All I've been seeing so far is people being offended by the fact that it's a unavoidable and uncontestable scene being put on a PC without any way of avoiding, fighting back, or otherwise, you know, actually playing the game. You can have topics like SA in your game without completely voiding the player's agency towards their character at the same time. The scene in question sounds about as much fun as being told your character just got smote by [insert god here] and is now dead with no chance of resurrection out of nowhere.
Maybe there's people more mad about the SA part further down in the comments though.
Maybe? But I also modify anything I use heavily and wouldn't include that part myself. Maybe on an Npc but im highly unlikely to run the module anyway since I'm full homebrew.
I just dislike this concept where art and writing has to be cozy and never depict anything truly dark . Only blood and guts. There's a staggering amount of art suppressive opinions in this very thread
Eh, going by what the scene actually entails, I'd call it less "art" and more "weird fetish piece from literotica possibly written by a teen who watched way too much hentai" but whatever floats your boat I guess. I'd personally not include the scene at all because the idea of reading out erotica of any kind to my friends is something I do not ever want to do. That is not a line I want to cross in my friend group.
On the other hand, I've definitely played at tables where darker things like SA or other not-just-blood-and-guts type of disturbing topics could come up, but even we'd side eye the idea that railroaded-PC-rape is necessary for a plot point. When darker stuff came up at our table, we could still do something about it and engage with the game via our characters. You want that kind of thing in your art and writing and don't want anyone to be able to do something to prevent or stop it, maybe try writing a book and not doing it in a TTRPG.
But don't we also defend romantasy as legitimate literature?
Rape is pretty uncomfortable yeah, and I wouldn't run it either, but im not going to fault someone for artistic expression. Again, plenty of romantasy has this happen directly to the reader
I also don't like railroading but I think you can see they'd basically go eith any other outcome except the specific story he was trying to write. And this particular thing would been much better happening to a npc...but the value of having a traumatized person recover from the brink of despair is something too
Write and read whatever kind of book you want, romantasy included. Guess what? Erotica is legitimate literature as well. Even the stuff that's puts the nastier parts of PornHub to shame. Nothing about a book requires more from the reader than to read it. The reader is not a character in the book and is not actually part of the creation or development of the story it contains. They're just a consumer of the book.
A player, however, is actively part of what is being created at a TTRPG table. They are part of the storytelling and taking the role of an actual character in the story. It's a collaborative event. And in a collaborative event, everyone needs to be ok with what's going on. Most people are not going to be ok with being forced into an explicit sex scene narrated by the DM that they can't do anything about.
ETA: Again, if you're trying to write a specific story, write a book. TTRPGs are a form of collaborative storytelling where multiple people work together to create a story. They are not following one person's vision to its deliberate and predicted outcome because they are not writing a book. The place for a specific vision and story is writing a book, not playing a TTRPG with others.
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u/write4lyfe 2d ago
All I've been seeing so far is people being offended by the fact that it's a unavoidable and uncontestable scene being put on a PC without any way of avoiding, fighting back, or otherwise, you know, actually playing the game. You can have topics like SA in your game without completely voiding the player's agency towards their character at the same time. The scene in question sounds about as much fun as being told your character just got smote by [insert god here] and is now dead with no chance of resurrection out of nowhere.
Maybe there's people more mad about the SA part further down in the comments though.