And if you have an edgy GM who is just throwing rape, torture and murder into a game that it isn't about plus is coming across as an utter Whizzard, then leave or if you can't manage a confrontation, get the rest of the group to tard smack that perv.
Yeah. I wrote my posts with the assumption that the GM is reasonable. If the GM is the one being a tard, it falls on the players to either tell him to cut it out, or just dump the chump outright. Half the times you see a would-be GM bitching about how they keep losing players, it's because they were being retarded and the players didn't want to put up with it.
(The other half is usually just being inexperienced and/or trying a setting/scenario/system that was just too advanced or difficult for them.)
And if it's something like Call of Cthulhu or Stormbringer, they get into some pretty dark content. For instance, the boxed campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep has an NPC presumably raped and impregnated by a Great Old One with a monstrous pregnancy that ultimately kills her, plus of course, she's completely insane by that time.
I'm not big on "trigger warnings" but especially if I knew someone weren't familiar with Lovecraft or might not be okay with it, I'd warn in advance that this gets seriously ugly and that there's rape, body horror and insanity in it, not to mention numerous opportunities for TPKs as it is a generally brutal campaign. In fact it beats out Tomb of Horrors as being one of the campaigns that killed every party I ran it with in its pure form.
Working as intended for CoC, then?
Anyway... trigger warnings are dumb as hell, because they assume the contents are all "triggering" for some kind of trauma. It's a small difference, but I prefer
content warnings. Those tend to work better because not everybody is going to want to experience the same themes, and in most cases it's not because of "triggers". It's because they just plain don't like the themes in question. Those things should all be set up and divulged by the GM ahead of time, and any player going in should be mindful of it.
If the GM says "this is going to be pretty hard on the horror, including body horror and rape", everybody signing up for it should be assumed to be fine with it. And if they aren't, it's on them to either put up with it, or excuse themselves. You don't start yelling for people to shut off the projector if you're at the theaters and the horror movie you bought tickets to ended up too scary for you. You get up, walk away, and regain your composure outside.
"What if the GM doesn't warn people ahead of time?"
See above: second verse, same as the first. If you're consuming a piece of media or playing a game that features something so heinous or frightening that it ruins your experience, you turn off the TV, close the game, and disengage with it. Same with RPGs. It may be 100% the GM's fault for being a sperg, but the biggest punishment for a GM is to lose a player (or a whole group if they fuck up hard enough). Getting up and walking away is going to upset a stupid or controlling GM far more than trying to argue with them or putting up with their spergery.
This whole notion that people are too fragile to be civilized when faced with things they don't like in a game of make-believe is just insane. It's not like they're watching a snuff video, the images are literally all in their heads.
tl;dr there are campaigns that feature disturbing content and I'm not going to change them for some shrinking violet. They can leave if they don't like it. This is why in current year I would never even consider playing or GMing a drop-in game at some cancerous troon-infested venue like a con.
Yeah, if you're doing anything with randos, be it a demo, a drop-in game, or organizing a game in a community you're not already very familiar with, you should be extremely mindful of the content you feature. Treat every player like they're a beginner: introduce them to your style of GMing (or playing) with something relatively inoffensive, and once you have a feel for the players you should be able to tell just what they are and are not fine with.
It varies from player to player, too. On my second group (still on hiatus, RIP), back when we were playing Hunter, one of the player characters lost an eye to a small worm creature trying to bury its way through to his brain. One of the other players got a little green around the gills (he hates eye gore), but the player controlling the character was pretty ecstatic at the end because his character got to wear a cool eyepatch. One player was mildly inconvenienced but was pretty much over it the next session, another other player had a lot of fun with the scene and ended up with a good memory.
You can't make everybody happy, so trying to prevent all discomfort is pointless. All you can do is, once you're aware of a pain point, to communicate with the players so nothing goes so far past the line that they're willing to quit over it. For example, the GM on my second group now keeps any descriptions of unfortunate things happening to eyes fairly vague when that player is in attendance. But he doesn't avoid it completely if it's called for by the setting or the situation. If there are crows pecking at corpses, the eyes are gone. Sorry, bud.
That's why I keep saying RPGs are social games: they work
much better when people are actually talking to each other.
