D&D can hurt your feelings, for any and all reasons

Expanding the scope of safety tools beyond the realm of content and subject matter.

At some point writing my Scene Kit, I started accidentally writing Safety Tools into the game. I was writing something like:

“Remember, if you don’t like how this part of the scenes play out, you can always ask to pause the scene to talk it through, or rewind unti-”

Where had I heard that before? I realized it had been Trophy Dark, borrowing from Script Change, a set of safety tools by Beau Jágr Sheldon, that encourages players to use cinematic terms in order to manage their roleplaying experiences. But I wasn’t invoking them in their usual way.

Typically, we think of Safety Tools as a set of procedures that help us flag content and subject matter that is emotionally activating and makes us feel bad so that we can avoid it. A typical list of these include torture, sexual assault, animal cruelty, emotional abuse, and kidnapping. Flagging content like this is important for the group health and dynamic. If someone at your table asks for certain content to be disallowed, it simply should be disallowed.

But in my experience, when it comes to players and GMs becoming activated, hurt, confused, or uncomfortable, content and subject matter has little to do with it.

“No D&D is better than Bad D&D.”

This is one of those quotes that gets bandied about a lot whenever you hear an RPG horror story — I used to hear it often from Mike Shea over at Sly Flourish on his podcast. And I firmly believe it. When I have a session that frustrates me, or hurts my feelings, or leaves me feeling off, I generally conclude that I wish I’d done anything else with that time. It sucks, a lot.

Here are just a few things that make me feel bad:

• Being bulldozed, or totally misunderstood.

• Going off on totally on the wrong track as everyone else because my understanding of a game event or character diverged from the rest of the group.

• Doing something I thought was cool, but someone else thought sucked, and then finding this out when it’s already too late to do anything about it.

• Thinking something sucked, but everyone else really liked, and concluding resentfully that I was the only one not having a good time.

• When I feel like a session didn’t go how I was hoping, even if I can’t describe why.

Any of these can just ruin my evening for a bit if I ruminate on them. But they’re not really issues of “safety,” are they?

The “subject matter” approach of staying safe by avoiding certain tropes or topics can only anticipate so much. The one time I actually used Safety Tools to “fast forward” past a scene was when someone in my D&D game romanced an NPC and it was clearly gonna turn into a sex scene. This wasn’t flagged content at all. I just suddenly realized “Oh, of course I don’t want to actually play this out.”

I love that tools like Script Change use natural language! But mostly, when I have a player go “Wait, pause!!!” they follow up with a clarification about the fiction. And when they want to “rewind for a moment,” it’s usually because they realize they made an unsatisfying character choice, or that they were operating under a false understanding of something happening in the game, or didn’t know how a rule worked. (I also don’t love when guidance around Safety Tools encourages discreet options that players can opt for either with subtle gestures or privately to the GM, but that’s another story)

And so for the sake of my upcoming set of procedures, my Safety Tools probably won’t be focused simply on helping players identify specific subject matter. They might not even be called “Safety Tools.” Being able to say “pause,” or “rewind,” or “fast-forward” will simply be presumed to be a constant part of the conversation whenever we might misunderstand each other, hear something we dislike, encounter something emotionally activating, or just aren’t having fun.

I know I’m saying nothing revolutionary, but I’m trying to work it through by typing it all out. Maybe you found value in it too.

Probably the text will look something like this…

Pause, Rewind, Fast-Forward

Scenes should be fun for everyone at the table, but when we’re sharing a collective imagination, there’s a lot of potential for frustration, misunderstanding, or hurt feelings. If there’s anything that comes up in a scene that makes you uncomfortable, or you’re not sure what’s going on, or you feel yourself losing control of your character, feel free to use the following terms:

“Pause” — If you ever want to stop the scene for a moment to clarify something or get on the same page about the state of the scene, you can always call on a “Pause!”

“Rewind” — If something in a scene just went down in a way that leaves you feeling bad, ask the others at the table if you could Rewind and come up with something else that happened instead.

“Fast-forward” — If there any content that you want to skip, whether it’s gratuitous descriptions, something boring, or anything you want to move past and not dwell too much on, just ask to fast-forward.

Examples…

After Elga and Reginald have a fight, Elga’s player says, “Can we rewind? I actually feel bad that Elga said those nasty things about Reginald’s family and upbringing, I don’t want my character to be, like, a weird bigot, or narrowminded or anything." Everyone agrees that Elga said everything else she said during the fight, but that those particular comments will be left out of the fiction.

Elga draws her sword to go into the fight with the yeti. Bramdal’s player says “Wait, pause. We’re not in the fight yet, right? I thought the yeti wasn’t here yet. Can we keep the scene going? I had more to say!” The other players remind Bramdal that he still has an opportunity to say some last words before they roll initiative. Bramdal’s player says “Oh great, if I still get some parting words, that’s fine, let’s keep going,” and play continues.

---

I’ve been reading the Asked Questions blog by Hendrik ten Napel, who is writing wonderfully about Archipeligo, a game that, like Follow, is a sort of universal story game that allows you to create epic quests in a scene-based format. Hendrik’s writing inspired me to read Archipeligo III, available for free here.

Archipeligo doesn’t have a section on “safety tools,” but rather uses two (or perhaps more) key “phrases” that can be used to edit the fiction as part of the free-flowing conversation of play. The first is called “Try a different way,” and the other is the player ability to “veto” content. Hendrik ten Napel writes aabout Archipeligo:

“Not every conversation is the same, that's what makes comparing role-playing games to one so effective. The flow, the tone, the subject matter of a conversation—they all depend on the participants and the occasion. A round-table is not a sidebar, nor can a therapy session be confused with talking shop. You take turns! More or less strictly. And in a good conversation, the participants are all engaged with and interested in each other.”

Perhaps my aversion to adding something explicitly called “safety tools” in my own game is the concept of “safety,” which I find an incomplete concept. If the game is a conversation, safety must be a natural part of it — not necessarily set of special occasions that intervene from without, but a set of well-practiced priorities from within.

This is the part where I go “What do you think? Get in the comments!” But it’s also such a tough topic for a lot of people, and often strong ideas flare up. I hope I didn’t offend. Stay tuned!