Emotional Safety
Player-Specific Boundaries / Personal Safety Boundaries
We provide a formal means to clearly indicate that there are topics you do not wish to roleplay, or to limit the emotional intensity of the roleplay other players engage you in, in the form of PSB Discord server roles clearly stating your boundary to others on the Dark Moon Discord server. Players with at least one PSB will usually show up in 🟦 blue, to prompt others to check what their boundaries are. If you would like a new PSB created for you and added to the list, ask the Head Ref to do this. Whether you have PSBs or not, if other players are pressuring you into things you have clearly indicated you do not wish to do, you are encouraged to report their behaviour to a Ref.
Emotional Safety when handling character death
Opt-in to Lethal PvP
Dark Moon is a game where you cause each other problems over the week and on Fridays, but put aside your grudges to go save Cambridge every Saturday. In order to allow players with a wide variety of views on player-versus-player conduct to participate fully in both aspects of the game, we provide opt-in Discord server roles for indicating you are okay with being on the receiving end of lethal player-versus-player actions. You can require people to ask you first, or not.
Choice of Risk Levels on In-Person Linears
Supernatural creatures are very hard to kill. Most actions that would kill a human instead cause them to receive a Setback, representing some kind of physical, equipment-related, or emotional harm. The Refs are very aware that players who enjoy dealing with serious risk of character death and players who enjoy dealing with horrible injuries are often not the same groups of players.
Death in Dark Moon is known as "crossing the rainbow", and consists of collecting a set of Setbacks in five unique colours, regardless of how many Setbacks you have in total. You can ask the linear refs to choose the colour and number of Setbacks you receive in order to independently minimise, or maximise, both the risk to your character's life and the scale of their injuries.
Emotional Safety on camera
You are not required to have your video on in order to participate in any voice channel in this game. Characters of players without video should be assumed to have mastered the art of ominous lurking in the shadowy corners in and around the UCH.
If your camera is on, you and your clothing and anything you are holding or clearly have nearby is assumed to be in-character, although the rest of your background is out-of-character and does not require set dressing etc. Many members of Cambridge Lunatic Society have sensitive ears and wear headphones.
You should not have any Restricted Topics content visible on-camera but out-of-character, or on-camera at all outside the Restricted Topics channels. This includes such things as explicitly sexual wall posters or cans of alcoholic beverages.
You should not record, or screenshot, or stream any of the Dark Moon discord voice and video channels. If you like another player's kit setup and would like an image of it, you should ask them for one. They can take their own picture with an angle and lighting and background they prefer and send it to you if they want to. Punishments for breaking this rule will be harsh.
There will always be at least one in-character interactive channel for general discussion that does not have video chat enabled. This is both to help people with bandwidth issues, and to ensure people never feel pressured to turn their video chat on in order to participate in the game. This channel will usually be the UCH Dark Room, but check the interactive map to see if that has temporarily changed for plot reasons.
Likewise, the Chill Zone out of character discussion channel does not have video chat enabled.
Visual nudity on-screen is a Restricted Topic. If you are in any doubt about whether your current visual setup falls under this, you should only have your video on in the Restricted Topics channels.
Emotional Safety in drama situations
The Escalate Role
Some of the characters in Dark Moon are not very good people. Some of the other characters in Dark Moon will probably get very upset about that.
We provide an 🔥 Escalate!!! Discord role for players who wish to very clearly indicate that they really, really, really want some drama right now. This role overrides all other colours and turns your name to 🟧 orange. Everyone else in the server is encouraged to throw escalatory drama at you unprompted, subject to the constraints of what you have clearly indicated you are not ok with.
Players are asked to turn this role off whenever they are not feeling like it, in order to preserve the sanctity of what the role conveys to others and to respect their own emotional safety.
Drama and the Tabletop Resolution System
Many of the mechanics relevant to the Friday portion of the game are designed to help the escalation, and eventual resolution and catharsis, of emotional drama. This includes the Tabletop Resolution System. However, the moral nature and grandness of scale of the plot being resolved has no impact on its narrative importance within tabletop, and a wide variety of violent and non-violent resolution methods are equally supported by the system. Baking a cake to deliver it to a wedding on time is equally as supported as murdering witnesses in order to cover up your previous murders. Bloody beat-em-ups are equally as supported as devastating duels of compliments.
Players are encouraged to generate and seek out the kind of plots, and approaches to solving them, that they wish to see more of in the system. Your choice of your two highest stats, each of which represent a character trait and corresponding problem-solving approaches, are public to other players and will help in finding the kinds of people on the server who want to have fun in similar ways to you.
Drama and Restricted Topics
Escalate!!! and Restricted Topics Access are two different roles. While we expect that people interested in one may also be interested in the other, we have purposefully created a format where the emotional stakes of any given plot can be evaluated entirely separately from the themes it contains. We hope this gives players the tools needed to have fun in the ways they wish to, without feeling obliged to opt into situations that make them uncomfortable either way around.
Further instructions on respecting the emotional safety of other players when playing with Restricted Topics can be found in the rt-rules channel of the Discord server.