Winged Snail plays RPGs

Winged Snail plays RPGs comes from Winged Snail who is a general mail culture enthusiast who produces a number of other zines.

The series so far are aimed at roleplaying neophytes and assume little knowledge on the part of the reader but an enthusiasm to try and get into roleplaying.

If you’ve managed to find your way to this website then I suspect you’re not the target audience.

Introductory material is generally written by very experienced people who imagine what might be useful for a beginner. Contributions from genuine peers of newcomers are valuable.

Issue 2 - GM Basics

The main content of the zine is solid practical advice for people planning their first games as a GM.

Take time to prepare, keep notes of what happens in the game, don’t block your players ideas reflexively or because you have too strong an idea of what happens next. There’s some solid advice on how to ask for feedback on the game.

It is all sensible stuff but the most important part of the zine comes in the few pages in the back. In it the author talks about her experiences of aggressive social behaviour from other players in her local gaming community.

There’s the simple things like aggressive rules lawyering or demands on what the game should contain. Then there are the darker things about allowing sexual violence into games, particularly aimed at women and in particular at the female characters of female players.

It is a depressing tale of social maladjustment crossing the line into misogyny. I recognised it immediately, the temptation to live and let live and not challenge difficult behaviour until you realise that you’re playing in a man cave and everyone around you looks the same.

You make allowances for poor behaviour until you realise you are operating at the level of the lowest common denominator and everyone who finds that crass and unacceptable has left to do other things.

On one page there is a single statement that sums up the problem:

I simply cannot comprehend how these players continually get invited to games.

It is a simple question; my answer is that gamers who want a broad, welcoming community struggle to confront poor behaviour. Moreover those of us who have lived in the culture for a long time are blind to it.

So in the end this zine for beginners had something important for me to learn. For the few Canadian dollars it costs to get your copy, it might be worth seeing if the experience is valuable for you as well.