The Survival Game

So ... the following scenario was propounded on a forum several years ago.  It’s based off of one of those post-apoc TV shows, where government, law and order has collapsed.  The two characters are military brats, the older boy sixteen, the younger girl fourteen.  They live in central Florida.  The closest surviving relatives are in Georgia.  They have what gear is in that upper middle-class home.  The food they have available is candy and 20 cans of Chef Boyardee, for which they somewhat imprudently traded dad’s shotgun.  Start walking.  (And by the bye, what gear do they take?)

Anyway, while this is out of the usual fantasy scope of my blog, herewith my answer (and obviously referencing other posts):

What the teen fashionista is wearing these post-apocs ...

First, a couple principles to consider.  You're not auto campers here.  You're backpacking teenagers, and you have to travel as lightly as backpacking campers.  Weight is your enemy, and bulk is your enemy.  Cans of ANY kind of food are far too heavy.  Here's a good test for you: get a backpack and load it as full of books as you can manage.  Hoist that on your back.  Pretty heavy, isn't it?  That's about 20-25 lbs max.  The backpacker's rule of thumb is that you should never carry more than 30% of your weight, and go-light backpackers seek to keep their packloads under 25-30 lbs.  I'd say that unless your character and his sister were on their high school cross-country teams, they oughn't be carrying much more than 60-70 lbs between them.

Second, this is survival here.  Your character absolutely needs to get that shotgun back, THE best close quarters weapon for the combat-inexperienced.  In a breakdown of civilization AND in the middle of settled country, you have to worry a whole lot less about whether you've got bleach to disinfect utensils than of whether the pack of looters the next town over thinks they can gang-rape your sister with impunity.  

Presuming your house has ample camping gear, this is what you take:

* Axe - THE indispensable survival tool.  Yes, this is heavy, but if all you bring is a hatchet, you'll be POed you didn't have an axe.  3 lbs is about the lightest you should manage; 5 lbs is about the maximum you can handle.  You're a sixteen year old chopping down saplings, not a 230 lb lumberjack felling old growth trees a yard wide.  (Bring that 1-lb hatchet too, though.)

* Knife -  The camp knife you want is out of the kitchen, a good strong filleting knife.  Never mind the "survival knives" you see out there, which are perfectly suited to dressing alligators or stabbing looters (or would be, if they didn't usually have stupidly thick hilts), but are piss-poor for basic camp tasks: for those, you'll either want a lighter knife or a hatchet.

* A compact first-aid kit, no more than a half pound.  Definitely bring that medical tape, because it has many more uses than medical.

* If your home has camping gear, you have 10x10 blue plastic tarps.  Cut some poles, rig one with rope, that's your shelter.  2 lbs, about.  Yes, a tent would be better shelter.  No, you don't want one, for two reasons.  First is you can't afford the extra weight.  Second, most factory-made tents these days require factory-made poles to pitch (and the "popup" ones that don't are pretty fragile).  Third, you can't afford to have to fiddle with zippers when the marauders come at 3 AM.

* Clothing: Leave cotton behind.  The reason *why* is that cotton (unlike wool) is a terrible insulator when wet, and Florida's not notably dry.

* The classic RPG standard is to carry 50' of rope, but that's rather a lot: about half that will serve your needs.  Carry a spool of heavy-test fishing line, a small ball of string, and a small spool of copper wire, which take up little room and fulfill various camp needs.

* Cooking gear: You don't need a kettle and you can't afford the weight.  Boil water in your pot.  You do need (a half-pint of concentrated) detergent, but not for the clothing ... it's to wash your cook gear, because mishaps there will mess you up a lot faster than dirty undies.  You'll want a quart-sized pot and a small skillet, minimum ... and two pots, really, if you can manage it.  (One cooks your meal, the other heats water for washing.)  Bring a couple of those thin nylon scouring pads.  A pressed tin bowl apiece and a tin camp cup will suffice.

* Food: The one spice you'll need is salt: clean out a secure plastic jar (like a cold cream jar) and fill it up.  You'll want some sugar too, for energy, about the same amount.  The camp drink for backpackers is tea: a single tea bag can make three cups easily.

* Foam mattress pads:  You're teenagers, and you don't need anything more for your sleeping bags.  Avoid air mattresses; if they're heavy-duty enough not to be easily punctured, they're too heavy for you.  Bring a couple small sacks that can be stuffed with your spare clothing for pillows, and those sacks might be useful.

* Small stuff: waterproof matches, needle and thread, two lighters, a penlight, a few cyalume sticks.  A few plain 3" wax candles have many invaluable uses, not the least of which is light and heating when you don't dare have a full-scale fire (pour some sand in a tin can, put the candle in the sand, there's a lamp).  Melted wax makes good emergency sealant for a tarp or a poncho.  By the way, bring a poncho apiece; you'll absolutely want those.  Bring a compass and a road map -- never mind topo maps, which unless you're skilled at orienteering won't do you a lot of good.

* I'm not counting it against your weight, but if you've got a kid's dirt bike (bicycle, not motorized), you can rig it to carry gear.  It wouldn't be too heavy or awkward to carry in a pinch, it'd be available if you needed to get somewhere fast, and it can go most places you can.  I'd avoid an adult's ten-speed; more fragile, harder to maintain.

Let me go through the list:  axe (5 lbs), hatchet (1.5), knife (.5), multitool (1), first-aid kit (.75), 2x sleeping bags (5), 10x10 shelter half (2.5), 4x plastic tent stakes (.25), 2x foam mattress pad (1), titanium 3-piece ultralight cookset (2 pots, 1 skillet, .5), 2x titanium sporks (2 oz), 2x titanium mug (.25), 2x titanium bowl (.5), ½ pt detergent (.5), headlamp (3 oz), mini hiking binoculars (1), 4x spare wool hiking socks (.5), 4x spare wool shirts (2), 30' high quality nylon rope (1.5), spool high test fishing line (.25), 2x poncho (.5), miscellaneous equipment (2).

That's just short of 28 lbs, half of your capacity, right there, and you can see a bunch of stuff you'd like that isn't there.  This also presumes that your parents were backpackers, not auto campers, and had very expensive ultralight gear.  This also presumes you're cooking over a campfire instead of bringing a camp stove and fuel, a task that rookie campers usually botch.

A gallon of water weighs eight pounds.  A can of Chef Boyardee ravioli weighs a pound.  If you're planning on defending yourself, a Remington 20 gauge shotgun weighs over six pounds, and a box of shells weighs a pound more.  Carry just two gallons, carry that shotgun and 25 shells, carry just nine cans of ravioli, and you have weight for NOTHING else.

This is a challenging scenario, especially for kids unused to roughing it on this scale.

Player Agency

"No sweat.  We're the PCs, right?  Of course we got this!"

Once upon a time, in a MMORPG in which I spent far too many years, there was a scenario revolving around the “Griffin Sword” – a legendary artifact around which the fate of the world revolved, etc etc.  Several dozen players were wrapped up in the scenario for many months, jumping through many prescribed hoops to do so.  Ultimately, the good guys won, involving the permanent sacrifice of a few.  Ave atque vale.

This is where it becomes a cautionary tale.

Several years later, management in their infinite wisdom decided upon “Griffin Sword Saga II.”  Lo and behold, the Sword was returned, this time in several pieces, and setting deity vs deity and player vs player – with the “evil” group seeking to reunite the pieces and forge the sword, and the “good” group seeking to prevent this.

I hated it.

For one thing, the scenario was heavily based around the city that was the game’s RP epicenter.  There was no neutral ground – you either were part of the “Dark Alliance” or the opposition ... or else you were on the firing line between the groups.  Being friendly with both sides was difficult at best, eventually impossible.  Constant PvP, constant betrayals, constant backstabbing ... and the scenario was a constant presence.  There weren’t many days off.

For another, there was next to zero player agency.  As with the worst brand of OSR dungeon crawls, what gimmicks the players tried didn’t matter worth squat: unless the right person made the right guess at the right time, when the GMs running the scenario wanted them to do so.  (If no GMs were watching -- a common occurrence in MMORPGs, after all -- then failure was automatic, and gimmicks pointless.)  

Nor did much of the "plot" solve anything.  There was a great deal of figure-this-out so that the players could move on to figure-that-out, interspersed liberally with find-the-dingus so that ... the can could be kicked down to the next stretch of make-work-for-the-sake-of-making-work.

Finally, I was the last of the original questers.  I was very bitter that all that sacrifice and hard work came to nothing, meant nothing.  It didn’t help that one of the characters sacrificing herself the first time around was my character’s mentor, her daughter my character’s one-time wife ... and that the player herself had died at the age of 40, just a couple years before.

And Round II lasted for FOUR YEARS.

Four years.  That’s forever for a plot arc in tabletop.  Online, that’s an eternity.  Very few of those who were in at the start were still in the game at the end.  Burnout was endemic, real life friendships ended, the city that was once a haven for roleplay was a smoking, depopulated hole in the ground.  I don’t even recall how the scenario ended, but there sure wasn’t any sense of triumph.  Just exhaustion, ennui ... or people having long since left the game for greener pastures.

Several of my blog posts give my philosophy on GMing – what to do, what not to do.  But the first and foremost rule remains: we should all be doing this to have fun.  And the keystone of this is player agency.

More than anything else, I feel this is why people roleplay.  So very many of us have little agency in our real lives.  We do what our bosses tell us to do, how they tell us to do it, when they tell us to do it.  The clerk or the manager shrugs and says that it doesn’t matter what reason you have for not having done X or having X documentation in your hands: without it, your request is rejected, so sorry.  Cast a vote for national office, and you’re just one ballot among millions.  The rent just got doubled, pay it or leave, we don't care.   Our ability to change our zero-tolerance world isn’t often more than trivial: to dye one’s hair, to get that tattoo, to wear a black top instead of a white one.

(Spiffy.  We’ve struck a blow for freedom and individuality.  Just like all the hundreds of thousands of other people who’ve dyed their hair turquoise.  Go us.)

Only yes: in a RPG, you get to change the world, in ways great and small.  You get to defeat evil.  You get to right wrongs.  You get to punch out the opposition.  You get to save lives.  Your choices matter.

A GM in for the long term cannot, cannot, must not ignore this.  If the players can’t make real choices which lead to meaningful, lasting outcomes ... that’s how you turn an eager group into a “meh” group, sitting back and waiting for you to pull the puppet strings.

How best to do this?  Less storytelling: to the degree they are a passive audience, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they make boneheaded decisions.  Let them make them all the same.  Less fudging: if you’re tweaking the action to produce the “right” results, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they roll critical failures.  Sometimes the bad guys roll critical successes.  Let them cope with it.  Less Mary Suing:  If the Awesome NPCs are bailing them out (or calling the shots), the players lack agency.  They ought to be doing their own problem solving, and if they’re not good enough to cope, the adventures need to be less strenuous.

The Joy of Calendars

I was asked on a forum once whether (among my many other cultural game fillips) I utilized IC calendars.  Good heavens, all the freaking time, was my response.  Since my gameworld isn't a one-dimensional save point between dungeon crawls, seasons happen.  High holy days happen.  Traditional village celebrations happen.  Lunar phases happen.

The party might pass through a village where the locals aren't ready at the drop of a silver to cater to their needs, because it's the day of the midsummer Fire Dance festival, and everyone who isn't wearing a costume and capering on the cliffside is a spectator cheering the dancers on.  (Plenty of free ale and festival eats, though!)

It does make a certain sense to hire an orc as your "Green Man" ...

The party might be looking forward to the high holy day of the state religion,  nine days from now, when people wanting to undergo vision quests in the precincts of the High Basilica have unusual success in seeing the path.  

(They'd also better plan on about twenty thousand pilgrims hitting town a few days beforehand, and every inn and tavern space booked up.  This would also be a factor in large-scale seasonal trade fairs, celebrations of the monarch’s birthday, and all manner of predictable events of which the locals would take advantage.  I once lived in proximity to New England’s regional fair, which takes place over two weeks and three weekends, it’s sited in a small city, it averages almost a hundred thousand visitors a day, and homeowners within a half-mile make hundreds of dollars a day selling parking spots.)

The party might be hellbent on getting down to Veredar Island NOW, because the monsoon season's kicking off down there in three weeks, and even with a weather mage witching the sails they'll be cutting the timing fine.

The party might be hoping for a moonless night to make that strike, and the scholar with the ephemeris knows the next one is four days from now, but the next one beyond that is fifteen days down the road.  (Hope she made the roll by enough to know that Rosverando's Comet is due to hit perihelion fourteen days from now, so they better not dawdle.)

And the party might want to pitilessly kill every damn partying local blowing a vuvuzela underneath their inn window ...

All this is fixed; I run a sandbox.  Part and parcel of that is I don't throw in bullshit "coincidental" monsoons/eclipses/full moons just to provide random extra obstacles to the party.  I don't see why a group can't plan carefully to deal with seasonal/meteorological/celestial factors just as readily as they plan for fortifications, the strength of oppositions, the power of sorcerers, or any other such "traditional" wargaming-style complication ... and I don't see any reason NOT to hose a party that can't be bothered, the same way I wouldn't take it easy on a party that attempted a frontal assault against suicidally heavy odds.

Hard to create?  Not at all.  There’s going to be a spring planting festival: damn near every culture has one.  There’s going to be a harvest festival: damn near every culture has one.  There’s going to be a holiday celebrating the founding of the nation.  The ruler’s birthday will likely be a holiday ... and not only has more than one culture used that day to designate the new year, some of them have trouble in how the change to a new ruler upsets the bookkeeping!  Your religions will have holidays.  There’ll be the commemoration of a great battle.  (A number of nations commemorate great defeats!) A major athletic festival like the Olympics or the Kentucky Derby.  The traditional day every year when new apprentices are taken, or the knightly order elevates new knights, or annual quitrents are due, or the Blessing Of The Fleet takes place, or last year's wine is broached.  

Heck, one of the oldest known ongoing holidays is Lanimer Week in the town of Lanark in Scotland, which grew organically from the town being granted royal city status 900 years ago, a condition that the local merchants ceremonially inspect the boundary stones on that date each year, and celebrations springing up from that.  Or the town where I grew up, which has an annual celebration at the beginning of May based around the running of the herring.  (I am not making this up.)  Come to that, said town had an annual ritual as late as the 1980s where the selectmen would walk the bounds of the down, touching up the paint on the carved boundary stones.  This involved some measure of bushwhacking, with many of the stones being in forests or marshlands ...

So come up with a couple a month.  This is far from over the top; England celebrated 33 “saint’s days” before the UK’s holiday schedule was settled in the 19th century.  Plenty of online lists of such holidays and how they were/are celebrated – just file off the serial numbers and you’re good!

Story vs Setting!

Something one runs into a fair bit in Internet discussions is using fictional works in compare-and-contrasts with gaming settings and setting design.  A hallmark of such discussions is a bizarre tendency of people to try to justify this element or that.  The twists and turns folks would make to concoct rationales to explain (for instance) the utterly implausible astrophysics of Joss Whedon’s Firefly setting were a wonder to behold.  For some odd reason, few of them listened to Whedon’s own explanation – “Science makes my head hurt.”

A very simple principle is at work: the goal of an author isn't to provide a RPG scenario, it's to tell a good story.
 

"So how do we load those 80 ton rocks again?"

We can all agree, I believe, that Lord of the Rings comes up more often than any other fictional work in terms of compare-and-contrast.  This always amuses me, because there's no frigging way in Hell any tabletop group would follow that script:

* Let me get this straight: you're putting together a party of nine questers upon which the fate of the world rests.  So you pick the best wizard available, check, and the best outdoorsman alive, check, and three other pretty dern good warriors, check.  And then you saddle them with four 1st level types with no skills to speak of save for eating and smoking, each of whom is as big as your average seven year old?  FAIL.

* And, being stuck with the useless little worms, you're tolerating them being in battlelines?  FAIL.

* What do you mean, you're worried about one of the high level types getting uppity and seizing the Ring if the hobbits aren't along?  (Quite leaving it unsaid that the easiest way to seize the Ring is to disembowel the Ringwearer, from behind preferably.)  And in general, we don’t want the Ringbearer – or anyone else – putting the damn thing on?  Ever?  Great.  Got some smiths there, Elrond?  Awesome.  Seal the Ring into a 2" cube of iron.  Can't be worn, can't be seen directly, less corrupting, can toss the sucker into the Sammath Naur all the same.  It's not that it'd weigh any more than Sam's collection of cook pots.  (A shade over two pounds, actually.)

* By the way, if you're going to be sneaky and create a diversion, do it from the damn start.  You never have Aragorn with the party to begin with.  You send him straight to Gondor, wearing an ersatz One Ring on his finger, and claiming to be the new Ringlord.  What, it isn't as if Sauron wasn't going to plaster Minas Tirith anyway.

* Of course, it might not get that far, because if Sauron's not a complete idiot, he doesn't have the Nazgul riding around hissing "Bagginssss ... ?" at local farmers.  He has them ramrodding every orc in the Misty Mountains to turn the Shire into a smoking desert to find that sucker, because he knows it's his point-failure source, and that's the War of the Ring right there.  (Yeah, yeah, I know.  Sauron is arrogant and all of that.  But he's not a complete idiot -- look at him using cat's paws like Angmar and misdirection like "The Necromancer."  He knows it's possible for him to lose, big.  His boss did.  HE did.  Twice, even.  Airy complacency makes no sense.)

* But if you don’t, and you follow the script somewhat, well.  At some point, the survivors of your party have two options:

    (1) “Okay, guys.  The McGuffin that the fate of the world hinges on is across the river there, with two pretty unskilled hobbits.  They’re still in line of sight of us, and we’ve got a couple boats left.  Those are the guys we need to shepherd and save. And hey, there's no opposition to fight through over there.  Let’s go.”

    (2) “Okay, guys.  There are two more hobbits out there, in the hands of a freaking company of pretty tough orcs.  Other than we’ve been traveling together for a while, we have to concede they’re not remotely important in the grand scheme of things.  And the orcs have a considerable head start on us.  (Y'know, the orcs that outnumber us about thirty to one, and whom we'd have to wax to get the hobbits back.)  But let’s go anyway.”

    You know, and I know, that not one party in twenty would go for #2.

And so on.  But JRRT wasn't concerned with the same things tabletop GMs are.  He didn't give a damn about niche protection.  He didn't give a damn that he had demi-gods and newbies in the same group.  He didn't give a damn about giving his PCs equal face time.  His bad guys and NPCs were there to further the plot, not to act logically, in their own best interests, or naturally.  His good guys didn't have a third-person omniscient perspective.  Everyone interacted with one another, spoke to one another, as he saw fit.  As a world designer, Tolkien was a derned good philologist.

The same can be said of most fictional works.  (Well, perhaps not the philology part.)  David Eddings’ Belgariad?  His parties faff around all the time, often ignoring or flouting any previous character development or their professed strategies of the previous chapter/scene, just so Eddings can get in some snappy one-liners.  Baroness Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel to a close parallel of Silver Age supers, where the good guys won with deuced good British pluck, planning and luck, and almost no one ever seriously considered slitting the bad guys' throats.  (Having read all thirteen SP books, I'm struck by the fact that Orczy played out the events that bequeathed the word "terrorist" to our language, punctuated by years of violent convulsion and warfare, without depicting a single on-screen violent death.)  Marion Zimmer Bradley only late in her career bothered much with consistency -- and only then under the heavy pressure of her vocal fanbase -- having written in a prior afterword that she was far more interested in the immediate narrative needs of her plot than in agonizing over a ride from Arilinn to Hali requiring four hours in one book and four days in another.  Examining all the ways the Potterverse makes little sense is a field of literary exegesis all its own, and the rebuttal that JK Rowling was more interested in writing entertaining children's books than in creating a milieu which would survive being picked apart of hundreds of thousands of nitpicking adults tends to fall on deaf fanfic ears.

But still, people try.  You can explain until you’re blue in the face that the approximate weight of those massive stone blocks those trebuchets were launching in Return of the King would be over ten times heavier than the heaviest projectiles ever fired out of the largest 20th century artillery ever built ... and about five hundred times heavier than the heaviest projectiles fired out of the largest trebuchets ever built on Earth.  “Peter Jackson just wanted a cool visual” doesn’t seem to penetrate.

But but but ... what do I NAME it??

 Running out of names?  Not remotely close.

First off, Wikipedia is your friend here, and all you need to do is (for example) pull up a list of provinces of Moldova.  Hm, I see on this page a list of all the municipalities down to the village level, all 1681 of them.  Must be able to find some interesting names to call that random village in the middle of nowhere.  I think I'll call it Vranesti (a teensy village on the Romanian border, as it happens).

Beyond that, look.  English language naming conventions are pretty simple: so many placenames are composites.  My area seems to have an obsession with “-field,” for instance: Greenfield, Springfield, Northfield, Westfield, Deerfield, Ashfield, Pittsfield, Hatfield, Sheffield, Brimfield, Sandisfield, Plainfield, Middlefield, Enfield, Litchfield, Chesterfield, Bloomfield, Mansfield, Suffield, they’re all municipalities. † (Heck, for all I know, Vranesti means “Eastfield” in Romanian.)  

For the record, Vranesti's sole landmark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A number of random name generators you can find on the Internet will throw such composites at you, but you can do it yourself.  Just close your eyes, turn around, point outward, open your eyes.  What are you pointing at?  Great, do it again.  There’s your composite name.  “Blueblanket,” alright, fair enough.  I missed pointing at my cat by inches.  The village of Bluecat?  Okay.  Not exotic enough?  Fair enough, let's let Google Translate render "Bluecat" into Romanian, say: "Pisica Albastra."  

Want a different route?  You have famous people in your gameworld, right?  Name something after them.  There are towns near me named for renowned Colonial and RevWar figures: Washington, Amherst, Otis, Monroe, Hancock, Adams, Boylston, Warren, Webster.  Some enterprising Aquilonian colonists must have founded a “Conanburg” or three, and I bet Gondor has a “Bagginstown” by now.

For people?  For starters, I don't feel the need to come up with a unique name for every NPC I've ever created.  I’ve made up, as is the case in the real world, a list of common names, both female and male, and at this point I've got variant lists for different cultures.  About five or six names in each list are the very common ones that are my world's equivalent of "Joe" and "Mary," 25 are pretty common, 70-75 are uncommon, and about 150 are unusual but not unheard of – the moral equivalent of "Xavier" or "Clarinda."  I keep a chart where if I use a name as a throwaway during a session, I rotate between the four sections, then strike it out ... obviously, I have multiple lines through Columns A and B!  

(The practice has given rise to a catchphrase: "Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg," being among the most common male names in my world, has come to mean a bunch of faceless mooks.)

Yes, this means that long-term players encounter the same name for key people more than once, but I don't think they're entitled to find this any more jarring than that they happen to know multiple people -- or have multiple relatives -- named "Anne" or "Bob."  It certainly isn't any weirder than that the lead long-term characters of my first and second wives are named "Elena" and "Elaina" respectively, and that the character of my IC-fiancee in a LARP was “Elana.”  Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Surnames?  If you need them, you've got various routes.  You already have your given names down, right?  So there are patronymics: Verella Elainasdaughter.  Pick a half dozen clans for that local village, and your NPC is from one: Verella Waflo.  Or a descriptive English composite from above: Verella Goldhand.  Or else a geographic name: Verella of Redwave.  Or an occupational name: Verella Smith (well, her father is one of the world's best armourers, at least).  Short of "Verella Hey You," that covers the bases.

Finally, just pick up a foreign dictionary.  I've had Finnish:English, Sanskrit:English and Gaelic:English ones for decades for just this purpose.  I don't even worry about finding the meaning of a word.  Hm, I think I'll call this rare find the "Tome of Sellainen."  And this is so much easier now with the Internet – no need to BUY a book for the purpose.


† - None of these are as much as 45 minutes drive from where I sit.  Some are in the Berkshires, on mountainsides ... seriously?

X-Cards

 “I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… just lift this card up, or simply tap it. You don’t have to explain why. It doesn't matter why. When we lift or tap this card, we simply edit out anything X-Carded. And if there is ever an issue, anyone can call for a break and we can talk privately. I know it sounds funny but it will help us play amazing games together and usually I’m the one who uses the X-card to help take care of myself. Please help make this game fun for everyone. Thank you!"

The X-Card has been a thing in the hobby for a number of years now.  Coming into vogue during convention runs, where a bunch of strangers get together for a Session Zero-less game under time constraints, it’s also a very controversial subject.  It works pretty much as described above: flash the card, the group is compelled to change an element, change the subject, fade to black, whatever.  I’m among the ones who don’t care for the concept.

I have always had an unusual number of female players, about a third of my player base over the years.  To my certain knowledge, a third of them were sexually assaulted/molested.  So I avoid rape tropes, beyond the abstract. A close friend of my wife's hanged himself on the main bridge in her hometown, so I avoid dwelling on hanging people.

But this is a hobby that involves a whopping lot of depictions of violence.  There's racism, and the whole spectrum of man's inhumanity to man.  A player who really does have "triggers" so deep that he or she's likely to freak out at their mere depiction around a gaming table has a responsibility to talk it over with the GM in advance.  Similarly, such players ought not be indulging in convention runs or one-shots, or if so need to pick out genres less likely to prove burdensome.  A Toon, an original Star Trek game, Golden Age supers, 1930s pulp, those are genres less likely to run into some of those problems.  

(While coming into others: Thirties pulp, run straight, isn't for those seeking to avoid casual and pervasive racism.  Or other elements: the times I've played Thirties pulp, some of the other players were baffled by my playing a chain smoker -- I'm very down on cigarettes as a filthy habit.  But, said I, look at movies set in the era.  Take the bar scenes in Casablanca -- two-thirds of the people on screen are holding cigarettes.)

Further, my wife’s take: she’s a special needs teacher who deals routinely with traumatized children.  (And we’re not talking “Oooh, I get squicked out at the subject of violence” kids.  We’re talking about kids who’ve been sexually assaulted from infancy, or kids who get smacked around by their abusive parents.  THAT kind.  The ones for whom violence is felt considerably more close to home than the sanitized kill-em-and-take-their-stuff one finds around gaming tables.)

She doesn’t have any use for X-cards.  She echoes that it is the responsibility of players who feel their traumas are so deep they cannot abide their depiction around a gaming table to be selective in their gaming.  She also says that squicked out players can just take a walk or choose that time for a bathroom break, that it strikes her as a very easily abused mechanic, that people with such traumas shouldn’t be gaming with strangers, and should hold Session Zero discussions.

There've been times, in the adventures I present, where PCs have found the severed heads of NPCs of whom they were fond. There've been times when the cute 8 year old died horribly.  There've been times when everyone in the sympathetic village has died of disease.  Like any other dramatist, I know and use the power of pathos, where and as I feel appropriate.  I would never think to question anyone who needs a more G-rated campaign for their escapism.  Never.  But they do need to find a table other than mine.

And my final thoughts are these:

* First off, it’s lazy.  People using such a mechanic aren’t attempting to mitigate their issues.  They’re not seeking out sympathetic GMs, or sympathetic genres, or – heck – avoiding the hobby altogether.  They don’t have to use their words (and this in a hobby utterly, entirely dependent on words).  And they’re unlikely to be seeking the professional help they really do need if their traumas bubble that hotly on the surface.  I am neither a therapist nor a psychologist: I can be compassionate, but tabletop gaming is not remotely the venue for a support group.

* Secondly, it’s aggressively abusive, as a lot of the “safe space/trigger warning" theorizing is: it allows one person to dictate the content of discourse for many.  That one person’s desire (however flighty or mild) to avoid mention or exploration of a particular subject automatically, unilaterally and without question or recourse vetoes everyone else’s interest (however strong or compelling) in doing so.

* Never mind being aggressively abusive; the concept is ripe for malicious abuse.  I've been spending time in online gaming forums since the mid-80s on GEnie.  Before then, since 1980 in the APAs.  Before then, on plain hack sessions in university clubs.  I've been listening for almost the entire history of the hobby, and I doubt I could guess the number of horror stories I've heard about How This Jerk Ruined Our Game For No Good Reason to the nearest hundred. (Quite aside from that my personal experience, from tabletop to MMORPGs to LARPs, is that there are a lot of malicious powertrippers out there who just love ruining things for others, for the sheer love of smashing.)  And now people want to give those jerks the unilateral power to disrupt gameplay, without even the fig leaf of needing to explain themselves?  Ulp. 

* Fear and discomfort are part of many genres and play styles.  Horror doesn't exist without it.  The whole gamut of White Wolf games become mere kill-em-and-take-their-stuff without it.  These are environments their adherents seek out, willingly and gladly.  (And oh, by the bye, how many of you would be enthused about someone using an X-Card to wave off combat, on the grounds that it's messy and icky and violent?  No?  Well, now.  Why ever not?)

* Finally, I don’t entirely buy it.  I have a strong phobia: a near-paralytic fear of falling.  It's been high school since I've climbed a tree as much as a couple dozen feet.  I’m white knuckled just driving up a mountain, on a graded, paved autoroad.  The bravest thing I’ve ever done?  I’ve done rescues in howling winter storms.  I’ve been between warring parties in a drive-by shooting.  I’ve been in knife fights.  But the real bravest thing I ever did was during a college party on the roof.  One gal was drunk out of her mind and dancing on the parapet, five stories above Huntington Avenue.  I was the only sober one up there, and I went over to drag her off.  The last ten feet, I was on my hands and knees, because I couldn’t force myself to stand.  (Probably if I hadn’t had a huge crush on her, I might not have been able to do it at all.)

But I’m a grown-ass adult.  I can withstand a GM talking about us climbing a mountain.  I can roleplay a mariner clinging to a topmast.  I’m not actually there, and I don’t actually see it, and even though the mere subject has me breathing shallowly and quickly – remembering that terrified young guy pulling Di off the parapet, 41 years ago – I don’t need to shut down the screen and play solitaire instead.

And if I just couldn’t mitigate it, couldn’t control those images, felt them so strongly that a casual mention of heights had me shaking ... then I’d be in serious therapy right now, and likely avoiding such a potentially damaging hobby as RPGs.

From the forums: Metagaming Monsters

Something I've done a whopping lot over the years is pontificate on gaming forums.  While the exchanges summarized below are about metagaming over NPC monsters specifically, the subject of metagaming generally is a hot button topic for me.  Read on for some modest ranting.

~~~~~~~~~

ForumDood: Whaddaya mean adventurers don’t know all the stats of monsters? Does your world have taverns?  Do adventurers stop by taverns to have a drink?  Do they talk to other patrons when having said drink?  If so, word has just spread in that town of the critters said adventurers have encountered.

"Alright, smart guy, what are its stats?"

 

These are, of course, taverns much akin to those in our own history.  You know, the ones where travelers swore that they'd seen dragons, hippogriffs, manticores, Amazons with their bow arm breasts cut off ... things like that.  Or, ya know, where the travelers blurted out, "It was TEN FEET TALL!!! Fangs like spears! Hide like steel! It ripped apart trees and boulders like they were PAPER!"  

Anyway, you just might be more sanguine about the honesty and reliability of your average drunk wanderer, trying to impress the locals, than I am.

For my part, no, of course not: players don't get to use their past knowledge any more than their PCs get to know the formula for gunpowder, who's really behind that death cult or how to rig a Leyden jar.

Beyond that, it's relatively simple: I don't feel the need to be bound by the sourcebook as far as critters go.

ForumDood2: How do you handle situations where the players know something the PCs don't, like a monster that has a weak spot if you hit it between the eyes or something.

Well, for one, GURPS makes provision for such skills.  Naturalist, Hidden Lore (Monsters), Occultism, Folklore ... they're all valid choices.  The better the roll, the more likely the info is both sound and useful.

For another, I'm not a huge fan of "This is an unstoppable juggernaut except for its left testicle, upon which a good shot will surely slay it" monsters. That smacks too much of the pull-the-right-lever-or-die dungeon fantasy BS I got past decades ago.  There are certainly useful strategies to engage certain beasts, and that's as far as that goes.  And even that doesn't mean some critters stop being tough -- sure, you made the roll, and you remember reading that giant crocodiles have relatively soft underbellies.  Awesome, but that's still a very tough, very tenacious 30' lizard with teeth the size of short swords, slithering on the ground so that it’s not showing you the underbelly, and it's comin' for you ...

ForumDood: Generic D&D-land assumes that critters like orcs and trolls are fairly common.

See, you're metagaming yourself: you presume that there's a certain density of monsters, that they all have unitary stats and abilities, and that these apply to every campaign out there.

I agree that "generic D&D-Land" is a thing, but sorry, that doesn't make any sense.  Some lions are a lot tougher and more capable than others, the same way that some humans are a lot flimsier and less capable than others.  I see no reason to presume that ANY foe of ANY kind always has 20 HP and always does 1d6+1 damage and always has the exact same move or armor protection, any more than were I to play D&D, I would presume that every enemy fighter I encountered was precisely 2nd level and had 20 HP and carried a bog-standard broadsword and sported AC 6.

ForumDood3: Do you suppose that people who live in an area where lions are a genuine threat to life would know a few things about lion habits, or would they be just as clueless as a zoo-goer like me?

It depends.  Do any of us really need to be told that human beings are very good at (a) thinking we know more about a subject than we really do, (b) swallowing the POV of the loudest, or the first, or the cutest, or the most eloquent speaker on a subject over that of acknowledged experts, and (c) blathering our inflated, flawed views to anyone who'll listen, except when they're (d) deliberately lying about the subject to get a rise out of the listeners?  How many parents, for instance, have rejected the all-but-unanimous advice of thousands of pediatricians, doctors and researchers on the subject of vaccination, on the strength of the word of the likes of Jenny McCarthy, whose credentials are that her boob job got her into Playboy a couple decades back?  (I won't even touch the subject of COVID anti-vaxxers, living in a land of compulsory childhood vaccination, except to observe that they tick off all the boxes above, and that I make zero apologies for schadenfreude every time another one of them wheezes its last from the disease they claim is a liberal media hoax.  To the degree their proselytizing emboldens others to follow their despicable example, they are each and every one of them murderers.)

Sure, a veteran herder or livestock farmer on the verge of lion-infested country would probably have a good handle on the habits of lions -- otherwise they wouldn't get to be veteran herders or livestock farmers.  Of course, those folks might be real willing to pull the chains of the outlanders ... "Aw, sure, yooze guys got nuttin' t'worry aboot.  Them lions be as meek as sheep.  Just toss 'em some raw candleroot, ye'll be fine. Where do ye find candleroot, ye ask? Why, happen I got some, right back in th' dryin' shed!  What's it worth t'ye?"

I would presume such skills of no one else.  A number of other folks might have such skills.  Did you pick such skills when you designed your character, by the way?  A number would not, beyond the basics of common sense practice for any scary-looking critter lurking about.  (I'm minded of the Sudanese NBA player Manute Bol, renowned for having killed a lion with a spear as a goat-herding teenager.  Far from being an epic battle, he stated that the lion was old, asleep, and that he'd snuck up on it from behind.  Otherwise, he opined, the lion would have eaten him.)

Otherwise?  Look.  You and I live in a world of mass media and mass education.  People in a medieval world didn’t grow up watching Animal Planet, or have access to Wikipedia articles or encyclopedias.  "Damn, that’s a huge cat.  You think that's one of those lions Farmer McHayseed was telling us about?" "I dunno. He didn't say they had stripes." "Never mind that.  Who's got the candleroot?" is the best I’d expect from medieval types.  

Make it an owlbear or a gelatinous cube, and “What the hell is THAT??  Mitra save us!” is more likely.

ForumDood4: Big furry cats who hunt. Are they social? Do they have a special diet? Are they different from those OTHER stories of cats? Fuck if we know.

And beyond that, there'll be the guy who is absolutely convinced to the marrow of his bones that he knows All About Lions, based on a dimly remembered conversation he overheard between two panther hunters a few years back.  And this is talking about something so basic and mundane as lions.  How will even expert naturalists manage to explain rare and bizarre monsters, comprehensively and accurately?  ("TEN FEET TALL, fangs like spears ..." yeah, yeah.)

My classic "confirmation bias" adventuring anecdote comes from a combat LARP session.  We had a Raise Dead spell, and a second-event newbie (unable, per the system, to have the spell at all before his fifth event) was absolutely convinced that the spell worked a particular way.  Me, I was a "magic marshal" of twelve years experience and the Grand Master of the guild that taught the spell, I set him straight.

So I thought, anyway ... yeah, not so much.  The guy just wouldn't take my word for it.  Soon three other veteran magic marshals joined the conversation, each of whom had ten years or more experience teaching and adjudicating the system.  One of those marshals had invented the magic rules then in use.  Another was the guy who'd invented the previous magic system the then-current system had replaced.  The third helpfully had a pamphlet of the official rules on his person.  

The newbie just didn't care -- he was just one of those types who Knew What He Knew and no one could ever tell him any different -- and wound up being escorted off the event site when he started throwing punches.

 And guys like that can be found around gaming tables all over the land.