At My Table: Conflict Resolution

There's a nice guy I know who recently started a tabletop gaming group. Every time we talk the conversation inevitably turns to his campaign, and I'd be lying if I said his enthusiasm wasn't infectious. He's got more ideas than sense, though, as he demonstrated the last time I asked him how his players were reacting to his carefully-planned sessions.
"Well, it's weird." He said. "The game's going great, but I can't seem to get five minutes into it without an argument breaking out. I don't think my players know how to work with each other."

He went on to tell me about their latest session: things had been going alright until he'd introduced a coven of evil witches who had been abducting children to fuel their wicked rituals. When one of his players displayed serious apprehension at the topic, another reacted by calling them a baby, and the whole thing went south from there. By the time my friend was able to calm everyone down, nobody was in much of a mood to play.

At this point I know what was wrong, and I made sure to tell him as such.

"Buddy, it's not your players that are the problem. It's your campaign. Or at the very least how you run it."

Now, this is a sensitive topic for most DM's, because we're more often than not an outwardly-confident raconteur with a creamy nougat center of self-consciousness. Knowing this, I was sure to choose my words carefully.

"What I mean is, you have to have realized that your coven scene was...dreadful. I've only heard it second hand and I'm gonna have nightmares tonight. How did you expect your players to react?"

"But I wanted them to react that way!" He said. "It was SUPPOSED to be shocking. These are evil monsters, they do evil things. Plus I'm running a pretty dark homebrew world, so it fits right in." He was practically beaming at this last sentiment.

"That's all well and good, but your dark world is going to stay that way if you don't have any players to fix it."

"Well how would you have done it?"

I've always been the altruistic sort, so after convincing myself that one less bad DM in the world was a net positive for mankind, I told him how to fix his game.

"Just from that one session, I see three main problems with your approach. One: you have no eye for where your players boundaries are. Two: your players don't either. Three: when a boundary did come up, you pushed the blame on the player instead of acknowledging the problem.

Now there's nothing saying your campaign can't get dark every now and then. The big trend in gaming right now seems to be to push the boundaries of what people consider tasteful, and it's produced a lot of great content. We're all adults here, and there are real-world happenings scarier than anything you or I could write up. Surely a little blood-and-guts is to be expected from a genre that has been historically based around wandering into dark caves and killing the inhabitants.

This line of thinking assumes several things about your players. Mainly, that they have no aversion to dealing with these themes in a living world, acting as if they were truly there. For some, these ideas hit a bit too close to home. That doesn't make them bad ideas, nor does it make the offended a bad player. What it should make is an example on how to handle conflict.

Case in point: Maze of the Blue Medusa by Zak Smith and Patrick Stuart is one of the finest adventures I've ever had the pleasure of running. Veterans of the indie RPG community will recognize that neither of these creators have made their living off of feel-good hero stories. MotBM is a poignant and vicious story of loss and desire, and nowhere is that more evident than in the section named "The Gardens."

Luckily for DM's and players, the page introducing The Gardens also contains this message: "A major theme in this area is horrible creepy nightmare plants and invasive body horror and abusive relationships and parisitic seduction and gross undead babies and whatnot and it should go without saying that if your have players that are likely to be upset by this, change it. Know your players and practice grown-up judgment."

That is how you deal with tough topics. As a DM, you should already have a good idea of what's going into your game before the fighter rolls for their STR score. Let your players know that you're thinking of introducing some ideas that might be hard to handle. This warning doesn't always have to be at the start of the campaign, because emergent storytelling is a wonderful thing. A few sessions ahead of time is good. I would say that the start of the session where the trouble's bound to show up is the absolute latest you can tell your players and still have it count as a heads-up.

I'm not going to mince words here: if you get a sudden idea to try something novel in the middle of a session and you're not 100% sure your players are going to be okay with it, YOU DO NOT DO THAT THING. At the end of the day, these are games we're playing at, not invasive psychology. Know your players and practice grown-up judgment.

Now that you've got an idea of how to handle boundaries, we can move on to damage control. As I said before, both you and your other player didn't respect the first players' feelings regarding the witches coven. A big thing in human relations is the idea of "impact, not intent." While I don't really believe you meant to offend or disturb that player on a personal level, the matter of the fact is that you did, and that you should apologize. No, none of that "I'm sorry you got offended" nonsense. Own up to your mistake, and let them know you're making an honest effort to make things right again. You're not the first person to inadvertently give offense -- and you're certainly not going to be the last -- but you can be the one to say, "this stops here."

As for your other player, the one who called out the first player for having strong feelings, take them aside and let them know that a seat at your table comes with the expectation of a certain level of respect. I've always been of the opinion that while player characters may argue and fight, the players themselves may not. Do problems come up? Of course. If it can wait, I have the players deal with it at sessions end. If not, I call a quick snack break and pull them aside to work it out, adult-to-adult. Don't let a minor squabble escalate enough to destroy an otherwise-good session."

Saying this, I sat back in my chair and let my friend work his way through it. I could see the wheels behind his eyes running at full-gerbil speed. 

After a pause, he looked back up at me. "That all makes a lot of sense. I've got another session coming up this week. I'll see if I can get my players to give it one more shot." 

"They won't regret it. When it comes down to it, buddy, remember that your players are people too." I paused for dramatic emphasis. "But don't let anyone know I told you that. I've got a reputation to uphold as a killer DM."