Tabletop games that make players cry, and keep them safe

Tabletop games make people cry. Between Lesbians of Thirsty Sword’ Ennie gold win for game of the year, an exceedingly positive fan response to Dungeons & Dragons’ The Radiant Citadel: JourneysPlease see the following: Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast’s critical acclaim, it’s clear that many are interested in games that ask them to explore all sorts of deeply human processes. With games that span themes from loss, trauma, and grief to queerness, diasporic identity, and community building, the next wave of tabletop games isn’t afraid to delve deep.

Jay Dragon, one of the most acclaimed tabletop designers in history (I recently spoke to him)Wanderhome, You can sleep away), Kazumi Chin (Invincible Sword Princess, Rogue 2ERae Nedjadi, (Apocalypse Keys, Our Haunt), about games letting us transmute trauma, Why?We are a family that loves to be cried at the dinner table.

These ideas often have their roots in the design of the format. The point of a TTRPG is that it reacts to you, making it a unique avenue of play; video games and classic board games stick to a set of rules, possible choices, and known entities, with little wiggle room, says Dragon: “A video game is this object that exists, and your engagement with it can be one-sided, but with a tabletop game, ideally it’s something that is actively responding to the things that you’re doing.”

Chin adds that we play tabletop games “to open portals into other ways of being, and feeling, and space, with others.” A party’s choice to befriend a monster instead of killing it, for instance, can turn a typical narrative on its head, opening up avenues for atypical or unusual play. These are especially relevant for systems like the one in Powerfull by the Apocalypse Belonging Outside BelongingThey encourage players to think ahead and not plan. You can play the game to discover! It happens.

“Especially in recent years,” Nedjadi says, “TTRPGs really embody this idea of all of us trying to take care of each other and make sure that we’re all safe.” That’s not to say that video games can’t promote themes of community and care, but tabletop games give players the agency to decide what kind of game they want to play — and what kinds of portals they want to open together.

What is the best way to ensure that games that guarantee safety deal with racism, homophobia, or disability? Additionally, players are more likely to choose games that address these topics.

Image: Possum Creek Games

As Dragon puts it, games create an environment where things can be transmuted: “In real life, as marginalized people, we are navigating a giant series of interlocking, hellishly monstrous systems. We have these systems in our world; our society’s relationship to love, to family, to grief, are all systematic models. The appeal of play lies partially in our ability to take these things which are present in our lives and transmute them and examine them and hold them in our hands, and in doing so, taking power away from them, and giving us this space, as marginalized people, to toy with them.”

“All human experience is structured by story,” Chin says. “You can’t live a life that is un-storied; you can’t live in a world devoid of stories. So when the stories of the world don’t work for you, when they aren’t permissive of your existence, then you’re drawn into other ways of storytelling. The ‘bad things,’ and us telling stories about the bad things, are us trying to grapple with a storied world to reimagine what the bad in the story means to us.” This goes for designers and writers just as much as for players, Chin says. Play groups can choose to engage with difficult themes in their sessions, but game designers are telling stories and grappling with the “bad things,” too.

The three main designers frequently work with deep emotional themes, such as death, trauma and memory loss. Nedjadi states that most often, these elements are incorporated into games by accident. “I don’t think about those things in advance when I design games. It just comes out naturally — all the postcolonial feelings, all the queerness. Since I’m a marginalized person who knows so much trauma, loss, and grief, those things will come out in the things I make. But because I am also a person who, perhaps by surviving this long, had to hold on to hope, my games also feature hope.”

The incorporation of these themes into tabletop games can also result in players engaging with them in surprising ways, offering alternate ways of understanding and processing — opening portals, once again, into new ways of being and feeling. Nedjadi discusses how he observed the playtests. Do you want to be one?His game is about an AI mech with no memories, and its only memories were those of the pilot. The game unintentionally incorporated elements from Nedjadi’s own experience of memory loss as someone with temporal lobe epilepsy.

“It was really surprising to see people play it out, because when they were talking about their memories becoming corrupted or lost, they were having conversations that I’d had with myself, when I was grappling with the realization that I was losing my memories because of seizures. They did so in safety. Talking about it with myself was scary and I took a long time to process it all. But when I saw my friends do it, they were saying the exact same things, but they were able to talk about it in such a way that there was so much compassion, and from that I learned how to be compassionate with myself, too.”

Everyone agrees that the success of exploring these complex themes requires player safety. Although tools like the X-Card and the Monte Cook safety checklist have gained popularity, there are still questions about whether these safety tools make a space more safe.

“Safety tools,” Dragon says, sighing, “are kind of like putting a Band-Aid on top of 500 years of marginalization, trauma, colonization, and capitalism.” They’re not enough to guarantee player safety, Dragon continues, especially when a game deals with potentially harmful elements: “The problem is that we act like it’s going to be totally fine when you take a game that was not designed with safety tools in mind, a game that was designed from the ground up to have hurtful mechanic and dangerous themes, a game that is built to play with fire, and then say, ‘It’ll be fine as long as we all fill out a checklist beforehand.’ And that’s… not true.”

The project of building a culture of safety in play requires more effort from all sides, Dragon says: “Safety tools are the first step. We’ve got this construction yard where people are dancing on the roof beams, and we’ve passed OSHA legislation.”

“Passing the legislation isn’t gonna prevent people from dying from falling off of the roof beams. It’s not gonna help people who get peer-pressured into climbing up onto the roof and dancing anyway. We need to actually build a culture of safety that understands that, you know, the OSHA inspectors aren’t killjoys.”

Image: Possum Creek Games

The problem, according to Dragon, is That the methodology and approach of “classic” tabletop games doesn’t leave room for safety. They use Dungeons & Dragons as an example, saying that the relationship between people in D&D is based around power and exerting power over others. “If I roll a persuasion check on you, I’m effectively consulting the dice to see if I can mind control you,” says Dragon. “If I use a Charm Person spell on you, I am violating your consent and agency in some pretty big ways. You’ve got a game where that is the philosophical underpinning of the structure, and then you put the X-Card in it, as if that is going to be the thing that keeps people from getting hurt?”

Nedjadi believes that games must be built with safety as a priority from the beginning. “In a lot of my games that deal with very difficult emotional themes where you are messy gay characters, I have to think about how to build quote-unquote ‘safety’ constantly,” he says. “The reality of that question is, How do I build in a sense of narrative power that’s not just in the GM’s hands? How can I foster this ability to collaborate and communicate? We have to come at it from the perspective of building safety into every single aspect of the game.”

“The project for us is not to say Yes, safety tools can be used to end conversations,” Chin says. “It’s thinking about how we create games where more happens to allow us to be vulnerable and to play in the ways that we want to play.

“I often enter into games with strangers, being unable to fully partake, because I do not know that [they]Know how to be safe. The tools are nice and all, but safety isn’t a tool; it’s a practice that emerges through trust. I can’t be vulnerable with you until you’ve demonstrated to me your ability to recognize your own power within the game as a person.

“I don’t know what the culture of this space is, you know? So it’s really about designing games where I can trust that the game can guide me. I want the game that can allow me to be safely vulnerable from the first instance.”

“I think the best path forward is for more marginalized people to create games that tap into that vulnerability,” Nedjadi says. “It’s a long-term thing, but we’re already seeing the effects of it, considering how long indie design has been around for. We’re on our way.”