Hello folks! Let’s talk about handling discomfort and disturbing imagery in role-playing games, and how to do so with tact, empathy, and (dare I say?) artfulness.

So uh, up front, let’s put down a CW for TORTURE because I’m providing an example. I’ll flag the example before it comes up, too.

In a lot of cases, RPGs don’t need to be scary or unsettling—they can just be lighthearted romps with silly villains (or no villains)! The world is already A Lot, and you don’t NEED to add dark shit to your game.

On the flipside, not all RPGs need to be lighthearted. The success of, say, Bluebeard’s Bride shows that people often DO want to play games about dark or scary topics.

It can sometimes be cathartic to draw an abstraction of something that hurts you, then role-play victory over that thing. I wrote a thread about this! https://twitter.com/ajeypandey/status/1235258697112264712

But such topics need to be treated delicately and with FULL INVOLVEMENT of everyone playing. Not just safety tools, but also old-fashioned listening to players.

So let’s get into that! Here’s a rough framework for introducing discomfort and disturbing imagery into your games:
1. Check with players beforehand
2. Take feedback
3. Take disturbing imagery seriously
4. Check with players afterward

And we’ll use an example from a game *I* ran! And here returns the...

CW for TORTURE!

So I wanted to portray a scene where a non-player character was subjected to torture, because I wanted that scene to tie into the broader plot. So I...

CHECK WITH PLAYERS BEFOREHAND.
Well first, I checked that the Lines and Veils document the group was maintaining didn’t mention torture. Because it wasn’t mentioned directly, I went to all my players.

I asked them, “Okay, if I were to portray torture, what would you want from that? I will not describe explicit gore.”

2. TAKE FEEDBACK
And one player said, “Don’t make it a thing protagonists do.” 

Great. I can do that. And instead of describing the literal torture, I did a more abstract depiction of what happened.

3. TAKE UNSETTLING IMAGERY SERIOUSLY
Notably, I didn’t play the scene for laughs, or to simply get a rise out of my players. There was a point to the scene. The narration took it seriously. All NPCs I played took it seriously.

The scene was disturbing on purpose, and I took it as the basis of a broader story, NOT JUST FOR THE KICKS.

4. CHECK WITH PLAYERS AFTERWARD
The MOMENT the scene was done, I paused the game and checked in with everyone playing, to check if I had crossed a line. And I DIDN’T resume play until I got a thumbs-up from EVERYONE.

So that scene worked! Great! What if one of my players said, “You know, I THOUGHT I’d be okay with that scene, but I’m actually not.”

Well, I would have stopped play, retconned the torture scene out of existence, iced the Discord channel for a couple of days, and started again, doing something completely different with the scene.

And then? I would check back in with all the players and ask if we should put torture somewhere on our Lines and Veils list.

That’s uh...how you can do it.

CONCLUSION
Note how safety tools were only the jumping-off point for how I handled disturbing imagery. Beyond that, I checked in with my players, gave advance notice about what I was doing, and kept tabs on how everyone was feeling.

In this game, torture hadn’t been discussed in our Session Zero. We had established no rules of engagement about it. And I wasn’t going to wait for an X-Card to go “Oh, maybe that was too much.”

Adding discomfort, fear, or anguish in an RPG requires trust, tact, and courage to make amends, if you unintentionally push things too far.

But it also can be really valuable, a kind of inoculation from those same feelings in an outside world that can often be quite hurtful.

If you want to learn more about safety tools, @KiennaS has assembled a cheat-sheet of really useful safety tools you can use in your games! It’s free! Check it out! https://twitter.com/kiennas/status/1216048663526543360