Consent tools, or safety tools, are a mix of tips and tricks to make sure everyone playing a tabletop RPG is comfortable with the game they create together. This is a wonderful idea. If a movie is too upsetting, it's easy to turn off or leave. Games with friends or strangers, not so much. Consent tools are necessary and worthwhile. You should use them.
But consent tools are not perfect. Now, 5-10 years after their introduction, we should give them another look. It's a hard topic to breach, and my intent is certainly not to do away with them. Rather, for the sake of doing the best we can for ourselves and our players, we should be critical of the options we have -- and consider if there's a better way.
This is the first in a series of articles exploring different safety tools, what they do right, where they fall short; a case study about their most infamous failure; and finally, my proposal for new ones.
Note: This series is only possible due to the bravery and brilliance of designer Jay Dragon of Possum Creek Games first broaching this topic from a place of caring. She's opened a safe, good-faith door to talk about this topic for the sake of better player experiences. Thank you. And if you have not played Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, you absolutely should.
Consent Checklists
A consent checklist is the most practical, widespread, pre-session problem-focused, GM-aiming tool in the space. The Monte Cook version is a gold standard. Before play, reach consensus on a list of on-screen, off-screen, and banned topics from play. While it should apply to all players' actions at all times, its biggest use is typically for the GM to plan content-appropriate sessions for the table.
As a session zero, collaborative campaign designing tool, it is the best idea we have. Myself and every GM I know use it every time. It's becoming as core to RPGs as rolling dice, and that's great! But "the best idea we have" is not to say it's perfect, and its age is starting to show. Standard PDF templates can be a time sink for topics never on the table. Custom ones take time to make, while the biggest themes are usually already present in a campaign pitch.
Fearing the Zero
Recently, I've noticed session zeros have started to feel bad to me. I've started to notice an unintended consequence. It feels related to the good intent but underwhelming results of trigger warnings, that similarly made navigating Tumblr feel emotionally taxing for a time. As checklists get more thorough, I often find myself morally and socially required to consider more horrors in rapid succession than any GM or player has ever asked of me over a whole campaign.
Starting a new campaign, with a new group of people, by meeting over an exhaustive gauntlet of creatively upsetting topics, feels bad. It feels like work. If you're a survivor of trauma like me, it can even feel triggering. But bringing that hesitation and stress to session zero goes against the whole point. Movies don't make you mentally engage with every upsetting topic that isn't in it first, and I think we know that would be a bad way to do things. I know we have to tell TTRPG stories ourselves, but this can't be the only way. So how can we protect the value while mitigating the harm?
Less is More?
To address this problem, I've started to put in the effort for custom-made checklists of the darker topics that will be in my campaigns, that players can narrow down based on their limits, alongside a general movie-style rating. If there's an upsetting topic fully outside the reasonable scope of our game, and someone goes out of their way to bring it up, there's probably bigger problems with that player that we would need to address right away anyway. But we realistically wouldn't need to make everyone think about that topic as a general rule at the top of every new game.
I also make the checklist available before the session zero, so players can pace themselves in a judgment-free zone. In session zero, we simply review what we already established so everyone's on the same page. This also improves player anonymity and makes those decisions firmly settled before we even start.
I think the reduced psychic damage of this method is worth it, but it does have a cost. A less-extensive process does open your table to more risks if unchecked content emerges in play. So, make sure you introduce something like the X-Card to supplement in-session play should anything come up. We'll talk about the X-Card and more next time. Stay safe, and good luck.
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