I’ve heard from several people that there’s been a recent rash of sensual, sexual, and downright explicit RP happening in live chat in various rooms at Dragon’s Mark.
This is nothing new.
Back in March, 2008, Panther, arguably the most well-known and public face of the Admins at Dragon’s Mark, found it necessary to post “The Red in RDI is not for Red Light District” which clarifies:
[R]ecently the amount of.. well, I’ll be blunt, the amount of cyber-sex being done in our public chat rooms has become… epidemic.
. . . I am not talking about folks playing tonsil-hockey in the RDI or whatever. Yes, that can be annoying to watch.. and yes… if a host or other patrons ask you to tone it down, you should. What I am talking about here is “sex”, played out in the chat rooms…
Panther then unequivocally pointed out that players involved in this will face at least a 3-day suspension of their account. Both he and Destre went on to point out that if people do witness something inappropriate, they can PM any admin or make an anonymous report via the “Contact Us” page under the More Info menu.
These days I am only intermittently playing at Dragon’s Mark and I can’t muster up enough prurient interest to search through logs. I haven’t seen many of these recent sticky scenes. I did have the dubious honor of witnessing some characters blatantly fondling and dry-humping their way to climax. But I’ve also been told there are characters:
- strutting around the Red Dragon Inn stark naked (with anatomical descriptions of what’s visible)
- doing “accidental” trip-and-fall faceplants into other character’s manbits with sly promises of more to come
- describing what recreational activities their mams might be good for
- shamelessly going at it in the Southern Glen.
I believe sensual scenes can be roleplayed well, even with tactful regard for an under 18 audience, but they’re usually not. At least not in any forum I’ve ever roleplayed at. More often than not, these public scenes come across as completely artless, juvenile and often laughable descriptions of Insert Tab A Into Slot B. At best, it’s as described by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: “Writing sex has always been the fast and dirty way to avoid hard and honest writing.” At worst, it smacks of a sad and desperately unfulfilling personal life.
Regardless of my opinions, Dragon’s Mark’s site guidelines appear to require live roleplay to be conducted within a PG-13 rating, even while vaguely acknowledging that the Red Dragon Inn has “been slowly maturing past the original “PG-13″ guidelines in many ways.” I think it’s that last sentence that’s causing confusion among certain members of the community.
I wrote about PG-13 and other ratings here.
Either the Red Dragon Inn is PG-13 or it’s not PG-13. The guidelines read that it’s not PG-13, it’s “maturing past PG-13 in many ways.” One would assume these maturing guidelines now stand somewhere between PG-13 and R or TV-14 – and either of those would permit the sensual/sexual roleplay that’s been happening.
I’d like to see the Red Dragon Inn remain a PG-13 locale. However, if the intention is to mature past that, the guidelines should be bumped up to an R-rating or TV-14. The thing is, switching the Red Dragon Inn to a pure PG-13 rating would exclude a lot of “adult themed” roleplaying that is currently accepted in the live chat and even the forums. However, if those sorts of more mature scenes are not allowed, the guidelines should clearly describe the environment as PG-13.
Either way, players have a right to know how they should conduct their roleplay at Dragon’s Mark.
Randomness in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1:
They have rules and common-sense guidelines at the RDI and not enough people for anyone to keep track of who is breaking them and where. There are probably hunnnndreds of people posting, writing and signing up to the site and a handful of the select few cannot keep everything all in tact.
Hoping a forum and site that large will self-police on it’s own is ridiculous, it’s not going to happen. Things are going to slide, people are going to look the other way, favorites yadda yadda.
If the RDI is going to have any rules, it’s going to need to cough up some people to enforce them and it just can’t. Frankly, keeping track of that many role players and keeping the volunteers to monitor everything would be a full time near impossible job and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Here we get the issue with people sliding under the radar, getting away with breaking rules no one has the time to make sure everyone else is keeping while others see other role players getting away with murder and the rules end up just being a lot of hot-air no one pays attention to, anyway.
That’s what I think I see currently happening at the RDI. There aren’t enough people to catch and enforce these cyber sessions in the chat rooms–or–some one let something slide either on the forums or in a chat room, someone saw this and just assumed they could get away with the same which in turn, brings about another vicious cycle.
If the RDI wants people to play by the few rules it has, it’s going to have to crack down on them and dole out punishment no matter who has broken the rules.
And, wow. Here, have a small essay.
Edit** If the RDI wants people to play by the few rules it has, it’s going to have to crack down on them and dole out punishment, no matter who has broken the rules and the players themselves, are going to have to grow a pair of manly balls and let the admins and staff know when people are breaking the rules. Even if these people are “popular” and “well known”.
I left that part out because it is 7 am and I tipe gud.
Having personally witnessed some of the behavior, people stripping down in the RDI out of some sense of a game, I directed an admin, who was online at the time, to it. Was there something done? I had no evidence to confirm or deny it, but the event continued and the same characters (not saying people, as maybe they don’t do that kind of thing with other characters) do the same stuff to this day.
One thing I have noticed is Admin has had, and perhaps still does, difficulty delegating. Repeatedly there have been words of how little time they have, they do have real lives, too, but they won’t establish subcommittees to handle difficulties. Image copyright infringement in the gallery could be monitored by three people designated with the ability to remove materials not appropriate to the gallery. Five people could monitor the forums. This is basic management of an organization that has grown beyond what three or four people can handle.
/soapbox
The site will never be properly policed, the admins don’t have the time nor will they give the proper power to others to handle such situations.
I frankly don’t blame them for their apathy. At times the site just seems like factions of children all squabbling for favor from their mommies and daddies. If I was admin over the DM and RDI all I would want to deal with is creating new folders and transferring old ones to the Catacombs. Sure, they have policies that need to be enforced, but when people try to manipulate those policies because of personal issues with other players I would get pretty fed-up of dealing with infractions. Sure, some of them are very obviously blatant and need to be dealt with. But when there is a larger majority of infractions being reported that are due to personal disputes between members, it has to get pretty tiring to try to attempt to filter out the valid reports of policy violation versus the ones borne out of player disputes.
I’ve suspected for a while that the Admins are getting pretty exasperated with the site and all the infighting. And I think this is a result of people being constantly unable to: keep their disputes to themselves, agreeing to disagree, take the internet way too seriously, or try to play nice with others.
*stop taking the internet too seriously
“I’ve suspected for a while that the Admins are getting pretty exasperated with the site and all the infighting. And I think this is a result of people being constantly unable to: keep their disputes to themselves, agreeing to disagree, stop taking the internet way too seriously, or try to play nice with others.”
Unfortunately in ten years I have yet to magically find the single web site where this never occurs. Those who claim to have a drama free role play environment are full of sparkly crap. You cannot gather more than 30 people with different opinions, ways of life, role playing views and what not and expect them to ever get along. What you CAN do is “hire” those willing to spend an hour or two every week (or more) in helping you maintain some semblance of semi-order and make sure there’s a definite, strong presence of moderators or administrators.
You have to deal with people if you’re going to run a very public website not to mention deal with role players when you role play. You have to deal with all the issues that arise if you are going to set down rules and guidelines, otherwise there’s not point in having them what so ever.
When you get tired of dealing with it then it’s time to suck it up and try and get some help.
I agree with the idea that if the admins are sick to death in dealing with it all then it’s time to go out on a damn limb and trust some people to help them. If they aren’t willing to deal with the issues (if such is the case) but still want people to follow rules and guidelines? It doesn’t work that way. If effort is no longer being put forth for whatever reason people are going to start sensing this and one cannot expect effort to be given back.
M you have a very valid point and I agree with it whole heartedly.
But the site has been in existence for a few years now and a lot of the players have history between each other going up to a full decade. And from what I’ve seen from my OOC board observation some of that history is personal disputes and vendettas between players. There is going to be the difficulty of appointing chat moderators that others would think are entirely neutral. And then that opens up a whole different can of worms that the admins have to deal with in the end. It creates another situation for the admins to have to deal with, as now they will have to audit any punitive actions handed out by the designated moderators when members file complaints. It creates a more complicated system then any of the volunteer admins have time to deal with.
There is never going to be an Internet utopia where every person sitting behind their monitor wants to get along with everyone else in that specific community. But members of the community can contribute by limiting these public disputes between players to simply agreeing to disagree in private, taking that burden off the shoulders of the admins, and freeing up time for them to deal with more valid infractions.
“There is going to be the difficulty of appointing chat moderators that others would think are entirely neutral. And then that opens up a whole different can of worms that the admins have to deal with in the end.”
You too, have an excellent point. Role players–we’re a damn fine lot aren’t we?
The only way to tell if someone is trustworthy or not is to actually …well…trust them. Should our above examples actually be happening at the RDI, something’s going to give if newblood isn’t brought in and soon. I can’t imagine it’s going to be good.
Blips on the trustdar are part of finding the right people. When I ran a board with a measly few 100 some odd role players on it, as much as I HATED having to guess who would be impartial and who would not, having to hand power to someone and trusting them now to screw up? I did it anyway. I had to suck it up and do it otherwise I would have lost my sanity and the role play environment would not have enjoyed the several year run it had.
There is no easy way to go about it, but new blood needs to be injected into that site and desperately. I suspect there are poor souls that have been working at doing the same thing, day in and day out on the board and in role play that they’ve completely burned out on.
What’s healthier? A forum run by mods and admins who frankly don’t care anymore giving out lackluster replies and doing fart-all for the site? Or a web site with a dedicated crew that cycle off and on every few months that might make the occasional slip in human judgment, which can be easily fixed (back ups, removal, ip ban)?
For me, the former leads to a nice dead road, the latter sounds like promise.
P.S THANKS EVE FOR LETTING ME CLUTTER UP UR BLOG.
UR BLOG. IM IN IT.
Oops, Juju, I forgot to address this:
“There is never going to be an Internet utopia where every person sitting behind their monitor wants to get along with everyone else in that specific community. But members of the community can contribute by limiting these public disputes between players to simply agreeing to disagree in private, taking that burden off the shoulders of the admins, and freeing up time for them to deal with more valid infractions.”
But…isn’t that their job? Isn’t that exactly what they’re supposed to do? Aren’t moderators, hosts and admins in place to help mediate? If not–then there in lies some of the problem. Vast majorities of people cannot be relied upon to play nice and deal with it maturely. Thus, it is the staff’s position to set the mature and impartial example to the best of their ability.
Or maybe I’ve just too high of an opinion on what it entails to run a group of people online?
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