Alright, first of all, let’s get this out of the way: the title is glib and exaggerated. This is intentional though, because I want to weed out people who will be scandalized by a line like that that. It’s not literally true as a blanket statement, but the sentiment has validity buried within, and that will be the subject of this essay.
Being a kinky, fat trans woman who does not think or experience sensation how “neurotypical”/”normal” society wants me to, I have a lot of thoughts on content/trigger warnings, safe spaces, and related conversations. I have never felt at home in kink spaces or most queer spaces. The more informed my opinions become, the less this surprises me. It shocks me in hindsight that I could ever let my guard down in game stores full of nerd bros, even when I thought I was one of them.
I’ve heard it said that RPG players’ conversations on consent and safety are light years behind those in kink. That is true, from what I’ve seen, but I also think kink communities’ conversations are light years away from anything I find relatable or safe to engage with. This is also true of queer and leftist spaces I have been a part of or observed from without.
Pretty much the only cases I see my inner concerns and experiences reflected accurately come from the most marginalized people who might want to be allowed into these groups. Almost always these are BIPOC people, trans or genderqueer people, disabled people, and people with lived experience full of poverty and trauma and systemic discrimination. The people whose voices go unheard, if not actively silenced, in the places ostensibly most welcoming to them.
This is all background information, and what I’m getting at so far has been abstract. Let me start being more concrete.
I think that it is certainly good that things like session zero, the X card, and lines and veils have begun to be socially acceptable to discuss in the RPG hobby, and indeed included in the text of many games. But, like reformist derailing of workers’ movements, this being the extent of the progress for at least a decade and a half is a problem. It’s not enough. Not even close. And in the mobbish cesspool that social media discourse and echo chambers are, it’s a problem that the narrative is not continuing to progress.
As a side note, I assume that readers of this essay have already familiarized themselves with those safety tools. If not, google still works just barely well enough that you can find them and then read on.
In my personal experiences playing RPGs with various people, from my own queer friends and fellow leftist organizers to “apolitical” white male nerds, to uninvested teens at game stores, I have seen general acceptance of the specific safety tools mentioned above. There’s also a consent checklist of common lines and veils that uses a “red/yellow/green light” system familiar from kink (albeit much less useful, as I will get into), and a couple other things in the same vein. These all appear to be understood the same way across players, excepting those who simply haven’t come across them yet. This is also true in what I have seen in actual play fandoms, discord servers, Bluesky, Tumblr, and other online spaces.
What’s wrong with this?
First of all, there is commonly an assumption that if you get through explaining all these things in session zero, assemble a list of lines and veils and share it with the whole group, that you’ve done your job and triggering or hurt feelings should be easily avoided unless there is a Bad Actor (TM) in the group.
This strikes me as extremely shortsighted and also built on insidious assumptions that will cause harm to the most vulnerable people present.
One assumption is that this conversation happens in its entirety at the formation of a group or the start of a new campaign. There’s a maxim from either kink or LARP (I forget which) that, if examined critically, debunks this assumption: “I need to hear your No before I trust your Yes.” Basically, people will say they are or aren’t comfortable with certain subject matter or triggering content when considering it in the abstract and act as though that’s going to usefully reflect how they feel and act when it actually happens.
The only commonly used safety tool in RPGs that is explicitly intended to address this issue is the X card (or occasionally, the “red light/yellow light/green light” from kink), but there are a lot of questions left unanswered when this is your sole recourse.
What happens when someone X cards the death of their character when death is the only meaningful consequence offered for failure by the game system being used, and the other players are interested in their characters’ actions having consequences?
What happens when someone X cards something that triggers them, but that they didn’t think to add to the list of lines and veils three months ago, but the triggering content is the main thematic motif of the adventure the GM has prepped, or the key clue that the mystery hinges on?
I think most of the time, either someone has to pretend they’re comfortable with something they’re not, or the game falls apart entirely. And there are ways to play that don’t make either of those necessary. They just require people to actually think and talk honestly about their feelings, rather than grab something that looks helpful off the internet that purports to make their game safe.
These kinds of problem commonly come up in session zero, too, and it’s rare that it’s addressed well. I’ve seen groups fall apart because someone stayed quiet when a line or veil was made, or not made, that they weren’t okay with. I’ve been that person. Who wants to jeopardize this social activity that requires several people’s committed attention and compatible schedules, before they even get to start playing the game?
What happens when someone says a line for them is any kind of sexual content (one I’ve seen very often), but another player at the table is trans, and wants to play a trans character that draws on their lived experience, and we exist in a society in which trans people are sexualized whether we like it or not?
What happens when someone says a line for them is racism or discrimination of any kind, and the group is playing a Western-themed game or campaign, or a 1920s U.S. Call of Cthulhu game, and one player is queer or a woman or Jewish or Latino or any other identity that was defined first and foremost in those times and places by the ways they were systemically oppressed?
In my experience, people get bitter or feel alienated from the rest of the group, and they try to swallow it until they can’t, and then they leave or blow up with all their restrained hurt. Often this is a deathknell for the game, the group, or even long-term friendships.
Another reason this status quo for such content and conversations is harmful is the way it propagates and reflects a common and dire problem in “woke” spaces: that when these heavily flawed safeguards fail, individuals are blamed for it, and there is no pause to reflect on the safeguards or the norms that led to them being agreed upon.
This is exacerbated by the widely accepted idea that the worst thing one can be is an abuser, a predator, a transgressor, a Bad Actor in whatever way it can be explained to justify a mob mentality. Kai Cheng Thom has written a very compelling case against this accepted “wisdom.”
Abusers and bullies are usually abused and bullied themselves. Addressing harmful behavior with punishment and judgment cements “Bad Actor” as an identity and self-fulfilling prophecy. The types of people that are most often vilified for transgressing are typically more marginalized. The types of people that are given sympathy or a more nuanced response are typically less marginalized.
People and communities nominally committed to social justice and acceptance, or even abolitionism or anti-racism, regularly overlook these facts when it would shake the status quo to take a closer look.
One last reason I feel this essay is necessary is that it’s far from the first time in the hobby this argument has been made. We’ve had games for and by marginalized people for a long time, that explicitly ask us to talk about this issue, often through the vehicle of game mechanics designed to facilitate conversation and critical thought. But these games are either erased or appropriated and derailed.
I cannot tell you how many times I see Monsterhearts recommended to queer players because it’s a game by a queer and about queer characters. It happens on social media, it happens in books (plural) by therapists on how to run RPGs for therapy groups. I have to assume a lot of the time, this recommendation comes from people who know of maybe five to ten RPGs that aren’t 5th edition D&D, and who have played maybe one or two of them. There are shitloads of queer RPGs out there.
Now, to be clear, I fucking love Monsterhearts. I think it’s probably the best game about queerness I’ve ever read. Many have read or played it (or vaguely heard of it) and tried and failed to cash in on its excellence. I think the reason we get games like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, that want to be part of the lineage borne from Monsterhearts, but that ring so hollow to me and people like me they almost feel like they weren’t written by actual queers, is that the imitators fail to understand what’s great about the OG. And if they did understand, I think many would no longer like it.
The real genius of Monsterhearts, as much as I love the way the themes are deployed and cute details like the seating chart, is the way the mechanics put you in the shoes of your problematic queer teen character, who is also a literal monster. You cannot control who or what Turns Them On (which is the name of the move that is the centerpiece of the game).
If you try to play Monsterhearts to tell stories of untraumatized, well-adjusted queers, the game will fight you every step of the way. If you try to play it and retain full authorial control of any aspect of the game, including your own PC, it will fight you. This applies to the GM as much as anyone else. This is beautiful, and what makes it a great game, but also something that is hardly ever mentioned when it’s recommended. Usually, I just see it touted as a “queer game” or “queer romance game.”
Admittedly, I think at this point the majority of the RPG “community” is adept at fighting and ignoring the explicit rules and intent of the game they play, if they even play at all themselves. We can thank actual plays and their fandom cultures for that.
Incidentally, my critical read of Monsterhearts is heavily informed by the RTFM podcast episode on it, although I am not unequivocally positive on that show as a whole. It’s also very interesting to me how Monsterhearts became, years ago, a “queer game” with a “queer author,” not a game with a “transfeminine author.” Both are true, but it bears consideration which term is more popular, and why.
The only other thing to talk about here is solutions. The obvious and least helpful thing I can say is, don’t engage in an activity like RPGs with the potential for extreme emotional vulnerability with people you don’t trust. This does no good for people who don’t have anyone they trust a lot (who also wants to play tabletop games with them), and it also creates the potential to damage that trust by not giving any more concrete support frameworks – the thing I’m criticizing in the first place.
I do have a bit more to add, but it’s still not super concrete. That’s partly because these kind of meaningful human interactions don’t have a quick fix. You have to engage with them thoughtfully and honestly, as best as you’re able.
So, here’s my advice: do not assume safety tools and session zero are all you need. Do not expect this conversation to happen once and be finished. Keep having it. It’s going to be part of the game as long as the group continues to exist. And accept that there will be times when you fail to use the safety tools when you should, or you misuse them, or you cause each other harm despite them.
People aren’t perfect. We all fuck up and hurt each other. It’s vital to accept that will happen to you and that you will do it, too. This does not erase the harm itself, and it does not excuse a refusal to apologize, reflect, and do better.
I often see people try to avoid “heavy” or taboo subjects in their RPGs to try and avoid this. It’s certainly understandable, and defensible to a degree, to want a gaming table to be a safe place where you can let your guard down. That’s perfectly fine to want and strive for. But this is the motivation that leads to people banning racism or sex or sexual assault wholecloth as subject matter that can be addressed in any way. And that will alienate and possibly even harm people who experience, or have experienced, those things. It’s erasure, even if well-intentioned. And it doesn’t actually prevent players from triggering each other.
So yeah. I guess it boils down to saying you can’t control everything, and loosening your chokehold on life is necessary, even though risk is scary, and that’s something that applies in every context, not just RPGs. I have an extremely hard time living that truth myself. But we need to have grace for ourselves, not judgment. Respect, not hatred, and informed by acknowledgment of power dynamics and systemic oppression. It’s necessarily a work in progress, but one we should be honest about, rather than afraid to admit.
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