People are falling in love with tabletop games that make them cry. between thirsty sword woman‘Annie Gold win for Game of the Year, an overwhelmingly positive fan response to Dungeons & Dragons’ Journey through the Bright CitadelAnd Yazeba’s Bed and BreakfastOf critical acclaim, it’s clear that many people are interested in games that ask them to explore all kinds of deep human processes. With games that span themes from loss, trauma, and grief to queerness, migrant identity, and community building, the next wave of tabletop games isn’t afraid to delve deeper.
I recently spoke to renowned tabletop designers Jay Dragon (wonderhome, sleep away), Kazumi Chin (invincible sword princess, Rogue 2E), and Rai Nedjadi (apocalypse key, our base), about games that hurt us, Why? We love crying at the table, and how to make a safe play space from the ground up.
Many of these ideas are rooted in the format itself, he says. The point of a TTRPG is that it reacts to you, making it a unique game opportunity; Dragon says that video games and classic board games stick to a set of rules, possible choices, and known entities, Dragon says: “A video game is an object that exists, and your association with it may be one-sided. But with tabletop games, ideally it’s something that’s actively responding to what you’re doing.”
Chin says we play tabletop games “to be with others, and to feel and open portals to space.” For example, the party’s choice to befriend a monster rather than kill it can turn a specific narrative on its head, opening up avenues for unusual or unusual play. This is especially true for systems like those powered by apocalypse And related to outsidewhich allows players not to plan ahead but play to find out what happens.
“Especially in recent years,” Nedjadi says, “TTRPG really embodies the idea of all of us trying to take care of each other and make sure we are all safe. Huh.” That doesn’t mean that video games can’t foster themes of community and care, but tabletop games do give players the agency to decide what kind of game they want to play — and what kind of portal they want to play. want to open together.
But how can sports that promise to keep players safe tackle issues of racism, homosexuality and disability? And, by extension, why do players actively choose to engage in sports related to these topics?
Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast Artwork Image: Possum Creek Games
As Dragon says, the games create an environment where things can transpire: “In real life, as marginalized people, we’re navigating a vast array of interlocking, hellish demonic systems Our world has these systems; our society’s relationship to love, to family, to grief, are all systematic models. The appeal of play partly lies in our ability to take in the things that exist in our lives. And transmit them and examine them and put them in our hands, and in doing so, take away the power from them, and give us this space, as if to play with the marginalized.”
“All human experience is structured by story,” says Chin. “You cannot live a life that is untold; You cannot live in a world devoid of stories. So when the stories of the world don’t work for you, when they don’t allow for your existence, you turn to other ways of storytelling. ‘Bad Things,’ and we’re telling stories about bad things, are we trying to grapple with a storytelling world to re-imagine what evil means to us in the story.” And there’s as much for writers as it is for players, Chin says. Game groups may choose to engage with difficult topics in their sessions, but game designers are telling stories and grappling with “bad things,” too.
All three designers often work with deeply emotional themes: death, trauma, memory loss, coming out, relatable and postcolonial fiction. But most of the time, Nedjadi says, incorporating these elements into these games is an accident. “I don’t think about those things in advance when I design games. It comes naturally — all the post-colonial feelings, all the weirdness. Since I’m a marginalized person who gets so much trauma, loss And grief knows, those things will come out in the things I do. But because I’m also the kind of person who might have had to hold on to hope, to survive for so long, there’s hope in my game. ”
Incorporating these themes into tabletop games allows players to engage with them in surprising ways, offering alternative ways of understanding and processing – opening portals, once again, into new ways of being and feeling. Let’s talk about watching the plays of Nedjadi gang up, his game about a fragmented AI mech whose only memories pertain to its pilot. The game unintentionally incorporated elements from his own experience of memory loss as someone with temporal lobe epilepsy.
“Safety devices are like putting a Band-Aid on top of 500 years of marginalization, trauma, colonialism and capitalism”
“It was really amazing to see people play it, because when they were talking about their memories being corrupted or lost, they were having conversations that I had with myself when I struggled with this feeling. Was that I was losing my memories. Because of the seizure. But they did it in a very safe way. It was a very scary time when I was discussing it with me, and it took me a lot to process all that stuff. It took a long time. But when I saw my friends doing this, they were saying the exact same things, but they were able to talk about it in a way that had so much compassion, and from that I learned how But have mercy.”
We can all agree that player safety is critical to the successful exploration of these difficult topics. Tools such as the X-card, Monte Cook Safety Checklist and Session Zero for discussing player limits have gained popularity in home games and actual plays alike, but there is some doubt that the use of safety equipment is inherently a The play makes the place safe or not.
“Safety devices,” Dragon says, sighing, “are like putting a Band-Aid on top of 500 years of marginalization, trauma, colonialism, and capitalism.” They are not enough to guarantee player safety, Dragon continues, especially when a game deals with potentially harmful elements: “The problem is that we act like that when you take a game that doesn’t have safety devices.” It would be perfectly fine if not designed with .brain, a game designed to have harmful mechanics and dangerous themes from the start, a game designed to be played with fire, And then say, ‘It’s going to be fine as long as we all fill out a checklist beforehand.’ And that… isn’t true.”
The project of building a culture of safety in sport requires more effort from all sides, Dragon says: “Safety equipment is the first step. We have this construction yard where people are dancing on the ceiling beams, and we’ve got OSHA The law is passed.”
“Passing a law won’t prevent people from dying from falling from ceiling beams. It won’t help people who come under peer pressure to climb on the roof and dance anyway. We really need safety.” There needs to be a culture that understands that, you know, OSHA inspectors are not happy.”
wonderhome Artwork Image: Possum Creek Games
The problem, according to Dragon, is that the methodology and approach of a “classic” tabletop game doesn’t leave room for safety. They use Dungeons & Dragons as an example, saying that the relationship between people in D&D is based on the exercise of power and power over others. “If I roll a persuasion check on you, I’m effectively consulting the dice to see if I can control you,” Dragon says. “If I use an enchantment person spell on you, I’m violating your consent and agency in some big way. You have a game where that’s the philosophical basis of the structure, and then you X-cards into it put, such as He Will that be the thing that will save people from getting hurt?”
Instead, Nedjadi says, sports should be designed with safety in mind from the ground up. “In a lot of my games that deal with very difficult emotional themes where you’re the messy gay character, I have to think about how to make the quote-unquote ‘safety’ consistent,” he says. “The reality of that question is, How do I build in a sense of narrative power that just isn’t in the GM’s hands? How do I build in this ability to communicate and collaborate? We have to come at this from the perspective of building security in every aspect of the game.
“The project is not for us to say” Yes, Safety Tools, End Conversation,” Chin says. “It’s thinking about how we make games where we have more to be vulnerable and play the way we want to play.
“I often enter games with strangers, being completely unable to participate because I don’t know [they] Know how to protect. Tools are good and all, but safety is no tool; It is a practice that emerges through faith. I can’t be insecure with you until you’ve demonstrated to me your ability to recognize your power within the game as a person.
“I don’t know what the culture of this place is, you know? So it’s really about designing games where I can trust that the game can guide me. I want a game that’s going to get me through the first time.” only to allow it to be vulnerable safely.”
“I think the best way forward is to make games for more marginalized people who tap into that vulnerability,” says Nedjadi. “It’s a long-term thing, but we’re already seeing the effects of it, given how long indie design has been around. We’re well on our way.”
