My mistake then. Misread or misunderstood Randy post.

Quote from: sureshot on March 18, 2021, 09:51:03 AM
My mistake then. Misread or misunderstood Randy post.

No offense taken.

I can't imagine not having a Session Zero or equivalent. Aside from rolling up PCs, it gives players and the GM the chance to discuss the system, quirks, dice or other equipment needed, the overall theme (wacky? mature? serious? Saturday-morning-cartoon?), and so on. Why not?

Quote from: Ghostmaker on March 18, 2021, 10:40:00 AM
I can't imagine not having a Session Zero or equivalent. Aside from rolling up PCs, it gives players and the GM the chance to discuss the system, quirks, dice or other equipment needed, the overall theme (wacky? mature? serious? Saturday-morning-cartoon?), and so on. Why not?

If you're playing with a long-time group using a familiar system in a tightly defined setting that everyone knows and the theme is pretty one-note, it can be possible to bypass having a formal S0. This is doubly true if it's a one-shot or limited-duration game with pregenerated PCs (like from some games' "starter sets").

I haven't had one since I started running games online last year, and it's going just fine with about a dozen randos in total that I've found online. It's not necessary for every group to have a session zero. And if the session zero is primarily meant to address something behavioural, like a player wanting to go too far with something sexual, then I have my doubts as to whether it will actually accomplish anything. Provide justification for kicking the player out later when he crosses the line? Is that the point?

I'm being a little blasé. I know that a session zero can be helpful for establishing tone and expectations. But if I'm running, for example, a dungeon crawl using some retro-clone, then that work is already done. The formality of it all puts me off.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead on March 18, 2021, 11:36:36 AM
I haven't had one since I started running games online last year, and it's going just fine with about a dozen randos in total that I've found online. It's not necessary for every group to have a session zero. And if the session zero is primarily meant to address something behavioural, like a player wanting to go too far with something sexual, then I have my doubts as to whether it will actually accomplish anything. Provide justification for kicking the player out later when he crosses the line? Is that the point?

I'm being a little blasé. I know that a session zero can be helpful for establishing tone and expectations. But if I'm running, for example, a dungeon crawl using some retro-clone, then that work is already done. The formality of it all puts me off.

Session 0 is seeming like one of those things where each person asked gives a different answer. My penchant for a session 0 relies purely on the game system and the players. If I have power gamers, and if it isn't a game like Traveller where we do chargen as a group, they make the characters offline. If I have "social" roleplayers (people there because their SO is there, or they just don't care about powergaming) I make the characters for them and modify as needed.

This new social justice oriented session 0 just seems like a minefield. I really don't want games with anything sexual and I really don't want to know what the comfort level of my friends are with this stuff.

Quote from: Reckall on March 15, 2021, 01:29:18 PM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on March 15, 2021, 12:42:30 PM

Quote from: Reckall on March 15, 2021, 12:36:03 PM
The whole fiasco about wokes vs. Lovecraft starts with the motto: "Let's Claim Back the Mythos!" Ah. Because they were yours and Lovecraft stole them?

   Let's see ... you detest the man (and he did have some detestable ideas

He was even more than a racist. It was Xenophobic. It is hard to deny this: it expresses his ideas in his tales, black on white.

Of course the obvious follow-up is totally ignored: if Lovecraft disparaged, among others, Italians and Asians, how comes that Italy and Japan are two of the countries where his tales are most enjoyed and revered? Maybe because the readers are able to put them in context and just shrug off the offensive parts? Well, no, because...

Quote
, although they're tangled up with matters of upbringing and psychology that might reduce his culpability)

No. Nope. You can't use this justification. SJWs forbid it for... reasons. You can't even point out how Lovecraft recognised many of his racial biases as wrong in his later years, because of... other reasons.

Quote
but still want to use and make money off his work?

Exactly. And that this doesn't give them at least a mantle of coherence. If they were Pontius Pilate, after condemning Jesus they would have gathered the Apostles and made money as the new Messiah.

Quote
  Seems like there are words for that kind of thing: exploitation, appropriation, etc.

I must confess that I bought a single book in the "Let's Claim Back the Mythos" series, "Winter Tide" and I read it with all the openness I could muster. What I found was... baffling.

The sheer description from Amazon should have warned me:

After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the U.S. government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god Cthulhu. (One wonders why) Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps (yup, THE CAMPS), and they emerged without a past or a future.

The government that stole Aphra's life (...As a deep one...) now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that Communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an instant, and hasten the end of the human race. (because letting instead people to worship Cthulhu will not totally hasten the end of the human race...)

Aphra must return to the ruins of her home, gather scraps of her stolen history, and assemble a new family to face the darkness of human nature. (next on this channel: Sympathy for the Body Snatchers!)

I managed to get to one third of the book before the hypocrisy overwhelmed me. Feel free to take back the Mythos, just don't present the people from Innsmouth as human beings - because truth is: you are not writing about the Mythos anymore. To support the "holy righteousness" that moves you, you had to change the very fundamentals of a key Mythos tale. 

Quote
  But what do I know? They are on the Right Side of History. They will bury us. Who is like the Beast? Who can make war against it?

As I said, I'm more optimistic than this. While SJWs are enjoying their brouhahas in their strictly controlled echo-chambers, Lovecraft is at the peak of his popularity in RPGs, tabletop games, videogames and comics. This is the real reason as why he become a target.

Like you, I find a lot of the effort to be hypocritical and shallow trend following. That said, I'm a lot more charitable towards "Litany" than you are.

The idea of taking a horror story and exploiting flaws in the narration to flip the narrative on its head is actually a pretty old trope. You can see it in The Dracula Tape from 1975. The Dracula Tape is genuinely clever because it points out genuine oddities in the original writing that make it seem less reliable, and uses that as a jumping off point to depict Dracula as being a victim of bad luck rather a villain. Also, it's possible to interpret Dracula as an anti-immigration metaphor and this alternate take as a challenge to that, if you like that sort of thing but I think the story stands well enough on its own at face value.

"The Litany of Earth" does something similar. You see, all the exposition on the deep ones is provided by a drunk and therefore isn't necessarily as reliable as you seem to think. The author uses this a jumping off point and asks "What if the drunk wasn't reliable?" Furthermore, the original story "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is literally an anti-miscegenation metaphor written by an avowed racist. Why is it so offensive to your tastes to recast the deep ones as a persecuted minority? Lovecraft's own racism supposedly softened over his life. Who's to say that he wouldn't have written something similar if given the chance to?

I mean, "The Litany" isn't actually very good on its own. It only makes sense as a sequel to "The Shadow" and can only be appreciated in that context. "The Shadow" is an anti-miscegenation tract, "The Litany" challenges that. You know? I'm not saying the Marsh family or the deep ones are paragons of virtue (that's a obvious trap anyway), but just because they're fish people doesn't mean they're innately any worse than humans.

"Litany" isn't the first story to do this, either. "The Black Brat of Dunwich" is from 1998 and recasts Wilbur Whateley and his brother as the victims of their grandpa's apocalypse cult and the body horror of their alien ancestors. Even over on sufficientvelocity's "let's read everything lovecraft ever wrote" thread, the OP asks whether Wilbur would have turned out a villain if raised by sane people. Well, "The Black Brat" has him turn out to be a good person despite his grandpa's rhetoric... because that doesn't describe a deconversion narrative (/sarcasm).

I can understand being disgusted with the typical SJW propaganda nonsense, but reinterpreting Lovecraft's writing to get an opposing message compared to the original story is not an inherently bad idea. Indeed, I think it's a fascinating way to analyze Lovecraft's work. Also, HPL's moral messages were often pretty twisted to begin with. Marceline and Muñoz don't actually do anything evil in their stories, but are depicted as villains simply because HPL considered them physically ugly.

Also, Cthulhutech takes HPL's work at face value and it gave us child rape farms and furries. I'd rather not like to encourage more of that stupid bullshit.

I don't think I've ever had a Session Zero. I usually have a pretty strong vision and I try to be clear about the kind of game I'm looking to run. IME players often don't really think to bring stuff up anyway, they assume their own preferences are normal. When players don't even notice eg "This will be run by text chat", what's the chances they bring up subtler stuff?

I try to give a movie-style age rating for the game, but (a) this will naturally drift over time and (b) different people and different cultures have different expectations anyway. My son was telling me how his Gen Z generation are far more sex-negative than my Gen Xers, in particular the idea of Page 3 girls in the daily newspapers, and sword & sorcery art showing female nipples, is something alien to his generation. Whereas my French players are less uptight than even Gen X Brits.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on March 18, 2021, 08:25:41 AM
As I have stated before, 99 percent of this shit can be managed in a Session Zero discussion where everyone understands the themes involved.

I think what they want is to be able to shut down a game when they don't like how it's going, who's playing, etc.

Quote from: S'mon on March 18, 2021, 03:45:06 PM
I don't think I've ever had a Session Zero. I usually have a pretty strong vision and I try to be clear about the kind of game I'm looking to run. IME players often don't really think to bring stuff up anyway, they assume their own preferences are normal. When players don't even notice eg "This will be run by text chat", what's the chances they bring up subtler stuff?

I try to give a movie-style age rating for the game, but (a) this will naturally drift over time and (b) different people and different cultures have different expectations anyway. My son was telling me how his Gen Z generation are far more sex-negative than my Gen Xers, in particular the idea of Page 3 girls in the daily newspapers, and sword & sorcery art showing female nipples, is something alien to his generation. Whereas my French players are less uptight than even Gen X Brits.

I've sometimes had a Session Zero and sometimes not. It depends how the game is getting organized. But even if it is there, stuff can definitely come up that wasn't covered in Session Zero.

I also don't generally use the X-card and other practices that the OP article calls "safety tools". They're not terrible. I've played in a dozen or so convention games where the X-card was available, but it was never actually used - and it mostly seemed like a bit of extra verbiage. The principle is that it supposedly makes it easier for people to communicate "Hold up, I've got a problem with this" -- but it's also possible to just verbally say "Hold up, I've got a problem with this".

Quote from: horsesoldier on March 18, 2021, 12:13:21 PM

Quote from: Trinculoisdead on March 18, 2021, 11:36:36 AM
I haven't had one since I started running games online last year, and it's going just fine with about a dozen randos in total that I've found online. It's not necessary for every group to have a session zero. And if the session zero is primarily meant to address something behavioural, like a player wanting to go too far with something sexual, then I have my doubts as to whether it will actually accomplish anything. Provide justification for kicking the player out later when he crosses the line? Is that the point?

I'm being a little blasé. I know that a session zero can be helpful for establishing tone and expectations. But if I'm running, for example, a dungeon crawl using some retro-clone, then that work is already done. The formality of it all puts me off.

Session 0 is seeming like one of those things where each person asked gives a different answer. My penchant for a session 0 relies purely on the game system and the players. If I have power gamers, and if it isn't a game like Traveller where we do chargen as a group, they make the characters offline. If I have "social" roleplayers (people there because their SO is there, or they just don't care about powergaming) I make the characters for them and modify as needed.

This new social justice oriented session 0 just seems like a minefield. I really don't want games with anything sexual and I really don't want to know what the comfort level of my friends are with this stuff.

I'm against the formality of Session Zero, but I think that it is a very valuable tool. The thing that I find galling is that these safety tools we discuss have a default framing for a tabletop RPG as being a psychologically threatening thing which demands the use of these safety tools to remove the threat. That base assumption is wrong because it isn't that hard to not be a creeper running a fucked up game or participate as a fucked up player.

If there is a problem with tabletop RPGs, it is not a systemic problem or a problem with RPGs in general, it is a problem with individual people playing those RPGs. The vast majority of safety tools are not focused on individual behavior issues, but on the entire group (usually the GM as the focus).

"Session 0" as a concept is far more useful than "Session 0" as an actual, kickoff session.  As such, it is also subject to all kinds of crazy, less useful additions by theory crafters.  All it should really mean is that the players and the GM are on the same page.  At least on the same page enough that the players have a reasonable guess that they want to play and can make characters appropriate to the game.  Once you've done that, you've addressed all the value.  If that's in an email or a phone call or whatever, then having a meeting as "Session 0" is just wasting session time.  If having a meeting as "Session 0" (or half a session or 15 minutes at the beginning or whatever) is what you need to get there, then you'll probably find that the time spent was useful in the long run.

My regular groups seldom have a "Session 0" as a game session because:

A. Gaming time is too valuable.
B. We in effect cover "Session 0" by talking about what we want to do next during meals, breaks, lulls, etc. while the previous campaign is happening.   

The exceptions are when we are learning a new system, as we find it helpful to work through character generation as a group in order to see if we really want to do this game.  However, we've also done that with nothing but pre-gens and a test adventure and jumping right in.  No point in Session 0 if Session 1 might be the end of that game. 

Maybe I'm strange that way, but I can usually determine if I have any interest in gaming with someone within 15 minutes of talking about a possible game. 

Quote from: Ghostmaker on March 18, 2021, 10:40:00 AM
I can't imagine not having a Session Zero or equivalent. Aside from rolling up PCs, it gives players and the GM the chance to discuss the system, quirks, dice or other equipment needed, the overall theme (wacky? mature? serious? Saturday-morning-cartoon?), and so on. Why not?

I've never run a session zero. We usually co-ordinate a new campaign over email and have characters created before the first session.
I find that the games I run and play in are usually about the same in tone and content, and nobody so far has had issues with it. Maybe it's the circles I game with.

No session zero since switching to D6. But in D&D we'd having something of a session zero as a side effect of the character being made, sometimes taking up to two hours especially with those old style character sheets of spell lists with all the checkboxes, I always hated when someone would print those all out. Would I like to have a session zero, yeah sure. But it probably wouldn't help anyway because hey we're gonna push mini's around and argue about the genetic defects that could be caused by mixing 15 absurd potions and force feeding them to the porkchop golem that you just turned the inn keeper into no matter what. This happens everytime you have players and write an adventure that 100% absolutely does not involve porkchop golems. I think human players are perhaps a defective component.

You don't need a formalized version of Session Zero, no. An email chain works perfectly well, as does a chat over lunch at your favorite burger joint.

Think of it as akin to agreeing on the betting and stakes before you play poker.

I like having a session zero to create characters and just talk.  Usually it takes enough time in character creation that there is not enough time left to start a proper session.