So I was discussing with another player around some things tied to Venetian Hospitality because I was being a gremlin. And during this chatting we seemed to come across something that isn’t really clarified in the helpfile, and that could prove an issue if people had different takes on it. The point of contention was “Is Hospitality one sided or two sided?”

My chatting patner, coming from a more grounded and historical perspective argued that once someone agrees to hospitality, you’re aggreeing to cease the aggression as well, that it is a two sided thing, because the Treaty is something to allow groups to interact between each other, and to find a common ground, not trick each other, that it needs to have a basis in not being exploitable. “Why would anyone agree to no violence while allowing it on themselves”. Because at the end of the day, if the Venetian Treaty is made to allow for civilized dealings between supernaturals, a system that can be gamed wouldn’t be permitted.

My take, mainly based on the wording on the helpfile and the idea that the system is designed around supernaturals and as such is probably atypical compared to ours, argues that it seems one sided, and that while in our world it would happen, the setting of Haven is filled with groups or people that you shouldn’t harm even if you can harm them. In my eyes, the offer of hospitality being one sided would allow bigger groups or individuals to deal with much smaller parties while offering the reasurance of “I cannot hurt you, but you can hurt me (you can’t)” because a lot of supernatural individuals or groups could just be big/strong enough to not go down by a simple attempt at attacking like it would happen with us humans, and that whenever a meeting of comparable parties are meeting, hospitality wouldn’t be extended from just one side but from all parties involved.

At the end of the day, it’s not like we can find a consensus among ourselves, because, these lore things aren’t up to us, even if Venetian deals are something to be handled by the player base, if different people are taking away different things from the documentation we have on the big system that everyone considers the big serious thing, this can lead to misunderstandings in the way to proceed when this is extended.
If this is something that the playerbase is to both respect and trust as the important system to keep in mind, and some people are expected to decide whenever a violation occurs, I think it’s ideal to know who is held accountable for what by the definition of the offering.

So in summary. If person A extends Hospitality to person B… Is person B expected to also ensure person A doesn’t get hurt or is it only on person A to ensure it doesn’t happen to person B? Is the offer of hospitality one sided from the offering party to the protected person or is it supposed to go both aways and be more similar to the venetian truces?