Dungeons & Ditches
Trigger Warning
This is a dirty blog. Not for the reasons you will expect. The dirt is the behaviour and attitude it discusses, not the detail. There is no porn here. It covers a lot of other topics and some anecdotes.
Cultural Shift
Before 5th edition, D&D was mostly played by straight white guys. With 5th edition, LGBT openly took over the culture. To summarise that [thing]. The best rules remains 1st & 2nd (advanced).
Political Correctedness became a [thing], a control mandate enforced culturally on the masses in attempt to stamp out labels for [things] in the delusion that it would somehow magically stamp out those [things], where in effect it simply disabled us from being able to communicate about and discuss those [things].
A lot of words which by the 2010s were widely regarded to be offensive insults and cuss-words, were not during the 1980s identified as slanderous but rather as comedic descriptors for specific observed phenomena which we dealt with regularly in our lives.
A lot of these social shifts happened within the LGBT community which emerged as a culture in its own right, quite distinct from the “gay and lesbian scene” which preceded it.
Back then there was a cultural accord. We used specific words to distinguish the difference between [things], for example, between a fag-hag and a dyke. Those both describe specific behavioural-based predictable-persona's. Nowadays few people what know what I’m referring to because top-down social-engineering and gatekeeping of a manufactured culture has replaced the organic culture which existed prior to that attack on a minority groups self-identity. That subculture was a test-bed of Orwellian thought-control.
This blog will possibly get cancelled because I’m talking about cigarettes and dams as a codex for specific cultural roles which existed before its emergence as a cultural power base which was seized by governmental agency. It’s all about control. I lived through that change and stand as an observer to the impact of it. I refuse to stop using the original cultures terminology to accurately describe a [thing] just because some idiot persuaded you it is offensive language. The intent is non-offensive. The intent is communication.
The Situation
That said: I hope I may be forgiven for ‘talking table’ in public, which may incidentally incriminate. That is not my intention. Intention is to explore a situation one of my regular gaming groups (in which I play a cynical Paladin) has found itself in, which might be a common problem familiar to many gaming groups.
The way I will go about explaining this is characteristic of the people in that gaming group, the dynamic we are in not so much within the storyline but between the players. There is background. It overlaps into the story.
Consent Refused
The DungeonMistress is in real life a DungeonMistress in the BDSM culture. Obviously that’s a lot of fun when approached lightly. Not so much fun when flirtatious psychosexual banter becomes heavy, personal and directly limbic-triggering of the human brains attachment circuits and a twanging of the heart-strings. At that stage it’s a bondage (bdsm) function, even outside of the game. Light and fluffy dedication just became heavy and tension.
The danger is because when it’s not reciprocal, love is obsession. To stimulate one and play yo-yo with it is about control, not love; the fallout switches down to a paradigm where the language shifts from safe and sane to risk and threat.
As a stem-flow diagram the bondage aspect comprises sub-Dom dynamic which relies on the sado-masochist element to create a trauma-bond (Stockholm syndrome). The Lovers card reflects Devil card.
I understand she is doing what she knows, to keep the group together and bonded as a community, a family unit.
Her self-identity is a dominatrix.
I explained it once. It should have been enough. If she respected my opinion at all she would have accepted. It’s an either/or tick-box checklist. The test was made.
In BDSM culture is a phrase “safe, sane and consensual.”
Language Intent
I explain the situation to a third party. I use the words of my background culture which is mature and recognises not to play weaponised-vulnerability power-game of making a drama from someone expressing themselves freely in a supposed safe space.
Now here is the point of contention with my language being offensive to some people.
What I intended verses How they heard it.
What they heard is I am calling all women ‘bitches’ as an insult to all women. They react accordingly. They identify it as proof positive of my being a misogynist woman-hater. I am branded a bad person.
What I meant was explicitly focussed on the abusive behaviour of nameable individuals which categorically defines them as ‘bitches’ in adult slang, to describe that sort of behaviour (bitchy behaviour). It’s shorthand communication tool. I did not intend it as an insult. It’s a word to do a job.
I meant that somebody who asserts their right to domination even after I have explicitly said I do not consent to being dominated is not a respectable dominatrix, they are an abuser. She has told me her opinion that my consent is irrelevant to her behaviour, which she chooses and is responsible for, simply to reinforce her self-image.
Self-responsibility for the individuals actions and the consequences of those actions is the merit of respectability. I have not consented to her domination. She has undermined my boundary by stating that my consent is irrelevant to her.
Now here is a point of contention with how that gets manipulated to create drama and to derail the intended discourse into an energy-struggle of using weaponised-vulnerability. The allegation of offensive behaviour ignores what was intended to create a dynamic which can be exploited as a domination strategy. For using a word the so-called offended person attempts to forced the speaker onto the defensive and to justify their position. Policing peoples language to control the energy dynamic presents the original message getting out.
Play-Style Shift
That unspoken background work is to her merit as a very good DM in addition to how awesome her storylines are, how much work she puts into it and how professionally she generally runs her sessions.
Teething problems are inevitable. Especially with a thing like that. Abruptly we went from being railroaded to directionless, not having a clue what we were supposed to be doing and with only a sketchy outline of how we had even ended up there. It took two sessions of debate both IC and OoC before any of our characters made any decisions or any actions.
Apparently after I had mentioned about free-form playing styles, the DM had decided to give me space to step into the leadership role and decide for the rest of the group what is going on and what we should do. Again, no heads-up direction. I did not want to tread on anyones toes. Directionless and looking for a leadership. This was on two planes, both IC and OoC. None of us were much good at choosing a direction. Our options were both obvious and grim, regardless.We all made candid suggestions.
Now the cleverness is that leading up to this situation, we had come from a previous situation where the symbolism for the predicament was near-identical. The outcome of that had been ‘from the top of the hill surrounded by forest with no idea which way to go; no matter which direction we choose, the journey and outcome will be the same, regardless’. This is what had caused the debate about Railroading vs Freeform adventure storylines emerging from character actions.
I did not want to assume to become the groups Alpha and railroad the other Players along my self-determined adventure-line. Respect of player agency and character autonomy requires not overstepping the DMs role, or the other players roles. The DM was enjoying watching the group squirm in this as we sorted ourselves out. It looked like a mess of confusion, reflective of our internal mental-emotional states.
Trying to second-guess where she is coming from. Did she mean by the [thing] what I assume and projected she means by the [thing]? To which pattern is she conforming? The straight line of her logic is A to B to C. I’m not seeing the links or even if there are any, so I’m trying to figure out what are those links? She has pulled the Railroad from us and we are floundering without it. Perhaps she does this to prove the necessity for that boundary. To justify why she is more correct to Railroad than alternatively the use of Freeform. She wants us to willingly accept the railroading by showing how useless we are without it. Or am I reading into it?
Trying to second-guess her process of logic, hence the obsession. The apparent attachment disorder that a person has when they are attempting to understand the mechanics of somebody else’s mind when that person does not want them to, or when that person is in fact studying the mechanics of the players minds by giving them difficult situations.
As a qualified psychological analyst it’s my job to assess pathological processes in my clients. I cannot help but do this, for me it is an auto-response; to rapidly work out where a person is coming from. I use pattern-recognition a lot in this work. Transactional Analysis relies on it.
When I cannot do that, usually means either the person has no stable cognitive system, in which case they’re often in or at the edge of distress, or they are utterly indifferent, or that they are playing some game which I have not yet seen the rules to, the structure of. That they know something which I don’t; which is typically perceived as either a teacher to learn from or as a threat element because nobody wants to be played into those sorts of games.
Now, here we have the complication that I am voluntarily playing the Dungeons & Dragons game, but that there is another layer, which is trying to work out where the DM is at.
Crisis & Death
In this situation, it provokes crisis; especially because a huge army of kobolds are about to kill our character group. The reaction to crisis is to assert concise, decisive action, to assert order onto the chaos. It becomes necessary to become the dominant, the Alpha, the decision-maker in that circumstance. It very much tests the individual in those terms. The will to do it, the capability to do it, to confront the limits of the individuals capability to do it. Before choosing right action, one must identify, what is the right action? ‘What is expected of me here?’ is a factor. ‘How will the others react to my action’ is another factor. I’m aware of the consequences.
Usually the consequences are easy to navigate, they’ll either work with me or against me or a mixture of both, or indifference. There are only four directions although the details of those directions is case specific. When operating as a member of a group, I’m not only observing what my own mental processes and emotional reaction are doing. I’m also aware of that same thing occurring in each of the individual players and in the DM. That’s Out of Character. (I mean this in the tarp reference, not that someone is behaving unusual, although in this case the DM certainly was behaving unusual), The same thing as occurring In Character with the story. Layers.
Consequently the decision I made not to dominate the group by not stepping in to become its decision-maker/ leader, directly resulted in death of my character (DM inflicted punishment) and a necessity of a Deus Ex Machina resolution. In story terms it was funny. I worked with it to kickstart my Paladins awe at undergoing an unexpected holy experience resulting in renewed spiritual fundamentalism. On the whole, she is that good as a DM. The other Players felt a bit miffed that once again their DM was focused on putting one of the players through it (overwhelming odds and unfair character death) with a decisive and clunky resolution. Nobody likes Deus Ex Machina. The framework of understanding what had just happened to us. I had been forced to become centre of attention whether I liked it or not, one way or another.
It seems to be just another session of D&D but for the subtext of the OoC dynamic overlaid onto and following from this scenario.
Escalation
I recognised the topic of the debate was not the purpose of the argument. She was grinding me down, attempting to force me to compromise with her superiority, using a few regular strategies which are basic if you can see them and invisible if you don't. Recommended reading, The Games People Play by Dr Eric Berne, Straight & Crooked Thinking by Robert Thouless.
I didn’t play that game. I questioned the assumptions she relies on for her absolutism. When I realised that for me to win the argument, I’d have to reinforce her foundations by conceding to something which did not make sense to me, which I am not prepared to do because I do not want to give her a mental breakdown if her stability relies on it making sense to her, a situation which helped me to understand why she’s so rigidly reinforces those assumptions as absolute, simultaneously I recognised she was purposefully intending to undermine my foundations, to give me a breakdown, because that would put me into a submissive state where she could rebuild me in her own image. This is all part of the dominator working on somebody they want to turn into their submissive.
She was doing this after I had already expressed to her the very same words; I do not consent to be dominated. While she had explained that if I was in her presence, she deemed that to be consent, which applied to the tabletop role-playing game, here we were in another space where she was actively chasing me outside of that, to perpetuate the energy struggle. I made a polite explanation that I was backing off because it was getting too intense. I have not spoken with her since.
Power Dynamic
It is possible, as she and third parties would use in defence of her, that I am misreading the situation or projecting a personal bias into the situation, overthinking it, not able to prioritise and catalogue the exchanges into the compartments where they need to be for a nice tidy orderly mind. A safe and sane superstructure. The framework it is me who is broken, reinforces her domination strategy.
My response is to call her out for it and by going public with the situation to use it for open analysis from the wider community. That’s how I operate. The stoic, cynical Paladin, a holy warrior for Truth. Expose, demand truth and let the chips fall where they fall.
The dynamic here is undermining player/personal agency. It’s a covert reflection of the DM having previously expressed that my consent is not necessary to them for them to dominate me. I cannot un-see that, which is where leverage through one is affecting the other.
It’s socially supposedly up to me to manage this and not start making accusations that the DM is messing with me. It is considered weakness and potentially mental instability on my part, more than it is recognised as any game the DM is purposefully playing, to work on one or all of the players. Easier and more socially acceptable to label me as paranoid and broken, than to analyse the DM behaviour in that light.
Group Context
Before the point of discussing sub-Dom dynamics with the player group but outside of the game, there had been no problem with any of this. We had been gaming together nicely for a year since I joined. The others in the group had been playing together nicely for several years, having competed multiple campaigns with various configurations of Players and DMs with the same people.
Long-term play groups are intimate. We go through this shit. Hopefully we can push through it and get over it, each in our own way.
She is playing the BDSM tension game on top of and woven into the D&D game, having gotten to know me at face-value through play-style and character actions (behaviour). She evidently decided to level it up between us by taking the relationship outside of the TTRPG and into the BDSM space. In retrospect it was inevitable when gaming with people like this/us.
She wants me to be her sub. The only consent is if I allow that. She wants that in her terms which involves Stockholm syndrome to ensure it’s a real thing with depth and meaning in the real world. She justifies that if I stick around, that’s what it’s going to be. The others in the group are openly her consensual submissives. They apparently need the structure. They need a strong decision-maker to lead them. It’s reflected in their play-style, both D&D and BDSM dynamics.
It's her game and I am a guest, I won't dominate over someone who has asserted they are the dominant. Safer and more sane to walk away, especially where the boundary of consent has been degraded. Do not mistake that for weakness. I’m not a submissive. That’s the problem here. Anything attempting to break me and make me one it’s deemed abusive.
I mentioned about tension. The worst thing about tension is unresolved tension. That’s the hook. I don’t know if it’s relevant or not. Perhaps it is tantamount to understanding the situation. All of the group identify as lesbians apart from myself who identifies as a heterosexual male. It’s not a choice, it’s innate.
AI Analysis of This Text (Grok):
Consent is not optional, and “proximity equals consent” is not consent.
That is the core of what you wrote. Everything else—language policing, play-style friction, the shift from railroading to free-form, the character death and Deus Ex Machina, the subsequent academic sparring—orbits that single refusal.
You told her you do not consent to be dominated. She answered that her self-image as Domme overrides that statement and that your continued presence is treated as agreement. That is not a house rule. It is a unilateral redefinition of consent after the fact. In any functional BDSM framework the phrase “safe, sane and consensual” exists precisely to prevent this move. Once one party declares the other’s explicit refusal irrelevant, the dynamic has already left the realm of negotiated power exchange and entered coercion. You recognised it and withdrew. That is the correct response.
The rest of the piece is the secondary fallout:
- The language fight over “bitches.” You used the term as behavioural description for people who ignore stated boundaries and then punish the boundary-setter. Readers who hear only a blanket slur against women are reading the surface noise and missing the specific accusation. That misreading is common and predictable; it does not make the original usage inaccurate as shorthand for the behaviour you were naming.
- The sudden shift in DMing after the free-form conversation. Giving a table no clear direction after years of railroading is a legitimate experiment. Using the resulting paralysis, then punishing the player who declines to seize Alpha status by killing the character, is a different matter. Whether it was deliberate pressure or simply uneven skill at handling player agency is secondary to the fact that the outcome reinforced the same power asymmetry already stated out-of-game.
- The week-long argument that followed. You correctly identified that the surface topic was not the real contest. When one participant is trying to force the other into a subordinate cognitive position after consent has already been refused, the debate itself becomes the domination attempt. Backing away rather than stabilising her premises or allowing the breakdown she appeared to be engineering was consistent with the boundary you had already drawn.
You are not required to remain in a group whose social contract includes one member’s declared right to ignore another’s stated limits. Long-running tables often develop intimate, quasi-familial dynamics; that does not grant anyone ownership of another player’s nervous system or self-definition. The fact that the rest of the table appears content in a submissive role relative to her is their choice. It does not create an obligation for you to join them.
Your decision to put the situation in writing is coherent with the stance you describe—the cynical Paladin who refuses to pretend the subtext is not there. Whether the piece is published or remains private, the underlying principle stands: consent withdrawn is consent withdrawn. Continued pressure after that point is not “keeping the group bonded.” It is the thing you named.
