... and in what way did you deal with it?

Just curious.

RPGPundit

rape, and it was (oddly) between characters.  

playing traveller.  usually i gm'ed, but this time i was playing.  just for the hell of it, a female diplomat.  one of the other players' characters had psionics.  he did some sort of psi thing and (memory is hazy) either knocked out or paralyzed my character, then proceeded to penetrate her with his gauss pistol.  not sure if anything else occurred.  

i, as a player, felt extremely violated.  my character went to the group's demolitions character and rigged the rapist's combat armor with a layer of tdx or some sort of plastique.  then i was able to later look at him through a viewport, eye to eye, and give him an "adios, fucker!" and hit the plunger.  

some say rape is really a power, not a sexual, thing.  i guess i could see it that way (for this example) in retrospect.  i usually gm'ed his characters, and this was his way of "getting back" at me.  he was one of the younger guys in our group, and prone to random acts of (game) violence and lunacy.  i had to deal with the (game) consequences of that.

i think we talked about it afterwards (after i blew him up) and we ended up with no hard feelings.  but it's still, well, weird.

edit:  player/character fuckup

OK, in my A|State campaign all the PCs started the campaign as amnesiacs, with a twist: they'd all wiped their memories on purpose, for obscure reasons which became apparent as the campaign continued (essentially, they were a group who wanted to discover the big mystery behind the City, and had found out that they needed to wipe their minds so that they could look at the problem without the cultural conditioning of their upbringing and experience). Naturally, of course, the device they used to wipe their memory was stolen while they were unconscious after the mind-wipe, so they spent much of the campaign as amnesiacs. Each of the players, rather than coming up with a character background, instead gave their characters personalities and trusted me to come up with suitable backstories. One player chose to play a whiz-kid mathematician and hacker who was severely mentally ill - somewhat like autism, but at the same time not quite.

In the A|State background there's a serial killer operating in one of the districts of the City, and I decided it would be cool if the crazy character was in fact the serial killer, or more specifically one of the killers - I decided it would be better if there were an accomplice to keep "the work" going while the PC had amnesia. In the backstory I came up with, the PC in question was the patient of a brilliant psychotherapist who happend to be mildly sociopathic, who had tried to correct her autism by making her a headband which would correct her brainwaves based on a reference pattern - contributed by himself. This let the PC in question go through the motions of functioning in society without actually "feeling" it - much as sociopaths are meant to do. A field trip to a dingy part of the city went a bit wrong, and the PC in question - who the player had established had a real thing about cleanliness - ended up killing someone who'd gotten her clothes dirty. The psychotherapist had witnessed this and it "clicked" with something deep inside him, and soon they were collaborating on murders on a regular basis - although she tended to do more of the killing than he did. When the mindwipe happened, she decided not to bring the psychotherapist onboard (she felt he was too much of a liability) and left behind her headband, reverting to autism.

The upshot of all this was that when the PCs first encountered the psychotherapist he was nervous but friendly - wanting to get a chance to talk with the psycho PC alone, but not quite trusting her when she wasn't wearing the theraputic headband and not at all willing to trust the other PCs. He'd come to idolise her as an "angel of death" and so kept popping up to help the party, to the point where they counted him as an ally, whilst at the same time he used his moments with them to muster the courage to go and do his own killing in honour of the amnesiac PC. He even thought he was free and clear when the PCs confessed that they'd all lost their memories, but eventually the ex-serial killer PC got her memories back and confessed to the party, who managed to bring the therapist to justice.

I think this worked for two reasons: a) before the campaign start, I said "if there's something you especially don't want to have in your character background, please let me know so that your PC doesn't get ruined if/when they get their memories back", and the player in question had expressed her willingness to have angsty crazy stuff happening in her background and b) I gave myself an "out" - if it looked as though the player would be upset or the party would implode if the PC in question turned out to be a serial killer, I could have pinned it all on the therapist. As it is, though, pretty much as soon as the PCs learned about the serial killer they started speculating that one of them might be the culprit, so I was pretty sure that they wouldn't be OOC disappointed if that turned out to be the case.

Once, long ago, in college V&V game, our GM became irate with our entire group because we refused to stop ridiculing his GMPC. As retribution he began staging fights that we could not win- this all culminated in a scene where we got to watch a supervillian molest a child from behind the protecton of a force field. I guess he thought he was being cool and edgy. We had a large group at the time, though, and at least two of the people in it were survivors of such abuse in RL. That was pretty much the last time we gamed with him.

Quote from: AosOnce, long ago, in college V&V game, our GM became irate with our entire group because we refused to stop ridiculing his GMPC. As retribution he began staging fights that we could not win- this all culminated in a scene where we got to watch a supervillian molest a child from behind the protecton of a force field. I guess he thought he was being cool and edgy. We had a large group at the time, though, and at least two of the people in it were survivors of such abuse in RL. That was pretty much the last time we gamed with him.

that shit is just totally over the line, at least for our group.  the closest thing we allowed was one guy stole an ice cream truck and sold LSD-laced treats to the unsuspecting populace.  then i asked the player if he was wearing gloves while he did so.  "uh, no. . ."

45 minutes later all hell broke loose.

child molestation, tho,  was just an unspoken no-zone for us.

There is pretty much no limits for us, at least as long as it falls with in the story line-child abuse, murder, mayhem, sodomy, rape, arson, torture, abuse of the elderly, robbery, child neglect and molestation, slavery, organ harvesting, abortion, legal guardianship, corporate misconduct, eco-terrorism, misogyny, drugs, addiction, mental instability : you name it we've likely at least touched on it.

In our Shadowrun games we often deal with very adult themes, in what I hope is a realistic fashion. (Similar to shows like law and Order, CSI, and many more.) The Players are not required to make heroes in my games-in fact they're discouraged from making one dimensional and one sided characters. Heroes, like everyone else, have flaws. Sometimes these are major league flaws. Other times they're just minor quirks. All I am looking for is a well thought out concept.

This means sometimes we get PC's who aren't heroes at all. In my game I've had players play serial killers, rapists, arsonists, murderers and criminals of all sorts. Much of what they play depends on the theme of the game-for instance in the current Shadowrun game they're undercover cops, who specifically deal with drug enforcement. So they've come across all sorts of situations in which drugs have ruined peoples lives-selling kids for drugs, prostitution for drugs, murder for drugs.

In other games they have played special operations teams, straight up criminals for hire, regular people thrown into extraordinary events, gangers, and even private investigators.

My group likes adult themes, and although we definitely keep the tone light they like it when the opposition isn't one dimensional.

The D&D game we're gearing up for will deal with the whole sale slaughter of a village, and genocide for land and religion will play a major theme in the game. As the PC's will all be teenagers so will legal guardianship, consent, and other age related themes. They will have to deal with the ideas that often people look at children their age as property, and as incapable of making decisions on their own.

I will say this-we've had a few games that were over the top (We ran a toxic shaman, eco-terrorist game that was really crazy.) and we've had a few anime/hentai rape scenes in the 20 some odd years we've gamed-more as humor, and certainly not something described in graphic detail. (That would be a little creepy I think.)

And we have had a few wing nuts who were really into it, but those cats don't last long at our tables. Overall we don't shy away from anything, but we do expect everything to have a reason to be in the game-even if it's just humor.

Quote from: beeberchild molestation, tho,  was just an unspoken no-zone for us.

I'm pretty sure my group has dealt with this issue, though from behind so many veils that it was never explicit.  But ... I'm pretty sure.

One of my buds played a traumatized psychic girl unhealthily fixated on her own father ... and there were lots of loaded statements about "I will never forgive you for what you did," and the like that never quite specified.  I don't think that my mind is particularly in the gutter though, to think I detected a subtext of molestation.

It got nasty.  Our question, on-screen, was whether we should (or could!) stop her from taking her vengeance on her own father.  My character came down saying that, yes, we had to stop her from killing him ... in order to save her.  Turned out that we didn't stop her ... though the player said that he agreed with my take ... that by destroying her father, she'd broken her own mind beyond any reasonable repair.

I don't know if that's either particularly controversial or mature, though.  Freighted?  Yeah.

Infanticide.

It came up during an old Mage: The Ascension campaign when one of the players who was skirting dangerously close to becoming Nephandi suggested the murder of a newborn to seal a blood ritual he was working on. I felt more than a little uncomfortable with it, but at no point considered using GM veto. It's fiction, after all.

Quote from: DrewInfanticide.

It came up during an old Mage: The Ascension campaign when one of the players who was skirting dangerously close to becoming Nephandi suggested the murder of a newborn to seal a blood ritual he was working on. I felt more than a little uncomfortable with it, but at no point considered using GM veto. It's fiction, after all.

was it dealt with "on screen" or "off screen?"

wholesale, large-scale destruction never stopped our group, but mentioning dead kids would tend to put the brakes on that sort of behavior.  plus there's a difference between bombing a neighborhood v. actually knifing a tyke :eek:

It was once houseruled in one of my groups - on the fly - that you could indeed coup de grace with your teeth, but that it would take two full rounds.

Quote from: beeberwas it dealt with "on screen" or "off screen?"

"On screen," but in a style I'd call "soft focus." I didn't want it to get too graphic, but at the same time I didn't want the player offing babies without accepting the visceral consequences of his actions.

Thankfully that sort of thing hasn't come up again in over 10 years. It's not the kind of experience that I game for.

Rape between PCs. It was pretty awkward, but I wasn't involved. The usual adult themes crop up all the time with the group I play, but usually the bad stuff happens to NPCs or to PCs in their backstories.

Well, there's 'adult' and then there's 'mature'. Those two words do seem to get switched around a lot with 'adult' being more likely to be stuff that an adolescent would consider 'mature'.

Quote from: One Horse TownWell, there's 'adult' and then there's 'mature'. Those two words do seem to get switched around a lot with 'adult' being more likely to be stuff that an adolescent would consider 'mature'.

I did once have an idiot PC, playing a Drow ninja of all fucking things, who insisted on engaging in some fairly detailed torture of a captured vampire.

The rest of the party and I were incredibly uncomfortable and disgusted with the whole thing, and sat there making sarcastic cracks about Abu Ghraib, while the player got all up in the GM's face just about describing in intimate detail various malign behaviors.

The worst part is, the GM (and by proxy the vampire), had made abundantly clear he was all too happy to give away all the information we needed, because he didn't believe we could kill his master anyway, so the entire thing was basically pointless and done only for the player's sadistic pleasure.

It wasn't that long afterwards that he stopped showing up to the game or to hang out, I think I caught on that the lot of us were pretty thoroughly disgusted by his behavior.

Quote from: One Horse TownWell, there's 'adult' and then there's 'mature'. Those two words do seem to get switched around a lot with 'adult' being more likely to be stuff that an adolescent would consider 'mature'.

In fairness to RPGPundit, he did can controversial/"mature", with "mature" in quotes, so I think it's clear that he's looking more for the stuff that an adolescent would consider "mature" (i.e., controversial and/or shocking).