Safety & Accessibility

(Press play for an audio version of the safety and accessibility tools, read by Aaron Catano-Saez.)

As you and your fellow players come to a consensus on the characters, tropes, and subject matter that will make up your scenarios, make sure everyone feels welcome, safe, and is encouraged to speak up if they find any aspect of the game unsatisfying. Here are several tips and resources you can utilize to help you do so. Share these with your gaming group and choose the ones that work the best for all of you.

Welcome

As an absolute first step, in venues where you may be gaming with folks who are effectively (or actually) strangers, make sure you understand how each individual at the table wishes to be identified. Promote the understanding and use of their preferred personal (and later, their character’s) pronouns.

Regardless of whether you are playing with strangers or intimate friends, make sure you are welcoming to each other. This means encouraging different ideas and opinions on setting, characters, tone, and subject matter. Ensure everyone has a say and use fair means of coming to a consensus on these topics. It also means encouraging open and honest conversation about hard lines folks may draw regarding the tone and subject matter piece, specifically.

Two excellent tools you can use to help with this are Monte Cook Games’ Consent in Gaming and Accessibility in Gaming Resources by Jennifer Kretchmer. Consent in Gaming opens up discussion about which difficult topics to explore or avoid. Accessibility in Gaming Resources includes a host of discussions, practical tips, and both physical and digital gaming tools designed to improve accessibility and awareness around disabilities that might affect how the game is played.

Additionally, let everyone at the table know that anyone may call for a break at any time to halt the current discussion or scene within a scenario. This provides everyone a chance to cool off and better organize their thoughts in order to discuss a difficult or unforeseen subject. Think of it as hitting the “Pause” button.

Safe

Safety means having tools and protocols in place to call out when things are approaching or have just crossed a line of any kind. Even with an open and honest conversation, a game based on word play is going to work differently for folks from different cultural backgrounds, or for whom a shared language might not be their primary. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit Quick Reference Guide (and associated Google Drive folder) by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk maintains an excellent compilation of safety tools and protocols.

Encouraged

Continuously encourage your fellow gamers to know about, understand, and engage with safety and consent tools and protocols. Actively promote open conversation throughout a game session, but especially at the end of the session.

Providing a consistent cool down period at the end of the game session to reflect on its events and talk through the highs and lows is a necessary part of any game session. It can be extended to (but not relegated solely to) offline conversation through emails, texts, forums, or other means of communication afterward, giving players time and distance to reflect on issues that crop up. Or better yet, to reflect on all of the awesome stories you create as you see how the characters transform over the course of a Descriptors game session!

Resources