As I said, I posted on here many years ago, back in the SR3 days. You can enjoy your paranoid fantasies, but I have to insist that calling someone a "14-year-old" for daring to include sexual themes in their game is worthy of being called "flaming."

Furthermore--and I think it's this mental disconnect that's driving a lot of the hatred towards this GM--equating a thematic appreciation for a story that involves rape and murder to thinking that rape and murder are cool is childish and wrong. I think that Requiem for a Dream is a great movie, that does not mean that I think extreme heroin addiction is cool. Telling a story about something =/= endorsing that thing.

I don't know enough to say - it could either be a GM who has a thing against opposite-gender roleplayers, a GM who thinks a female player needs to be handled with kid gloves... or he could be a GM who know that some things (rape, unplanned pregnancy) might be triggers for a female player, and to be cautious using them. But from what I gather, the player more or less shrugged over the whole thing - and is "cured" now.

@Umidori:
Your concept might not be set in stone, but my worry is that it might look that way to the players - without an omniscient view, this might just look like a GM power trip or an unbeatable NPC to them. Then again, if your players are familiar with your GMing style, maybe they won't make those assumptions.

One of those things can be a trigger for men, as well...well, they both can, but one can be an equally-heavy one. Not as commonly, but it can, and the assumption that it isn't is wrong...as is the assumption that women are somehow less capable of handling adult themes than men.

However, I will say that its pretty easy to develop a bias against men playing female characters in tabletop gaming. In a lot of situations it gets...well, gross. It's by no means the standard, and holding it against a player is definitely wrong, but we all know what I'm talking about.

Noone was "Called" a 14 year old. I said that the behavior --seemed like-- the sort that a 14 year old would indulge in. And it does.

There's a huge difference between "A story that involves rape and murder" and "You wake up, you have no idea why but you've been raped and are pregnant" or "You wake up, and you have to kill at least one person a day, and you have no choice in it" and "You wake up and when you see an elf you have to attack and rape her"

I think there's a huge mental disconnect if someone can't see that. There are ways of including such "themes" ((If you want them)) other than taking your player char's and making them the subjects of such, with out any way out of it. You can do 100s of stories with out 'You wake up raped" or "You wake up a rapist". Shadowrun isn't fluffy and nice and such. There's still a far step from "There's a serial killer in town" to "You wake up and you are now a serial killer" there's a huge difference between "There's a serial rapist in town, targeting elves" and "You're now a rapist who must rape elves and look, the room you just walked into is full of elves!" One is approaching a topic, the other is forcing it on players and their characters.

Myself for example, have very very strong views on rape. Personally I think it should be a capital offense. If some GM went "Ok you wake up and now you're a rapist, you rape elf women and look the room you walk into is full of elf women, no savings roll and you don't know why" I'd have been pretty vocal with words best not said in mixed company about what I thought about that. Because as a player, I never would, and I don't make characters that would. (( I've made bad guy characters in the past. None were ever rapists.)) Can others? Sure. But __I__ Don't. Nor do I play rapists. Rape isn't a 'theme' that should be forced on a group. Be it you're the raper, or the one that's raped. Not with out a very clear and upfront discussion before hand, to make sure your group is down for that.

Springing a story in this fashion on the group with these forced behaviors is not cool. I wouldn't WANT to play with a guy who thinks they are. That's me. That's my preference. I would seriously question someone who thinks such things are awesome and has tons of fun playing a forced rapist or forced rape victom with out warning and out of the blue.

Or, "you wake up after what seems like years of torture in Hell that was actually a UV host and now your eyes have been ripped out and you take orders from a murderous AI, helping him capture, torture, vivisect, and zombify other people, including children, which by the way, you are one." How is kidnapping, torturing, experimenting on, and zombifying most of a community of nearly 100,000 people okay thematically, but rape is a no-no? That's not a rhetorical question. I actually seriously wonder about this, because what does it say about us as people if we're okay with role-playing mercenaries who will murder innocent people on the reg in order to get paid on, and our moral compasses don't falter for a second until rape is brought up? One of the reasons I stopped playing SR in the first place was that a lot of the people playing it have no idea how to deal with themes of moral ambiguity or outright moral evil. I like my RPGs to have serious themes and SR just wasn't doing it for me. I actually quit playing RPGs altogether for a long time, and just read White Wolf sourcebooks without ever playing (which, I'd seriously stay away from any pre-nWoD WW stuff if THIS makes you queasy).

Anyway, this is Shadowrun, and incredibly messed-up stuff happens. If you don't want that messed up stuff in your game, that's totally cool. However, I think that the OP's issue was never really about that, it was more "holy crap, what just happened to us?" The point being, it doesn't seem like the players in question are totally adverse to playing a game this dark--that was an element of the debate that the posters on the thread really brought out. His problem was, "is it cool that GM fiat just totally turned our characters into compulsively evil versions of themselves?"

And my answer to that is, if it makes for good story, it's certainly better than "Well, you all just got stunballed. They slit your throats. Make new characters." Or the far-too-common "You wake up in a dingy holding cell. Now you owe X people Y favors."



I agree with all of this, actually, particularly the first part. As for the second part, as I said in my original post, that's one of the main examples of this GM severely failing. In this instance he's beating the PC over the head with something that should be handled with extreme subtlety, if at all. And if the player in question, or the group as a whole, is not cool with their game having that kind of content, the time to speak up about it was exactly that moment. Not later, after 8 pages of Dumpshock arguments. As others have pointed out, starting GMs make mistakes. I agree that this one is doing so, but I also think he deserves a chance to learn and tell what could be a very good story in the process.

I would say, however, that if that kind of thing continues, it WOULD be time to kindly ask said GM to take a break from being a GM until he figures out how to do it right.

Also, I have to say that I have a distinct feeling that the sniper who wasn't actually assaulted in any way other than having a *thing* of some kind implanted, was initially intended to be pregnant, and the GM wisely backpedaled on it when he saw the response he got. So, look, learning.

I've seen you say this several times, and I think you're viewing it the wrong way. The GM was trying to be considerate.

I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but I would say that for women in general, rape and unwanted pregnancies happening to them are a much, much scarier and repulsive thought than for men. So for a female player to have an unwanted pregnancy forced on their character would be a much less...acceptable...curveball than for a male player. That's all the GM was saying. Same as if a player's parents had died of cancer, the GM might think twice before arbitrarily giving the character cancer.

That's a false analogy. And in general this whole idea is sexist.

Basically, if the GM was being "considerate," it would be analogous to him having a PC castrated, but only if that PC was played by a woman. I think that most would find that absurd.

@ds1138

There're far better ways to handle this than magically turning characters into compulsive rapists. Seriously.


That's presuming a number of things not necessarily true of the character. Actually, that makes her act out a deeply American and conservative view of pregnancy. Again, there are far better ways of handling this than magical pregnancies - which are easily ended, and quite honestly, in a world where cutting off pieces of yourself on a trip to the mall because it's fashionable, where to the death fights are the most popular sport and where violence and death are everyday occurrences, I fail to see how abortion would even be an issue to the unwashed masses outside sheltered corp enclaves of very socially conservative corps like Ares or Shiawase.


1) So people who have casual sex need special care, at least in case they're women?
2) You're really presuming a lot and judging even more here. "Amoral" is not a natural constant, no matter what you may experience in the sociocultural bubble you may or may not live in.
3) I do not want to talk to you about Jesus, thanks.


Which he did not. That's the problem here. Have you even read Hawke's posts?


Are we projecting ourselves a lot into Umidori? Seriously, people need to learn to differ between attacks on themselves and their works. Published work - which is ALL published text or art in general - is up to public reception and discussion, and has to stand or fall on it's own. It's in your own best interest to keep it at arm's length, and it's an even better idea to not project yourself into the place of a criticized piece's author and start lashing out. It makes you unhappy and look like an idiot at the same time.


Yeah, or rather, sublimated bias acted out like this. Real men need to be a, real women need to be b. I agree with you there, tenatively (because I still do not knwo the GM's perspective or even the whole story of the campaign). Of course, you fell into that trap with your first post yourself. Fortunatly, this indeed isn't a gender discussion board.


I am genuinely sorry for you, you must live in a horrible place indeed.


This can apply to women playing men as well. It's not the standard for either, though.


Because the society you're from and the game was designed in celebrates murder and taboos sexuality. You answered the question yourself in your first post.

My greatest issue with the "you're a rapist now, mwahahaha" thing isn't the rape as such, it's the GM invading the player's area of autonomy massively - acting out his character. He just dictates a major personality trait here, unilaterally and seemingly out of nothing but spite (or carelessness). It'd be the same if he'd force a character to be madly in love with a GMPC, convert to a Religion of his choice, or suddenly become a pacifist. The Samurai skims the issue too, but there we can at least consider this a byeffect of what he does anyway. With the face? It seems a lot more invasive on the player's autonomy in designing and acting out their character's personality.

The GM was trying to push some limits, and he realized that the limits might be nearer (narrower?) for certain groups of players. Sounds considerate to me, even if I don't agree with the rest of what the GM did in the game.

Castration isn't really something most men have to worry about, ever, even though it's not pleasant for us to think about. Your example fails to be analogous.

But this is veering into politics or whatever and isn't SR, so I'll stop now.

Attacking my argument for being presumptuous and then wandering through a string of presumptions doesn't validate your argument.

And please, don't accuse me of trying to convert you to Christianity, or whatever that was. That you assume any mention of the word "morality" is tied to Christian theology indicates the extreme bias from which you're operating.