As a 19 year old girl, I was shy and meek and very bad at standing up for myself. I worked at a Denny’s with a lot of creepy and rude customers, and one day a regular customer came in and he asked to borrow my pen. I was the only hostess on duty at the time, and the host stand only had one pen, which I very much needed almost constantly. We usually had more pens but servers would often lose theirs and come raid the host station for replacements. This particular pen was very excellent and I guarded the thing with my life… you all know the kind of pen I’m talking about, super ergonomic design and never runs out of ink and writes on any surface. This pen wasn’t going anywhere, not if I could help it.
Well anyway I told the customer, “oh I’m sorry, I’ve only got the one pen right now and I need it”. He said “don’t worry I’ll give it back when I’m done” and just took it. Well I sucked at standing up for myself and they drilled all that ‘customer is always right’ nonsense into our brains pretty well so I just resigned myself to having to track down another pen. (Not an easy task in that restaurant, there was some kind of black hole for pens there.)
Well another customer, a woman in her 40’s, saw the whole thing go down. After the guy had seated himself, the woman pulled a pen out of her purse, I thought she was just going to give it to me but she actually walked over to the guy, snagged my pen out of his hand, and smacked her pen down on the table and said very audibly “Respect her no.” And then she brought me my pen back. I was so touched by this simple gesture of coming to my defense that I paid for her lunch myself. The whole thing took less than 3 minutes but it honestly taught me so much, it taught me the importance of standing your ground, defending other women, and not letting men get away with ignoring your No. If a man can’t even respect a no on something as simple as borrowing a pen, how could he be trusted to respect you on even bigger issues? Anyway I just think about that incident a lot, the importance of standing your ground and not letting men feel entitled to take whatever they want. Bless that woman, I hope she is having a really excellent life.
As a GM, I’ve actually come to somewhat hate the “it’s what my character would do” thing. Don’t get me wrong: It’s great if you have a character with a clearly defined personality and you consistently portray that personality. That’s awesome. At least until that personality starts holding up the game.
Let me tell you two stories. Coincidentally, they’re both about Call of Cthulhu.
The first one happened with a group that I didn’t really know. I put out flyers looking for CoC players and this group responded. Since I didn’t know the players and also just couldn’t come up with a story in general, I just let them go through a pre-written adventure from the Keeper’s Guide. It was about their characters being summoned by a mutual friend who was about to die and told them they inherited a small house out at the edge of a village, but only if they can basically excorcise a…thing he summoned back when he was a college student dabbling in the occult. First thing they do: Hire a PI to look at that thing. That wasn’t really what I, or the person writing the adventure expected. So I just say the PI doesn’t come back. So they send another. And then another. I think they sent five in total before I decided one of them returns, disturbed by what he saw and tells them ramblings about what’s going on. Then they finally went.
The other wasn’t as extreme, but still notable. Different group. I wrote an adventure, put in a puzzle for the players to solve. Only two of the players even tried. With one of the others, okay, I think his character never even saw the puzzle, so that’s fine. The other? His character wouldn’t be interested in solving that puzzle. It took a while until it was solved (and I thought it was too easy), but I think if that other player would have helped, it would have gone way faster.
So, what’s my point? Well…in both these cases, the players acted totally in character. They did logical, sensible things. Logical, sensible things that totally stalled the actual story. And in both cases, it was the first session with these characters! So…if they had recognized that they envisioned character personalities that didn’t fit the story being told, they could have easily changed them and nobody would have even noticed!
There’s a point where you have to ask yourself “do I wanna act realistically? or do I wanna play the fucking game?” And okay, you might say it’s the GM’s job to keep the players and characters motivated and interested. Be that as it may, but it’s also the players’ job to, you know, actually play. They’re the protagonists, and they shouldn’t wait until the GM specifically asks them to do something and they should especially not just…stall. As in, stall the actual progression. Especially if it’s obvious that what they’re doing doesn’t really do anything (like the thing with the PI)
Just blowing off steam, I guess…
I had an abusive boyfriend who would do this to isolate me from my friends. He’d insist on joining my games, then play solitary, loner characters who were actively antagonistic to everyone on the team and refused to go along on any of the adventures.
YEARS later, I would have a couple in my group where the boyfriend was pulling the same bullshit (insisting on being included and grinding the game to a halt). I put him on sabbatical, but his girlfriend was SO AFRAID of how he’d react if she had fun without him, she spent the whole game with her character sitting beside her boyfriend’s character and watching the other players play the game.
This behaviour has become a warning sign for manipulative and abusive men. It’s a form of entitlement, where they believe they’re entitled to all the attention and a hand-crafted story just for them, but will reject it out of hand if even the tiniest point isn’t right. It’s a power move and they’re looking for someone to push around while they maintain plausible deniability (because if you get angry, “it’s just a game” and “it’s your fault for not making it engaging so I play along”).
Those gamers only play games to shut them down from the inside because it gives them a sense of power. Kick them out.
every major comics publisher in 2017:
what if we made the good guys.......fascists
every major comics publisher in 2017:
why is no one buying our comics
Look man, my local store can't sell Secret Empire, so they tried GIVING it away on free comic book day, but still nobody wanted it, so they ended up taking the boxes to the dump. They got turned away because they were printed on paper that wasn't accepted.
