Why I Don't Trust People Who Won't Roleplay Sex Scenes: On Attitudes Toward Safety Tools, Consent, and Predation in the RPG Hobby

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. 

Whose ideal "UWU queer found family" system DOESN'T have extremely 

detailed mechanics for when you can and can't move in five foot increments?

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.­

Modeling Stress, Trauma, and Mental Illness in RPGs

 

In college, I studied English and psychology, a hybrid degree. My capstone project focused on analyzing the portrayal of mental illness (or, more often and regrettably, “madness” or “insanity”) in roleplaying games. It wound up more of a survey than a statement, beyond pointing out some obviously flawed approaches that I will bring up again here. It’s been less than two years since I finished that project, but I feel my understanding of the medium of RPGs and the world of mental health both grow every day.

First, I should differentiate some terms. I use “stress” to mean tension brought on by circumstances. For example, knowing a killer alien is hunting you is likely to put you on edge. “Trauma” begins to get into a space where one ought to tread carefully, so I’m going to outsource my definition. SAMHSA says: “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

More contentious yet is finding a definition for mental illness, or mental health. Even establishing how those two concepts are related can be tricky. To that end, the CDC says “poor mental health and mental illness are not the same. A person can experience poor mental health and not be diagnosed with a mental illness. Likewise, a person diagnosed with a mental illness can experience periods of physical, mental, and social well-being.”

Personally, I don’t believe in arbitrarily saying certain people’s minds are fundamentally “ill” just because they deviate from societal norms and expectations. That is a judgment which is inconsistent from person to person and cultural group to cultural group, and which has been used in countless harmful ways throughout history. This is what trips up even the RPGs that otherwise do a pretty good job, I think. More on this later.

In the interest of having a working definition, I will say that mental health refers to how well one’s mental and emotional paradigms match the expectations of the society they inhabit. Therefore, mental illness can be seen as paradigms that deviate from those expectations to the point that existence in that society becomes challenging.

Let me bring this back to RPGs with an example of where I’m headed with this essay. The first time I played The End of the World, a game in which you play as yourself in the context of an apocalyptic scenario, it was with university classmates. This was for a class assignment, as a matter of fact; I didn’t really know any of my fellow players outside of class.

The game began as is typical for EOTW: we (our in-game selves, much as their real counterparts) were sitting in an on-campus dining hall when concerning, sporadic news reports began to filter in. Pretty soon, zombies attacked us. We escaped narrowly to someone’s dorm room and began to plan our next steps. It was at this point that I (the player) began to consider what I’d really do in this circumstance, having just dodged a grisly death by a hair’s breadth. I decided I’d call my dad. I had to know if he was safe, and if so, seek his advice on what to do next.

As soon as I relayed this to the GM, I realized the awkwardness of my choices. This guy barely knew me, and I was asking him to roleplay as my father (who he knew nothing about) in a fairly intimate conversation. It was a non-starter, and also took pretty much everyone out of the game until I decided to just resolve the outcome of the call myself and move back to the action.

I bring this anecdote up not just for its cringeworthy humor, but because it represents an aspect of roleplay that has always mattered to me: I want my characters, be they copies of myself or something much more fanciful, to react in believable, human ways. One way that manifests is a desire for trauma to have meaning in the game.

 

 End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse (2014, Fantasy Flight Games)

Let’s move on to another game example. Imagine a first-time D&D player showing up with their debut character: a high elf wizard with the noble background. Level 1, fresh from her mansion, with only a theoretical curiosity for the arcane and a yearning for adventure in her head. Let’s say this character is running through the 5^th edition starter adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver.

The adventure starts with an ambush by goblins on the road. Just four goblins versus the party of adventurers; simple enough. This fight can be pretty brutal if the GM plays their cards right, though; the goblins can employ some pretty scary hit and run tactics with their Nimble Escape feature. In this playthrough, maybe none of the PCs die, but our wizard gets hit by a couple of lucky arrows and drops. The cleric saves her with a Healing Word, but she comes to with the knowledge that she almost died.

Personally, I would imagine this fledgling mage would feel pretty freaked out. I don’t think it’s a stretch that a brush with death would be traumatic for someone coming from a life of pampered luxury. However, D&D has absolutely no game mechanics to support this line of roleplay. I can decide she sticks behind the paladin from now on, or learns more defensive spells as she levels up, but as far as the game is concerned, I have no reason to act like that. My hit points are back to full from a single spell or an hour of downtime; let’s get back to the killing – I mean, the adventure!

To that end, the same logic applies to the reverse: maybe my elf got some good attack rolls in and killed three of the goblins herself. Goblins are unambiguously sentient people with their own society and culture by D&D’s official lore (as well as how they’re presented in Lost Mine). What if my elf feels remorse or disgust at her actions? In this case, it would actively detract from the game experience. This is because D&D is a violent power fantasy above all else.

Not to go on too much of a tangent here, but D&D (in its current iteration’s base rules) allows characters to improve through violence and nothing else. What’s more, the improvements they earn are almost exclusively pertinent to killing and avoiding being killed. This isn’t necessarily to knock that style of game, although I don’t personally prefer it.

But this is the reason D&D doesn’t model trauma, especially the mundane (as opposed to magically inflicted) kind. If my wizard gets more and more distraught over her bloodshed as the adventure continues, and the adventure is 80-90% about killing more thinking beings, sooner or later I will have to roleplay a breakdown, a sadistic change of heart, or a tearful departure before bringing in my next character.

This flavor of escapism doesn’t work if you look too hard at the consequences of your actions, even on your own character. There’s plenty of deconstructions of this in the hobby, such as John Tynes’ Power Kill, which frames the characters as psychiatric inpatients who have gone rampaging, thinking they’re murderous adventurers.

As a last note on D&D, early editions had explicit rules for characters being afflicted with real-life illnesses such as schizophrenia, albeit gamified in a way that bears almost no resemblance to the experience of those with the actual diagnosis, and far more to harmful, sensationalized depictions from other works of fiction. This was clearly an afterthought in the 70s and 80s, and is even more so now, with the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide retaining slightly smoothed versions of these effects without the real-life name (because we can’t be insensitive, now can we?)

 

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Lost Mine of Phandelver (2014, Wizards of the Coast)

 

Let’s move on, then, to a game that actually wants to explore these things. Call of Cthulhu is no power fantasy. You are set up to play as ordinary people, and in some ways, CoC investigators are actually feebler than your average joe. One of these ways would certainly be their sanity. In CoC, sanity is a meter that starts at a certain value and only goes down. Once it’s empty, your character is “permanently insane” and you can no longer control their actions at all.

This deprivation of player agency is at the core of CoC’s sanity system. Whenever you go insane, be it “temporarily,” “indefinitely,” or, as mentioned above, “permanently,” the manifestation of this debility in the game is determined randomly, unless the GM wants to fudge it and pick an entry from the tables in the book.

The way this works is not only horrendously inaccurate to any kind of real mental illness or response to trauma, it’s so swingy that it’s often not even a fun gameplay experience. Yet another example: I recently ran a prewritten scenario from the 80s, One in Darkness. The investigation was a little slow at first, maybe, but heading swiftly to an interesting climax when the central monster first reared its head to the whole party.

Despite being depicted in the art as a giant, demonic rat, this was an avatar of the god Nyarlathotep, and so simply witnessing it cost the characters either 1d10 or 1d100 sanity points (SAN), depending on if they made a singular roll. That meant losing an average of 5 SAN and going temporarily insane if you failed another roll, or an average of 50 SAN, which for many characters means permanent insanity and automatic loss of your character.

Here's how it played out: I had the avatar pop out of a sewer grate while the PCs were driving to an NPC’s home. They were split across two cars. In one car, all three PCs went permanently or indefinitely insane. They crashed into the avatar (who, as a kicker, was immune to harm from nonmagical objects) and all died because the driver’s madness manifested as, essentially, road rage. The other car’s driver was also properly insane and drove into a house while her passenger fainted from temporary insanity. Those two survived until the cops showed up, but obviously that was the end of the adventure. The avatar simply walked away.

Obviously, reducing the numbers on the SAN loss would mitigate some of that fiasco, but I still feel that CoC is regularly hamstrung by the simultaneously rigid and chaotic way its characters react to trauma. This is to say nothing of the way it takes a sampling of real-life symptoms and diagnoses and attaches them to game mechanics completely haphazardly.

One more example of the disservice CoC does to this subject is in one of the very few ways you can regain SAN. Investigators who successfully unravel a mystery, protecting innocents and apprehending no-goodniks in the process, regain a die or two of SAN. This has the implication of moralizing the game’s attempt at portraying mental illness. You might stop being crazy if you’re a good Samaritan – because that’s how mental health and trauma work, right?

 

 Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Core Rulebook (2014, Chaosium, Inc.)

The next game I want to touch on is Free League’s Alien RPG. This system chooses a broader, perhaps more generic “stress” mechanic; every time your character experiences something stressful or traumatic, or pushes themselves hard, they get stress dice. Stress dice can make you more effective, but they can also make you panic. This creates a neat little flow in which you start reacting effectively to the dangers that surround you, right up until you’re so freaked out that every little thing you have to do is almost guaranteed to cause a meltdown or overreaction.

I feel this captures the Alien movies quite well, and also seems a decent way to represent how competent people would fold under such distressing circumstances. I also don’t feel that it would be fair to criticize the game for its avoidance of the subject of real mental illness or the more nuanced effects of trauma. This is because the scope of the Alien RPG is focused on the encounters with the titular creatures, not on deeper character interiority. The character sheet is simple and focused on telling you what you’re good at when it comes to space exploration; Alien PCs are meant to die far more than change and grow.

I would contrast that with D&D because that game claims to have three “pillars” of gameplay, all equally important, and roleplay is one of them. 5e D&D also tries to do it all, with some mechanics included to flesh out your character’s personality. Alien is up front about its intent to terrify and maul your character, and its ruleset supports that.

 Alien RPG Core Rulebook (2019, Free League Publishing)

Lastly, let’s look at Unknown Armies, a game I love, and the one that gets closest to my ideal for handling this subject. It actually has a lot of similarities to Call of Cthulhu: eminently mortal characters, similar dice mechanics, a focus on what skills your character is and isn’t good, and of course, a system for modeling trauma.

The first thing UA does better than CoC is splitting “sanity” into five “shock gauges.” These are categorized as Helplessness, Self, Isolation, Violence, and the Unnatural: the kinds of trauma you might encounter in UA’s occult underground. I might monkey with this division a little (maaaybe combine Helplessness and Isolation?), but on the whole I don’t feel it needs adjustment; it works well.

The next refinement: a shock gauge doesn’t just decrement when you are subjected to a relevant traumatic event. Rather, you either get a hardened or failed notch. The former means you become more resilient to the trauma, but also develop a more detached or warped relationship to that category. The latter means you are more frightened and shaken for future encounters, and in the moment, you fight, flee, or freeze. Notably, the player chooses which of these happens to their character, not the GM.

I find that this is a much more believable model, and also lends itself to thinking about who your character is and how their traumas change them. Characters are actually expected to begin with some notches, allowing you to be someone used to killing others (by adding hardened notches to your Violence gauge) if you want to be that kind of murderhobo. There are tons of other ways you could assign notches, though, and this leads to some really interesting characterization through the lens of trauma.

Where I feel UA drops the ball is what happens when you gauges fill up, specifically the failed notches. This is where the game brings in real-world symptoms, and under the category of “ongoing madness,” no less. The game allows players to “work with [their] GM” to figure out the specifics (unlike CoC), but you’re choosing from a list including flashbacks, substance addiction, and so on. I do appreciate the designers’ conscious choice to leave out dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia (they include a half-page explanation on why they felt this would be going too far), but I feel that if one or two diagnoses are better off left alone, you should really question what is so different about the rest that makes it okay to include them (and, again, label them “madness.”)

 

 Unknown Armies 3rd Edition, Book 1: Play (2016, Atlas Games)

Okay. This has gone quite long. Let’s end on some takeaways that I want to keep in mind as I think about how I would create a system for stress, trauma, and/or mental illness in a game of my own. First, I am not really interested in designing a power fantasy, and I am interested in exploring these topics intelligently and compassionately. This means I will want to at least acknowledge them in my thinking about the design, if not include mechanics on them.

Second, I do think mechanics would be wise. My reason for saying this is that mechanics are how we engage with all aspects of a game. When you don’t address something you claim is important through a mechanical lens, it won’t end up being important at a lot of tables (see my comments about roleplay in D&D 5e – and this applies for the exploration pillar, as well.)

Third, there has to be nuance. A 1-100 meter isn’t going to cut it for such a deeply nuanced subject. Fourth, as we learned from Alien, it has to be in line with the overall scope of the game. Fifth, player agency must be preserved.

Sixth, avoid disrespecting the real lived experience of people who have undergone trauma (which to some degree is basically everyone) and who live with mental illness. This would include not calling people “mad” or “insane” for struggling with addiction, for example. This one is definitely easy to screw up, but it’s also very important. Research, sensitivity readers, and so on are key.

And lastly, seventh, is the point I’m still chewing on: how do you represent real mental illness in a game, if that’s something you decide you want to do? I’ve established that it has to be incorporated into the mechanics, at least to some degree. But any attempt to attach real symptoms to mechanics that I’ve seen has not looked good in practice.

Maybe separating trauma from diagnosable mental illnesses is a place to start. After all, the idea that you can develop schizophrenia from seeing a spooky fish-man has always been a laughable flaw of Call of Cthulhu. If you didn’t know, you can’t just “become schizophrenic” at the drop of a hat. That’s not how the illness works.

I still need time to think on that one, so I’ll come back to it later. This is a 3,000 word monstrosity as it is. I’ll sum all this up by saying that whether you’re writing or running an RPG, you should give at least some thought to the depiction of trauma and mental illness, because it’s probably in there somewhere, and if it’s a focus area for that game, don’t make an ass out of yourself by doing the subject injustice.