The Day of Thunder

Since this has come up and I have recovered enough to make a coherent post about it:

It's pretty obvious at this point that for many players, sexism is very much not something they want in their fun fantasy samurai game, and this is valid.

Ranmaru got the okay, because his stuff is pretty blatantly satire (and allow me to confirm that it is OOC). But some stuff isn't clear that way, and can make a lot of players uncomfortable. We have had more than one instance of this, the well known one of making a joke about reproductive frustrations, and a less known one of one character openly hating another for being an "unloved concubine" despite them never having met. Both players involved have been spoken to about this.

I just want it to be clear that this makes other players feel unsafe, and we'd rather not see any more negativity regarding characters' reproductive or relationship status or choices, no transsexism (it hasn't happened that I know of and won't, hopefully, but addressing it for thoroughness), no body shaming, stuff like that. If it comes up, please let us know, and we'll see what's going on and decide how to address it.

Going forward, I will be taking Kaijariguigyo's suggestion of this link to heart and start developing some safety tools to try and help create systems that will create a safer environment and avoid some of the general toxicity we've seen in the past. We haven't done the best with this in the past - and I take responsibility for my part, as I have had trouble with my fear of confrontation - but hopefully we can do better in future games and try to make PbP a more fun and enjoyable experience for everyone.

I'll post this here since it's come up on the Discord. I was in a four hour meeting today at work (@_@), where I learned a lot of great stuff regarding conflict resolution, making safer spaces to work, and encouraging communication. So I want to start setting actionable goals to that end over the next few years. Here are the goals for next game:

A clear rubric for behavior and a strike system.
A safe space where I can talk to people without defensiveness or worry that I'm judging them.
A form for submitting suggestions.
A presentation on what I talked about today.

I am also going to make an effort to try and write events such that I don't need to make adjustments after the fact, avoiding some of the heartache this game.