@Admiral said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):
@Thenomain I've been in situations where you are forced to use that sort of system. You compare it to raising a hand in class, but that is to avoid a large group of people all shouting 'LEMME GO PEE!'
In small social environments such as a tabletop, if you aren't comfortable enough speaking up to say 'Hey, this is bothering me' then the group hasn't done a very good job of making you feel welcome/safe enough to speak up.
And is it not plausible that suggesting tools to aid in this welcome/safe sense is reasonable enough to mention? You say that the system "gets around it", while I wholeheartedly disagree: It's another tool that people use to communicate. We don't consider crutches bad when someone's leg is broken, yet we use the term "a crutch" as if all people can stand equally on their own. This isn't true, and is a flaw in our language when we relate a tool to an attitude.
Not that you said it directly, but to follow your interest in solving an issue you personally had before you personally get burned by it again, I personally believe that how someone uses a tool starts with a shape of the tool, a personal belief understood by thousands of industrial designers, coders, writers, and artists.
I will follow this up with my personal belief that drawing lines of fault to a system that hasn't been attempted is a flawed argument. I'm sorry that you got hurt by people being too worried in the past, but people have been hurt because their own flaws needed help to overcome. A kind of crutch, we might say. A tool that is usually used to help people learn how to walk when they have problems doing so.
It's for them, not you, and until someone starts forcing it on you then I really wouldn't worry about it.
Whether or not you understand this after this moment is no longer something I care to help you with. Best of luck in your future gaming endeavors.
(follow-up: Re-reading this, I apologize for my part in Soapbox's latest spate of people basically not giving a shit what other people are trying to say, and only saying what they want to hear. I know some of this wasn't your intent, Admiral, but whether or not you get it means that you don't need it, and you're far from the first person in this thread to quasi-imply, quasi-be-inferred that these people are doing something wrong. It would be great if all of us could be as mouthy as me, or bold as you, or as comfortable as Faraday, or or or, but it's not, and after what happened in the White Wolf Vampire beta adventure basically having WW's loudest douchebag saying 'lol you guys can't handle hints of pedophilia also it's not pedophilia you're wrong lol you hate me but this wasn't me lol', I'm honestly pretty glad that Onyx Path has the balls to say, up front, This Is Going To Get Bad, these might help.)