In the western world, a potion of healing is more akin to taking antibiotics, and imbibing alcohol has been agreed to be just a Regular Thing People Do, not a drug thing.
And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.
Let's look at another media: movies. Do you ever look at reviews or the advisory notices to see if a movie will be appropriate for someone you're watching it with? This is the exact same thing but since the story hasn't been written yet, you need to agree with all the story tellers (DM and players) what your story rating will be.
Do you skip this step when it's your closest pals who can handle a gory mature story? sure!
Is it good to have a system for others to use or in public settings? Definitely.
Hypothetical situation: someone had an abusive alcoholic father, and discussion of drinking and alcohol brings up a lot of unwanted feelings, including anxiety, unpleasant memories resurfacing, etc.
You're suggesting that the person in that scenario should either suffer those feelings in silence or should just keep trying new groups until they find one that just coincidentally doesn't bring up those topics?
Or someone who was sexually assaulted should keep that to themselves, and if discussion of the topic comes up in the game and makes them uncomfortable they should just leave and go find a new group without telling anyone why?
Are you suggesting that you could just say "hey, these are things that bother me so I'd rather not be part of the game if these topics are going to come up", and either the DM can exclude those topics, or they can refuse and the player can go somewhere else? Because that's exactly what is being discussed.
Lay out your ground rules. If there's no way to reconcile, go elsewhere, but it saves people getting blindsided halfway through the game and then having to deal with it while surrounded by other people and potentially feeling very vulnerable.
So what if your dad died last month, and the DM decides it'll be a cool twist for his BBEG to abduct your character's dad gouge his eyes out and try to kill him?
It's good to be able to explain these things, and IMO a lot of D&D players aren't comfortable being the first one to say that stuff without an "HR" exercise to give them permission.
Well, if my dad had died, I would understand the DM has no clue, until I say something.
If I say something and that scene plays out, things are understandably ugly.
If I don't and find myself uncomfortable, that is on me to manage, nobody else at the table.
How are these things so damn hard for people to understand?
All that was true when I played years ago. People would intro the game, have chat about stuff and then get into it. I recall having tough conversations, and I recall just being a good human to the other humans as a given.
I'm not sure which side you're arguing for, but I do agree with what I think I'm reading - that you should be able to tell the table what you are and aren't comfortable with. And the new rules encourage that.
You are reading it correctly. The before game meet n greet was where everyone caught up with everyone else.
Maybe being pre cell phone has something to do with it all.
Where and when I came from, the idea of having to do a "might trigger" rundown did not need to happen because of the dynamics I put into my prior comment.
How about this mess:
Say one chooses to not talk about a dead father confident the game will play out fine. Basically omit the father in the pre-game rundown of potential triggers.
Then the scene happens, and major trigger!
Now what?
Seems to me one falls back on the very basic rules above and acts accordingly.
Nobody else would be blamed. How could they?
The result is the talk didn't solve anything, which us my point and lack of understanding.
Another POV:
DM runs a scene that is a major trigger for someone. Bummer.
Pause game, help that person, right? Take a bit and figure it out? Do they want to end play? Is there something any of us can do? Etc...
Blame and shame aren't the answers. Being a good human is the answer.
Seems like someone is trying to write be a good human rules. Ah well. They tried I guess.
The point, I think, is that a lot of people pathologize "this is just a me problem" to the point that they don't want to bring things up at all, particularly if it's not someone they're very familiar with, because while some people react reasonably to, for example, "please do not include a graphic description of bugs crawling around, I had a really bad experience once and it still bothers me to think about", some people will also very deliberately introduce things for that reason.
Or perhaps you say "I don't like it if X" when you really meant "I am going to have a full blown trauma flashback if you surprise me with X", and they think that you meant what you said, and it's something they would do with all the maliciousness of hanging a "boo!" sign on your front door one day.
The goal is, I think, to recognize that a lot of people are bad at being the first one to bring things up, as well as a lot of people being bad at "reading the room", and set up an explicit normal structure to reduce the friction of doing so.
(Whether they succeeded or not is a different question, but I think that was the goal - to try and make it feel more normal and part of the structure and expectations, and thus have lower friction to bring things up a priori and in the moment, rather than people feeling like "I'm the problem" if there's no explicit moment for it and they have to ask.)
Yes, you can't make people be good people, but you can try to provide tools to make it feel more like the normal part of setting up and running your game to leave explicit room for them to say something. More or less the difference between saying "you can call us after filling out the paperwork and have us add manual edits to what you filled out" and "you can just include a form 412 and check the boxes for which things apply, and fill out an other box at the bottom if it's not covered".
In the case of someone being malicious, many just would no longer choose to play in their campaigns. Incentives to NOT fuck with people seemed plenty high enough.
It was never the case. In my experience, we can partition people into three groups: (a) "Why would anyone do that?"; (b) "What's wrong with doing that?"; (c) "People obviously do that." People from groups a and b tend to consider members of group c "sensitive", because members of group a don't recognise members of group b (considering them members of group a, if they even think about it) so believe group c are overreacting to imagined slights, and members of group b don't care because they don't think group c's objections should be sustained. Members of group c can usually distinguish between members of groups a and b, but it's such an uphill battle to convert members of group a into members of group c that it's rarely worth doing. (Members of group c often find it hard to empathise with members of group a, because "how can anyone be that obtuse?" – and members of group a often consider it the responsibility of group c members to do all the work of teaching them, because "you're the one with the extraordinary claim: that requires you to provide extraordinary evidence".)
I try to be a member of group (d): "I suspect that might be a problem, so why don't we talk about that?". This behaviour is very annoying, but it's clearly better than groups a, b or c. (In practice, though, I'm usually a member of group a, occasionally a member of c, and probably group b about loads of stuff I've never thought about.)
Part of the problem is a "boiling the frog" situation - if you're invested in the campaign, or in the social circle, just burning the bridge in the moment is a very high cost.
I'm not the type of person who wouldn't say something in the moment, but I've had a lot of friends who were in longstanding campaigns well past the point of the people involved dreading going to sessions because some interactions had turned the group dynamic into a shitshow, and some conjunction of the social ramifications of being the one to blow it up and sunk cost fallacy meant that they kept going even as it poisoned their friendships.
Neither am I. Perhaps the game value is different these days.
No game is worth my friendships. Would have to speak up, then follow it through and adhere to the golden rules to treat people right while it all gets sorted out.
Anyone not on board with sniffing something that toxic out is just going to have to go their way, best of luck, etc...
Maybe these things help people. Hope so though I do feel it all is a sort of dodge around people both being more direct in their interactions, which absolutely do include benefit of the doubt being given where necessary. And having just a bit thicker skin, that being derived from "we are as offended as we think we are" basically mandating everyone managing how they respond to potential offenses.
There just are a whole bunch of ways to do that which leave others the outs needed to bring the conversation to a reasonable place and more of us need to use them more of the time.
Put another way, the people burning an hour trying to figure out who is the biggest asshole deserve to have that conversation.
Maybe that just isn't so important?
Thanks for an interesting exchange everyone. I will read final responses on my way out.
> Why do you frame it as an "HR exercise" when it's just the people who are about to play a game talking about what they expect out of it?
Because they're so incapable of considering other people's feelings that they think the only time anyone ever does so is because someone cried to HR about something and HR is making you sit through a meeting to cover the company's ass legally, and not because anyone actually cares about how they make other people feel.
And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.