The comfort zone

This excerpt from the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide has been getting shared on social media recently, turning into a gaming shibboleth after Elon Musk commented on it. (I'm surprised he had the time between tweeting puerile 'jokes', supporting fascists, and spreading misinformation about UK & European politics, but a brain soaked in ketamine has unusual priorities, I guess.)

It's a matter of etiquette rather than rules, and the DM's Guide approach isn't how I'd personally handle sensitivity among players. Consider two different games that you might join. One umpire (or DM if you must) offers the comfort tools outlined above. If you object to anything in the game you can stop the action and ask for something to be changed or deleted, much like a censor watching the pre-release cut of a movie. The other umpire starts off by saying that if you have any red lines you're better off not joining the game. So that's the equivalent of going to a movie theatre and checking the age ratings so you don't take your kids into an NC-17.

Those might be examples of Isaiah Berlin's two forms of liberty, though I'll leave it to the philosophers out there to tell us which is which. As I said in an old post, there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they're going to disapprove of, and both approaches deal with that. I prefer the certificate method to the x-card one, given that I very often aim to include extremely disquieting horror elements in my scenarios, and once called off a campaign rather than exclude one of my players who objected to the tone I was planning for the game. And I agree with Hubert Selby Jr that self-censorship is creatively stifling, and that would include group self-censorship. But if the creative outcome, the art, is not your main reason for roleplaying then you're perfectly entitled to join the self-censoring group. It all depends on what you're after.

Here's another way (from Upon a Distant Shore, a D&D campaign book) to handle players objecting to stuff in the game. It seems fair enough to me, but social media immediately lit up with people objecting that it wasn't using comfort "tools" the way they insist on framing them:

Folks get irate because not everyone uses their preferred gaming-table etiquette. But why? As long as you're told the etiquette upfront and so can ensure you aren't going to get unexpectedly upset or offended, isn't that all that matters? You go and watch Paddington in Peru, I'll watch Titus Andronicus, and we're both happy. So I'm not quite sure why the issue divides people into warring camps, other than the fact that pretty much anything does that these days; we're right back in the era of the Blues and the Greens. And Elon Musk is using that fact to buy control of the Western world, so we'd better all smarten the fuck up before it's too late.

Pointing the finger

British literary critics of the 19th century had the notion of the "Young Lady Standard", which was a kind of family-friendly U-rating for novels that would not offend the sensibilities of a Victorian girl. Because of this, British literature often shied away from the sort of forthright depiction of life you find in French or Russian novels of the time. There was a feeling on the Continent that literature was an art form and had a right, indeed a responsibility, to mirror life warts and all. In Britain literature was the forerunner of early-evening television.

Even so, authors like Jane Austen were not the twee and cosy yarn-spinners that many suppose. Lady Susan Vernon is an amoral, manipulative adventuress who deserves a place in the ranks of dark antiheroes alongside Vic Mackey and Walter White; Catherine Morland runs afoul of predatory sexual vindictiveness; Lizzie Bennet takes on a real-life dragon for very high stakes; Becky Sharp is willing to betray even those who love her just to squirrel away some cash. Nonetheless, though depths of human depravity are certainly there to be inferred in 19th century British literature, those are all pre-watershed conflicts. None of them is described with the uncompromising raw honesty and occasional breathtaking brutality of authors like Balzac or Chekhov.

Dickens wrote stories to stir your emotions, but he and his readers knew they were parlour entertainment, to be read by the whole family -- a "safe space" in entertainment. A Victorian paterfamilias who opened a novel to be confronted with the likes of Madame Bovary might well have stormed back to the bookshop and thrown it through the window.

I think something similar is behind the uproar we sometimes see nowadays over "unsuitable" content in roleplaying games. There are some people who play games the way those Victorian families read novels; there are others who expect games with no holds barred. This has led to the concept of the "x-card" -- sadly nothing to do with homo superior, but a mechanism to interrupt games whose scenes or subject matter a player is unhappy with. To quote from the blog I linked to there:

"The x-card is used to signal that a boundary has been crossed or that a player is not OK with the content. The game stops immediately, and discussion shifts to the reason why the card was used."

For me that's as absurd as calling a halt to a disturbing play or movie. If you don't like what you're seeing, don't tell me about it; there's the exit. But there's a category disconnect here. I regard roleplaying games as art, no different from literature, theatre, cinema, poetry, and painting. The people who advocate x-cards want their games to be morally uplifting and to avoid upsetting anybody, just like those family novels for the Victorian fireside. We have different expectations.

I have a player who doesn't like horror scenarios. If we're going to be playing a horror campaign, that's OK; she sits it out. Sometimes there's a grey area. A scenario may not be overtly intended as horror, in the sense of belonging to the horror genre, but horrific things happen. There have been a few times when my players have shocked me to the core with some of the things they're willing to do. And that's fine. It's why I play, in fact, to see those things that emerge unexpectedly from characterization -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes very nasty. It's the same when writing characters. You ask yourself how far they will go, what lines won't they cross, and the answer is often revelatory.

What do you do if you come up with something you know will be shocking, whether as a player or a referee? If I thought my players couldn't handle it then I'd keep it to use in a story, perhaps. But really, if my players were like that then we'd soon part company. They and I know we're not setting any limits.

Taking the blog post I cited again, one of that player's boundaries is "I don't want any romance involving my character." But it's really hard to plan that kind of thing in advance, especially in the improv style of play that gives the best games. When refereeing, I wouldn't have an NPC profess love for a PC if I didn't think the player was capable of running with it. (I'm talking about their acting ability and imagination, of course.) What if one player-character falls in love with another? I'd much rather they both played it. Unrequited love is one option there, and it could develop in interesting directions as we know from countless TV shows and novels. It would be pretty disappointing if a player just said, "I don't want to roleplay that." In that case play your blocking. Reject them, spurn their advances in-character. Don't tell everyone about it.

But what about games in a public forum? Twenty years ago I went along to a convention to sign Fabled Lands books but soon got roped into a series of fascinating mini-RPG scenarios run by the guys behind West Point Extra Planetary Academy. Each game had a different setting and was built as a moral quandary to be played out in twenty minutes. They could hardly have started by saying, "This scenario deals with issues X, Y and Z." It's the trigger warning problem. If you're trying to capture a genuine sense of surprise in the game, you can't give too much away upfront. (Not to mention that the evidence indicates that trigger warnings are of no use in any case to the genuinely traumatized.)

Why have these debates crept into games of late? I think partly because roleplaying is becoming -- well, not mass market entertainment, not by any stretch, but certainly it has opened up beyond the hardcore gaming demographic of the early days. Aficionados take a sophisticated approach to their hobby. The casual fan tends to have a less mature outlook.

Also, American culture has always had a much more censorious streak than European. The idea of shutting down a discussion because it offends somebody's moral code is perhaps natural if your country was founded by Puritans. And because of social media, the Overton window has shifted away from liberalism towards moralism. Hence gripes like this, that maybe do make sense over in the US (American friends, feel free to chip in) but strike most Europeans as potty.

And because most roleplaying derives from genre fiction, and genre sensibilities tend to be a little less grown-up than proper literature, there's a tendency to expect roleplaying games to stick to the soft-soap forms of conflict you get in traditional SF and fantasy. Witness the outcries over Game of Thrones when the writers stepped outside genre norms -- even though that was pretty much the entire thesis of the show from day one.

Anyway, enough theorizing. What do we do about it? Well, surely few gamers want to sit around listening while one player explains their reasons for halting the game. The next stop on that line is struggle sessions, which nobody will enjoy. But those people's sense of offence seems genuinely to overwhelm them, and there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they disapprove of. So we're going to need better ways to signal which kind of roleplayer you are. High literary with anything goes, or pulp with puritan boundaries? As long as everyone around the table knows what they're letting themselves in for, I'm sure we can all keep on gaming without needing to call the thought police.

I've been x-carded!

You know I mentioned a little while back that I was planning to run The Wars mini-campaign from The Yellow King RPG. Well, you didn't miss anything because it never happened. Why? I got my first x-card.

What dat, you ask? Here's what the Yellow King RPG has to say:

"Each player receives an index card with an X on it. When someone introduces subject matter that a player finds truly, personally fun-ruining, the player holds up the card. The player can either suggest that the troubling element be dialed back, or dropped entirely. You and the other players, as the fine and considerate people you are, accede to the request without pushback, adjusting the narration as desired."

In preparing for the first session I'd been assigning nicknames to the player-characters, who were all members of an infantry platoon in a sort of not-quite WW2 with bits of steampunky WW1. One of the players complained that one of the other characters' nickname was in poor taste. Don't worry, it wasn't some awful racist David Starkey offence; I'm not that insensitive to modern etiquette. It was pretty much in the same line as the name of the corporal pictured left, actually. But I don't do "no pushback" so I pointed out that squaddies in a brutal mid-20th century world war would not share the sensibilities of civilians in 21st century London. Taste would be very low on their agenda when inflicting a nickname on a new recruit.

In fact it helped me make up my mind to pull the plug on the game. It's always better to do that before wasting the players' time on a session or two, as happened with another famously crowdfunded RPG that I'd better not mention. It wasn't because of that x-carding -- I could easily enough have changed the character's nickname to something untroubling to that player -- but because it had been dawning on me throughout the character-creation process that the Wars campaign I wanted to run wasn't the one most of the players wanted to be in. Mine would have ideally been The Red Cavalry meets Kafka, and I'd have settled for Charley's War; the players were hoping for Kelly's Heroes (perhaps with a dash of 'Allo 'Allo) and would have settled for Fury. And it was quite enough work just to prepare the game; I didn't also want to have to stop and justify my creative choices every session against what one or other of the players might regard as good taste. Once you do that you start to self-censor, and then nobody is happy. Better to walk away.

We are back to the question of how sentimental and moral the universe of the campaign was meant to be. For me, there would be no heroes or villains. NPCs would say and do the sort of things I'd put into a novel, where nothing should be out of bounds. Attitudes would be harsh, soldiers brutalized, taste offended. Players who are accustomed to adventure stories in genre settings would not find that water lovely. (Case in point: listen at 24m 24s here to the Appendix N fellows describing how to efficiently ruin a fine Robert E Howard story for the sake of making it palatable to the dopiest readers.) Even if I removed the original cause of offence there'd be something else to complain about in short order, because the real problem was the disconnect between my whole gaming ethic and the players'. One player said to me, "This group prefers games where we survive and win." So of course they were never going to go for a campaign set in an endless war whose origins defied logic and where their characters' orders were (a brilliant touch by Robin D Laws, this) to report to their own side for execution.

Gumshoe-style RPGs like The Yellow King frequently liken campaigns to long-running TV shows. The shows I like best tend to be the ones that get cancelled, often before the end of their first season: Vinyl, Action, Journeyman, Aquarius, Cupid. Same with the kinds of games I'd like to run if I could. A couple of players might say they were great; most would find something else to do until the campaign wound up. To avoid doing lots of set-up work that ends up in the bin, I have to rein in my own preferences, keep an eye of the Neilsen ratings, and just do it "for the network". It means never pushing the boat out to try anything very startling, disturbing or original, but that's what RPG referees have in common with TV producers. C'est le jeu.

The takeaway is to think about the kind of game the players want. If we must see roleplaying campaigns as TV shows, the referee/GM is the showrunner and the players are the cast, sure, but they're also the audience. Ask yourself if this is going to be a show they'll stick with over seven seasons, or one they'll want to switch off after half an episode. Don't wait until they start to fling x-cards at you. An x-card means "I don't trust you to run this game" and the signs should be there long before you reach that point. You'll save yourself a lot of work if you're alert to reading the room, not blinded (as I was) by my enthusiasm for the campaign inside my head.

But here's one of those opportunities that playing over the internet has opened up. I don't have to find a campaign that appeals to the whole gaming group. Before, when we all arranged to meet up every other Thursday, whatever we played had to appeal to all of us. That was the equivalent of the network TV drama. But over Zoom, Skype, Discord, whatever, my campaign can be a cable show. There's a good reason you don't get stuff like Breaking Bad or Succession on ad-supported networks -- smaller audiences equals more quirkiness and more daring. So maybe I should be pitching the campaign concept and players can decide if they're up for it -- and for those who aren't there's always the other channel.

Judging by this review of The Yellow King by Mike Cule and Roger Bell-West, I have that x-card to thank for dodging a bullet. Roger mentions "the frankly intimidating amount of work it would take to run it well" and Mike alludes to the near-impossibility of improvising anything that could inflict shock or injury, which are the two metrics of damage to characters. I had already put in a full week just prepping the first session of The Wars, only to realize that what I really needed was another game system, a different war setting, and to invite only those players who were intrigued by the pitch. If you're worried about missing all the unsettling Ligottian stuff I had planned, though, I'll hopefully still find a home for it somewhere. Maybe in a scenario on this blog for Armistice Day -- if that wouldn't seem in poor taste.