@Arkandel (for sure this time)
Playing such obsessions out appeals to me, as I've no interest at all in healthy IC relationships. Those can't go anywhere because what's left for the PCs to do after they've hooked up and everything is working out just great for them?
That doesn't really seem to follow. I mean, if an IC relationship is the primary focus of your storytelling interest, that would be true but a relationship is only one part of your life. Other shit can still go terribly wrong, even when you're in a healthy relationship, can't it?
@Ganymede
But people who seek rape RP from unknowing or unwilling participants need to cut that shit out.
Truth.
@Sunny
Not so, with rape. Fuck, if I say 'I don't want to deal with childhood sexual abuse as a plot' people are like 'oh okay no big deal', but if I recoil from rape RP 'but it's the world of DARKNESS'.
You need to stop associating with such shitty people, then. Anybody who gives you shit for not wanting to participate due to OOC/RL discomfort is a shitty person, regardless of the subject matter.
Putting 'violence' on the tin, okay, maybe I should go play Harry Potter instead of The Greatest Generation if I'm dealing heavily with war related PTSD. I don't get to do that about rape!
You sort of focused on the violence angle, but that's really not at all what WoD has presented pretty much from day one. Hell, the flagship game going all the way back was Vampire, a game about predators who use physical and mental domination to take control away from their victims by taking what they want from their bodies while forcing them to experience sexual ecstasy. And that's just the starting line for presentations and implications of sexual violation in the game lines. It is absolutely on the tin, inasmuch as anything is on the tin. The WoD has always described itself as very much like the real world, except with all the terrible things that happen in the real world being cranked up to eleven both in frequency and in horror. How is that not putting it on the tin?
Too late, though. Already twitching.
That's unfortunate, but also not compelling. Do you watch the news/read blogs covering events/etc? Because there's some truly awful things happening out there in the world on the rape front, from college campus creeps to rape camps in other countries. When that shit comes up do you refuse to watch that news channel ever again? If that's too far from entertainment, how about television shows? Most of them don't advertise 'SOMEONE MAY GET RAPED ON THIS SHOW AT SOME POINT', but it's happened on many of them at one time or another. Sure, you have a reasonable expectation that it's not going to happen while you're watching children's television, or an evening sitcom with a laugh track, but if WoD were a television show it's one where something rape-y would pretty inevitably happen. Which... it actually did if I'm remembering my Kindred: The Embraced right. 
I can see a lot of harm, and the list of good is.... Well. I can't think of any, but I'm sure somebody else could.
The one person I know RL with combat related PTSD finds the portrayal of combat veterans and their reactions to/portrayal of their personal trauma to range between offensive and triggering, and has ranted at length about Nerve and so many others because of how common the character trope is. These people don't know what it's like, they don't really understand what people really go through or have to deal with when they come back, they're just using an easy to identify trauma for an attention grab and bring it up whenever that attention wanders away from them. So on and so forth.
What good does it do to allow people to play those characters? Hell, what good does letting people play any particular concept or through any particular roleplay actually do, that's true for one type but not another? 'What good does it do?' seems like a false question asked to frame the followup as more important. What good does it do to roleplay sex between characters? What good does it do to sit in bars and chat? What good does any of it do, and how do you even answer that for other people, when the value of any of it will vary wildly between persons?
What harm does people portraying victims of terrible trauma do? Are you injured by someone portraying a combat veteran? I'm not. Animal abuse? Do you shut off your computer and walk away if there's a zoo massacre? There are absolutely people who find even the suggestion of animal cruelty so disgusting that they've exited stage right when it's come up in RP, and even refused to RP with those they felt responsible. There was a rant on the Dunlin channel back when I first started playing Xenos about how terrible it was that they weren't warned ahead of time that it would come up in the PRP. Clearly they felt there was some kind of harm involved, and a cursory glance at the internet suggests they aren't alone. Is your trauma greater than whatever's setting them off? Maybe. There's no way to know without questioning the very thing they don't want to be confronted with.
What harm a subject of roleplay does is entirely dependent on individuals and their particular traumas and issues, just like why someone roleplays a given thing will vary pretty wildly, no matter how much people want to paint with the brush that everyone doing X is just an attention whore/monster.
Again: Rape isn't special. Its victims don't have a monopoly on trauma, or on feeling sick and disgusted at it being used, nor on being offended when it's handled in a shitty fashion by people whose closest experience with it is network television or other truly shitty fictional portrayals.
Personally, child abuse is something I would put on the same level of rape. Please just don't, for the health and comfort of your fellow players.
Should we just have a game-wide vote every six months to get a majority opinion on what can and can't be a subject of role play? How many people have to be 'harmed' by a particular subject for it to be against the rules to engage in it? How will we judge relative levels of trauma to properly weigh the ratio necessary? Is it enough if just one person speaks up? It would be at pretty much any game table, after all.
@SilentSophia
Honestly, call me Prudey McPruderson No Sexhaving but I'm pretty okay with a ban on rape RP on games since the drama bombs are awful.
Please don't use this example. Whatever one's opinions on the subject being used in roleplay, it's got nothing to do with Prudey McPrudeperson, or how one feels about Sexhaving. Not that I believe you think it does, but phrasing. >_>
