This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a clean and well-lighted place for civilized public discourse.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling
  • Ad hominem attacks
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
  • Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s leave our community better than we found it.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

  • Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
  • Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
  • Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
  • Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

  • Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
  • Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
  • Don’t post no-content replies.
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
  • Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

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This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, make a post in the Ideas and Suggestions thread and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Regarding Zak S

The issue of how to address Zak S, his contributions to the OSR scene and his behavior has already surfaced in our community. First of all we acknowledge this is an extremely sensitive topic and that any decision we might take is going to be a problem for somebody. We really hope that this is going not going to be a big enough problem to drive you away from this community.

The charges against Zak S are extremely serious and we aim for the Pit to be an inclusive, safe space were to discuss OSR RPG content. This means that we cannot, in good faith, take the risk of allowing somebody with his history of online and offline harassment in this space. To spell it clear: we are not aware of Zak S having an account on this forum, but he is banned anyway . Please note that what lead to this decision (a long history of online harassment, multiple accusation of rape…) will be cause enough for a ban for everyone here. If we become aware of the same kind of behavior from any of our present or future users, we will ban them.

Now, regarding Zak S material. The OSR scene is a long conversation between thousands of people, in hundreds of different places. Ideas are exchanged, copied, changed and discussed all the time. In this conversation, for years, Zak S played a major role. He worked with a lot of good people (who don’t deserve to be branded guilty by association) and many of us worked on his work to produce our own. Many of us also got inspired by somebody who was inspired by Zak S and so on. This means that we cannot remove Zak’s works from our collective memory[1]. As it already happened, new people will stumble upon and be fascinated by it without knowing who he is. We have all been there. We can, and will, reduce his influence on our future conversation. This means that you can discuss Zak’s work up until the day of Mandy’s accusations (11th February 2019) . We acknowledge this is an arbitrary date, but that post has been a wake up call for most of the community and the day when he started to fade out of the conversation.

Any other discussion about the person of Zak S (like news on his trials) is off-topic . We are here to discuss gameable content (and sometimes food) and exchange ideas about OSR games. Some off-topic is inevitable, but off-topic which is going to hurt people in the community or even, simply, is guaranteed to degenerate in flames is not welcome .

[1]: damnatio memoriae is a though task, which humanity has been failing at since (at least) the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut (14th century BC). It would be better to orient our efforts on a more effective way to handle the issue.

Terms of Service

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