[rincebrain]

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".

[ddingus]

Ah ok.

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.

Apparently that is no longer the case.

[wizzwizz4]

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.)

[rincebrain]

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.

[ddingus]

Ugly times there!

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.