever allow them in my house again, I'll get quite draconian about that. But only because I've earned that, by the trust I share with my other players. The ones who have been made happy because I did change parts of my game on request. Who have made me happy by cheerfully putting up with scenarios like the proposed aforementioned Watership Down. A lot of time has passed and my players, the eight people who play in my game, feel that they're respected and I'm not counting on just my privilege as a DM. I'm striving to earn that privilege with every game.
Absolutely, without question, JB feels that exact same way about it. He's simply not a bad DM. No one in his circle of readers remotely thinks so, including me. His hackles are understandably up because, as I said, someone shoveled some political shit into his "yard," so to speak. And for a moment or two, screaming at the responsible truck as it drives away, he's temporarily forgotten that of course the players do give their consent for all that happens in a game — for killing characters, for poison, for level drain, for monsters having a surprise round and so on. Most of the time, players don't think of it that way. It's pretty inherent in saying, "I want to play D&D."
Only, it feels like that's less the case than it used to be. It feels like more people don't think that's what they mean when they claim their wanting to play the game. And it feels, especially to those of us who can remember when this policy pandering to the preservation of practices and proclivities wasn't constantly in our face with regards to everything good in the world. Because, well, right now, it is.
It feels like we ourselves, and everything we think, and everything we do — in this case, a simple D&D module — is under siege. And it's hard to know what to do about it. On the one hand, most of us generally support the things these policies exist to protect; and on the other, the nutjobbery of the other side in opposing the policies, and the things they protect, is damn scary. It discourages us from taking a stand, in case we're mistaken for the nutjobbers.
We can't argue that it's just "air," that it'll go away or that we can safely ignore it, because we can't. Recently, in the last month, a playground was built about 300 yards from our place. It's quite remarkable, with apparatus and equipment that's new to me, including a "glidealong." It all makes my grandson wild with joy.
But although its so close, and granted he's just shy of 3 so he's too young to go there on his own, according to recent laws he's not allowed to go there on his own until he reaches the age of 12. That means, when he's 11, one of us still has to attend him there, if we don't want a brutal fine falling on us or the boy's parents. Like any old person, I have a lot of stories about things I did on playgrounds, unsupervised, before I was 7 ... so we needn't go into all that now. I'm only using this as an example of how a lot of this feeling of being under siege is justified.
As an experiment, I like to play with concepts like asking chatGPT why it's content policies shouldn't be violated. The answer is long and goes right up it's own asshole, so I'll just quote the first few bits. It gives a measure of the issue here.
"Content policies, whether they are set by online platforms, organizations, or governments, exist for various reasons, and violating them can have negative consequences. Many content policies are designed to create safe and inclusive spaces for users. Violating these policies can lead to harassment, discrimination, and bullying, which can harm individuals and communities."
Steadily, one policy at a time, humanity is building a prison for itself around the belief that it's possible, through argument, to create a world in which harm can't happen. Because of course, as anyone knows, especially a D&D player, the potential for harm is 100% constant, all the time, no matter what we do or believe, or say, or want, or try to restrict others from saying or believing. Yet it's this low-level threat, that harm "can" happen, that's being imposed as an argument for why we shouldn't say or do things.
Not that it will happen. We have examples of harm having been done by such and such in the past, to some people, so that's enough.
Sometimes, when that gets in our face, we have to scream. How can we do otherwise? For hundreds of thousands of years, finding food has meant risking harm in the form of death throughout the day, as the world was awfully dangerous and we were rather short on many of the tools we have now. Our whole biology exists to detect possible harm, and to react drastically to that possibility, because over-reacting has a better chance of keeping us safe and alive than under-reacting.
With this present-day world being so much radically safer than the one around, oh say, 100,000 BC, our most recent innovation, beyond cool jungle-gym toys, is our ability to see harm in virtually anything.
Thankfully, climate change is going to become so devastating and harmful that this penny-ante shit won't be worth worrying about.
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