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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3705 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

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Is anyone familiar with the history of the TTRPG safety toolkit? http://bit.ly/ttrpgsafetytoolkit / https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/114jRmhzBpdqkAlhmveis0nmW73qkAZCj

I only learned about it yesterday and I'm afraid to think what kind of taboo content people that have created this include in their sessions.

There's some Weird Stuff in fairly well-respected mainline TTRPGs. I've got the Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Exalted textual examples (aka "fuck this wolf or the earth will die"), but they're honestly pretty tame compared to what people came up with for Black Spiral Dancers, Malfeas, or the Neverborn to do, since they're all basically different flavors of corruptively invading your very soul. Unknown Armies was better-known for its magical bum fights, but one of its more serious mechanical advances was a system for measuring and applying how traumatized your character had become, and while some GMs were just got in the oceans-of-blood wackiness, there was a lot of space for really subtle attacks that could be really innovative and/or strike to the bone.

That said, the toolkit's not really meant for that purpose, as evidenced by the fairly conventional material in the topic checklist, so it's not a huge surprise a lot of the motivating incidents were less 'extreme' or 'taboo' and more the conventional array of cringe. The Far Verona scandal lines up with the release of that specific safety toolkit (though is almost certainly not the sole motivation), and it's less kinky than the classical Pissard's 'magical forest'; it's simply not something most players signed up for. X-cards were something people brought up in response to the 2019 UK Games Expo snafu (which is a little worse than the mainstream media coverage: the game was Tales from the Flood, and this means probably-mid-teens characters), and I'd heard about the cards back as early as 2015.

There's probably some acceleration due to the BlackhattMatt scandal from White Wolf and to a lesser extent Zak S, both early 2019, but that's more political realignment in general rather than their behaviors specifically.

That said, the toolkit's not really meant for that purpose, as evidenced by the fairly conventional material in the topic checklist, so it's not a huge surprise a lot of the motivating incidents were less 'extreme' or 'taboo' and more the conventional array of cringe.

I was completely puzzled by the vibes of the conversation this link pointed to until I realized it was RPG.net and not RPGcodex.net.

And thanks for the detailed reply.

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