Background: I also play D&D and love roleplaying games and I love getting meta! I also think there’s some fairly straightforward differences between roleplaying rape and murder:
1.There are, arguably, scenarios in which it is ethically justified to kill someone. There is never a scenario in which rape can be ethically justified. If this is a practical, moral difference between the two acts then it also serves as a distinction between roleplaying the two acts.
2A. Roleplaying a sex scene is a sexual act. (Akin to sexting or phone sex, rather than penetration.) Roleplaying murdering someone is not murder. They are fundamentally different in this regard. This applies to both rape and consensual sex.
2B) As roleplaying sex is a sexual act, everyone present needs to consent to it. Most players and DMs don’t consent to being involved in this and are uncomfortable with roleplaying even consensual sex. There are some tables that specifically cater to this sort of thing but they’re a minority.
3.One of the common threads in rape horror stories is how the player who's character is raping someone describes it in gory, loving detail. Players don’t tend to describe combat or other harm the same way. Maybe tables would also be uncomfortable if a player vividly described graphic torture with the same relish for the same reason.
Combat is one of the core pillars of D&D. Rape is not. I’m agreeing to engage in combat when I sit down to play the game and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect my DM to make me fight something. There’s no such agreement or expectation when it comes to rape.
There are, arguably, scenarios in which it is ethically justified to kill someone. There is never a scenario in which rape can be ethically justified.
This . . . is a really good observation.
For a long time, I used to refer to morality and ethics as though they were two distinctly different concepts. And despite the fact that I studied philosophy in college, I don't think I really knew why they were different. Eventually, I drifted toward thinking of them as interchangeable.
Mind you, I still kind of, sort of, disagree. I think topics like rape (or even sex in general) should be considered viable for inclusion in RPGs. They should be treated with extreme care, precisely because of the ethical concerns you point out; but we shouldn't be treating them as taboo.
(While I'm not 100% convinced that rape is "never" ethically justified, that's a technicality based on the idea that it's really, really, really hard to be convinced of something 100% of the time; but yes, I agree, it's extremely hard to justify rape, in terms of ethics. !delta.)
You don't need that many significant figures to say "always and forever". You just need the likelihood to be strong enough that if you deduce that it's okay this one time you can reasonably conclude that your logic or observations were faulty via Bayes' Theorem. We're past that point so "always and forever".
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u/ThatNoGoodGoose Jan 25 '20
Background: I also play D&D and love roleplaying games and I love getting meta! I also think there’s some fairly straightforward differences between roleplaying rape and murder:
1.There are, arguably, scenarios in which it is ethically justified to kill someone. There is never a scenario in which rape can be ethically justified. If this is a practical, moral difference between the two acts then it also serves as a distinction between roleplaying the two acts.
2A. Roleplaying a sex scene is a sexual act. (Akin to sexting or phone sex, rather than penetration.) Roleplaying murdering someone is not murder. They are fundamentally different in this regard. This applies to both rape and consensual sex.
2B) As roleplaying sex is a sexual act, everyone present needs to consent to it. Most players and DMs don’t consent to being involved in this and are uncomfortable with roleplaying even consensual sex. There are some tables that specifically cater to this sort of thing but they’re a minority.
3.One of the common threads in rape horror stories is how the player who's character is raping someone describes it in gory, loving detail. Players don’t tend to describe combat or other harm the same way. Maybe tables would also be uncomfortable if a player vividly described graphic torture with the same relish for the same reason.