P H Lee

(this is a technical post about the boardgame Twilight Struggle)

I'm unhappy with US-Japan Mutual Defense Pact. It's far too unilateral for my tastes, and (for the game) decidedly historically inaccurate. There was a real fear that Japan would fall into the Soviet sphere during the early cold war. Part of the reason that the US poured so much money into Japan and its defense was because it was terrified that a communist Japan would eventually read to an all-Red Asia, and they were right to be afraid: the Communist Party of Japan was fairly strong and engaged at the time and posed a legitimate threat, particularly if Japan had been ignored by the US.

So my proposal is to change the wording on US-Japan to:
If the US has any influence in Japan, it gains sufficient influence for control. USSR may no longer coup in Japan.

This means that a strong USSR East Asia push, in the Early War, might result in kicking the US out of East Asia entirely and threaten Control of Asia. Which is way more interesting strategically: a first turn 4 ops into South Korea is actually may be advantageous relative to the Iran coup.

The problem is that US-Japan is fairly weak as a 4 op card now, and this would make it incredibly weak ... pretty much the weakest in the game after Nuclear Test Ban (which is at least situational). So it should be dinged to a 3 op card. This would upset the game's balance, though.

My proposal is that NORAD, an incredibly strong 3 op US Early War card, be bumped to 4 ops, text unchanged.

Thoughts?

Something I just remembered is that it used to be (maybe still is) that there were a bunch of indie game designers who were ideologically anti-safety. (A group which may have included me.)

Let me say, in hindsight, that this is a stupid ideology.

There's a way that emotional safety gets used to try to reject difficult or personal thematic content and, sure, that's often crap. But that's not "safety" that's just "extremely badly written safety rules poorly applied."

If rules for personal safety make play worse, they're bad rules. That doesn't mean personal safety is optional. It means that you need to write better rules.

Ideally, structures of personal safety and interpersonal trust should allow us to explore deeper, more personal, and more challenging content in our play.

So, quite recently, I've been discovering a lot of people making hacks of my games -- sometimes for sale -- without ever asking me or even informing me. This makes me happy, because I'm glad to see my work out there inspiring people, but this is also extremely frustrating, because I wish people would ask me first.

Ideally, I would like everyone who wants to make a hack of my games to write to me and ask permission before publishing it. 95% of cases, I will just say "Great! Please credit me and send me a copy when you're done." (The 5% of cases are either things which I want to offer design advice or where I can't in good conscience allow the work to be associated with me or my games.)

To be clear, this isn't everyone. Some people are great about this! Like, for example, Lauren McManamon's awesome Sherlock Holmes version of Hot Guys Making Out in Codex - Lies. I got a very nice note from the publisher and the full text of the game for review. (It's great and you should absolutely play it a bunch.)

Anyway, to clarify, my games are not available for general public re-use. I do not use any sort of open license. Rather, when people want to use my games as a basis for their own work, I expect them to write to me and ask. In almost all circumstances, I will say yes within a week.

I am excited about people reworking and hacking my games! All I want is to know if you're doing it! It doesn't have to be a long e-mail, it can literally be "BTW, I'm making a version of Bliss Stage about competitive eaters" or whatever.

My professional e-mail is taogames@gmail.com

So, I'm running a Ravenloft game, hopefully starting this weekend if I can kick this cold. I played a ton of Ravenloft as a kid and really enjoyed the setting, although, as I was fairly cut off from a lot of AD&D's traditions and history, I think I probably enjoyed it for different reasons than many people did (my favorite characters are often the ones who are side-notes in the book, etc, etc.)

My first question was: What D&D should I use to run this game with?

And therein lies a problem.

D&D after Third Edition is very well power-curved. Everything is a level-appropriate challenge. If you fight something several levels above you, you should expect to lose. If you fight something equal to or lower than your level, you should expect to win. A big part of the DM's job is gating the players towards level-appropriate challenges.

And this isn't just fights. This is also skill challenges, parleys, literally anything you could undertake, in D&D 3 or higher, is level-gated. If it's hard, come back in a few levels, or with a few bonuses, and then it's fine.

This, to me, totally kills the setting of Ravenloft.

Ravenloft needs a degree of incoherence for its power levels. It needs us to believe that a 0th level human who likes doing horrible "science experiments" grafting humans to animals is as scary, and as dangerous, as an 18th level lich king (both of these characters are Dark Lords of Ravenloft.) The horror in Ravenloft isn't "this is a powerful monster, I better gain some levels." It has to be horrifying on its own. If you are stripped naked and hunted by werewolves for sport, it has to be scary, not just because of your comparative levels with the werewolves, but because being hunted by werewolves is scary as hell.

Likewise, you should be able to, if you're clever and lucky, escape, even if the werewolves are 15th level and you're 3rd level.

D&D 3+ just doesn't have the capacity for that kind of thing, in either direction.

This feature -- which I think of as "incoherent power-levels" -- is something that I like in games and in settings. It reminds me of the old saying "even a cat can look at a king," and not just because an AD&D 2nd edition cat can absolutely murder a king if it comes to it. The idea is, here's this big messy world, sometimes, but not always, the weak beat the strong. Sometimes, but not always, the lucky beat the mighty. Sometimes, but not always, cleverness can get you out of a bad jam.

I have always thought that this sort of thing was very hard to take as a design goal. But it occurred to me today that actually both of my D&D-ish games -- deeds & doers and High-Quality Roleplaying -- have this as a feature as well.

(I cut out a passage about what I think is necessary for this mechanical feature because I'm not actually as sure as I was sounding. Still, I think it's worth studying.)

Anyway, that's just my thought about why some of the cool 90s-era TSR settings (Ravenloft, Masque of the Red Death, Planescape, Dark Sun) often fail to make the transition to 3+ editions of D&D, and maybe how to design towards that.

On inauthenticity, via Zhuangzi

If you properly view everything as its own self, nothing can be inauthentic, because it is absolutely itself. Ultimately when we say something is inauthentic what we really mean is "I believe that this thing is or should be something that it's not, and despise it for that."

(not quoting Zhuangzi, just acknowledging the source of the idea.)

Preamble
I have PTSD. About 6-7 years ago, more or less, various pan-RPG techniques to control triggering[1] content -- The Veil and the X-Card, to name two of a vast diversity -- became commonplace in the RPG circles that I played in. Around the same time, I stopped participating in role-playing games at meet-ups and conventions, or anywhere else that these techniques were promulgated. These three things (PTSD, X-Card, and my withdrawal from play) are related. I'm writing this essay to discuss the ways that these techniques cut off my access to role-playing games, and introduce know techniques that, I hope, will point to a way forward in terms of accessibility.

Conflicting Access Needs
Before I go further, I'd like to reference a term from the disability rights movement: conflicting access needs. Disabled people are extremely diverse and our disabilities are also extremely diverse. While an ideal world would have everyone's access needs met at all times and in all circumstances, in many circumstances, with many disabilities, that is practically or fundamentally impossible.

An example, which I'm paraphrasing from Autistic blogger Mel Baggs: A group home for Autistic people have some occupants who constantly verbalize, and others who are hypersensitive to noise. The verbalizers have a reasonable access need to be allowed to verbalize. The hypersensitive have a reasonable access need for quiet. Both of these access needs are reasonable, but it is impossible to meet both of them in the same space.

For this essay, the point is that, while I'm describing ways that my (and others) access to role-playing games has been cut off, I want to acknowledge that the techniques in question were developed and promulgated -- often by people with similar disabilities to mine -- to meet a legitimate access need. That they cut off my (and others) access to role-playing games does not mean that they are inherently wrong, bad, or ableist.

I do not want this to turn into "X-Card (or The Veil, etc, etc) is bad" and, even more so, I do not want it to turn into "the people who propagate these techniques are bad." That's not my opinion and, also, it's wrong. I am hoping that by writing this essay I can move the discussion of accessibility of RPGs for PTSD sufferers from "use this technique" to a conversation which can account for different players, different goals, different communities, and different access needs.

A Note on Personal Narrative

I'm going to use a personal narrative throughout this essay, because it is based on my own experiences of both role-playing games and PTSD. But I want to be clear: I am not speaking solely for myself in this. Simply from personal circumstances, I can attest that the problems I have are problems that are shared by a number of other people with triggered mental illnesses.

Likewise, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who have a very different experience -- most importantly, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who find the X-Card, The Veil, etc. to be vital techniques for their access to role-playing games. I do not want to erase these people -- they exist, and their experiences also matter.

Please do not take my use of personal narrative as evidence that I speak only for myself. I don't. Likewise, please don't take my speaking on this topic as someone with PTSD to assume that I speak for all people with triggered mental illness. I don't.

The X-Card, the Veil, and all that

The X-Card, the Veil, and similar techniques have their roots in a section of Sex and Sorcery, a supplement for Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, where he (roughly paraphrasing) suggests a technique dealing with difficult sexual content in the game by "drawing a veil over it," basically, describing it in loose terms and then moving on with play, rather than playing it out. This is included together with several other techniques, including actually playing it out and fading to black. From there, like many things from the Sorcerer supplements, it developed on the Forge forums as a more generalized technique that could be applicable to all games.

I first encountered The Veil as a universally applicable technique in the context of public play in the Pacific Northwest -- I believe it comes out of the Go Play NW convention, but I could be mistaken. By the time it reached this form, it had mutated considerably -- it was something that was invoked by a particular player, rather than a general technique for play, and it generally had the effect of erasing the content of play [2], rather than playing it out in a vague sense and then moving on. It became a widespread meta-technique[3], adopted at a lot of public play events.

Simultaneously [4], in the New York City play scene, John Stravopolous developed the X-Card as a meta-technique. With the X-Card, the system is formalized. By "throwing the X-Card" (either a physical card marked with an X or just an invocation), a player stops play, and the offending material is erased, and play continues as if it had never happened.

The X-Card grew in popularity and was adopted throughout the indie-games public play culture. By the time that I had largely retreated from public play (~2013), it was fairly universal. Although I have not been in touch with public play culture since, it does not seem (from my outsider perspective) to have become any less widespread.

My Experience

My first reaction to The Veil as a meta-technique was simply "well, I don't want to do that." At the time, it was not generally regarded as a universal meta-rule, so that was the end of my encounter with it. However, as it grew in popularity, I began to be increasingly averse to it. I remember a particular event -- I think it was at Indie Hurricane, although I could not guess at the year -- where it was introduced as a generic rule for all pick-up games. I got a horrified, sinking feeling, my eyes started to flutter and my stomach twisted -- familiar signs of a triggering [1] event. I cannot remember whether I then said to my players "I'd like not to use that for our game" or not -- I cannot even remember if I ran my planned game or left the scene immediately. Poor memory often accompanies being exposed to triggers.

I tried playing a few games with the rule in place, thinking I could maybe get used to it. Even though, to my recollection, it was never invoked, those games left me an anxious wreck afterward.

I stopped going to convention events as often. I started going to local public play groups, but shortly thereafter the meta-rule spread there as well, and I stopped attending those as well.

I did not at the time understand why this was triggering to me. I'm not entirely sure I was conscious that I was being triggered -- it seems obvious in retrospect but I think that at the time I was not able to recognize exactly what was going on.

I made several attempts to communicate my distress -- I remember talking on separate occasions with John Stravopolous and Avery Alder about it -- but because I didn't understand what was going on, I could not clearly explain my problems, let alone propose solutions. Obviously, my attempts at communication were unsuccessful [5].

The Veil was replaced by the X-Card, and the technique continued to spread. I continued to retreat from Indie RPG circles, although I continued to play with personal groups and in non Indie RPG spaces such as AmberCon NW.

As an aside, I should say that this inaccessibility was far from the sole reason I retreated from Indie RPG circles and that, also, I do not regret having done so. My retreat has allowed me to spend more time on fiction writing, on personal friends, and on campaign play of RPGs. All of these have benefitted me both personally and professionally.

The problem

Both the X-Card and The Veil (as practiced in the PNW at that time) have as their core concept that the correct default way to handle triggering material in a role-playing game is to excise the material from the fictional timeline and thereafter to continue play. This is a commonplace understanding of how triggers work -- remove the trigger, problem now solved.

This is, for me, a disaster, because it replicates the environment of denial and powerlessness that caused my PTSD in the first place.

Fundamentally, any approach to triggering material that contains any element of "pretend it never happened" is emotionally disastrous for me, because it recapitulates the environment of denial and dismissal around my traumatic experiences. This is not limited to excising the material from play -- it also includes attempts to dismiss, deny, or minimize it.

No technique that centers this approach can possibly be functional as an accommodation; furthermore, any game or community that uses a technique that centers this approach is necessarily inaccessible to me, because an environment that centers denial as a coping strategy for triggering material, is in and of itself, a traumatic trigger.

Centering status quo vs centering healing

Fundamentally, these meta-techniques center the status quo -- the goal is to "deal with" the triggering event, or the triggered person, and then return to regular play as if the interruption had never happened. I submit that, due the nature of PTSD, this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Once I have been triggered, I am in a traumatic experience. No amount of care or concern or comfort or accommodation can untrigger me. The question is not "how do we return Ben to the status quo?" or "how can we stop Ben from having a traumatic experience?" because those goals are impossible. The question is "what kind of traumatic experience is Ben going to have?" It can either be a damaging experience -- one that reinforces the trigger and my PTSD -- or it can be a healing experience -- one that lets me recontextualize the trigger and its part of the trauma into my normal psyche.

Denial and social pressure to "return to normal" are damaging experiences.

Acknowledgement, empowerment, and story-building are healing experiences.

I believe that, in principle, good techniques for dealing with PTSD in role-playing games will avoid damaging experiences and center healing experiences.

The Luxton Technique

I didn't post about my problems with X-Card, The Veil, etc for a long time because, among other factors, I did not have a proposed solution or alternative technique. All I could do was say "I'd rather have nothing than this," but "no technique" is not particularly good rallying cry and it was not really a meaningful solution, just an attempt to get back to the somewhat-more-accessible-but-not-great status quo.

Until last year, I truly believed that there was no technique that would improve access to RPGs for some PTSD sufferers without also excluding PTSD sufferers like myself. But, last year, I played in a role-playing game at AmberCon NW that was specifically focused on traumatic experience and, particularly, centering the trauma of the players in the story we made. In that game, we used a particular technique -- which I'd like to call the Luxton Technique after the GM of the game -- which I found to be empowering, healing, and accessible to me.

It's difficult for me to summarize all the parts of this that worked, but, roughly, the Luxton Technique includes:

* An honest discussion of potential traumatic triggers prior to play, in a supportive environment, with the understanding that there is no possible way to identify or discuss every conceivable trigger or trauma, and with no social pressure to disclose particulars of individual trauma.

* When, in play, a player encounters triggering material, they can, if they choose, talk about that to the other players. When they do this, the other players listen.

* As part of talking about it -- and possibly the only thing that they need say -- the player is given absolute fiat power over that material, expressed as a want or a need. For instance "I'd like to play [character name] for this scene" or "I need this to have a happy ending" or "I want this character to not be hurt right now" or "I need this character to not get away with this" or "By the end of play, this should not be a secret" or "I need to stop play and get a drink of water" or "I don't have a specific request, I just wanted you to know."

* A player does not need to use their traumatic experience to justify any requests or demands. We just do it.

* A player does not need to be the one to speak first. We keep an eye on each other and we are watchful for people who seem withdrawn or unfocused or upset. If we are worried about someone, we ask.

* We play towards accommodating that player's requests.

It's hard to overstate how much the Luxton Technique (or, really, set of techniques) helped us approach extremely difficult, extremely person material, both for the trauma survivors at the table and for the non-survivors. Rather than having our traumatic experiences -- already a disjoint with reality -- cause a disjoint in play, we were able to integrate them into play and tell a story about or, at least, at an angle to, our traumatic experiences, real and pretend.

Healing and RPGs

I am well aware that it sounds both pretentious and terrifying to talk about RPG play as a process by which one might legitimately heal from trauma. But I'd like to elaborate on that a little, because I think it's important.

Fundamentally, a traumatic experience is an experience that is at a disjoint with the narrative of one's life. Having PTSD means that your trauma exists out of time, out of place, and always in the present tense. A big part of recovering from PTSD, inasmuch as it is possible, is not about excising the trauma or your continued experience of it. Rather, it's about integrating the trauma into normal memory and a normal narrative of your life.

A big part of that is story-telling, because a story is about incorporating disparate elements into a coherent narrative. And, for me, a big part of that story-telling has been role-playing games. In this essay, I present the choice as a binary -- either a game can harm, or it can heal. That's a lot of pressure to put on something as casual as a role-playing game! But, also, story-telling helps, and the story itself doesn't need to be traumatic. Any story-telling experience can contribute, constructively, to healing, because PTSD sufferers need to be able to tell our own stories to the world and, more importantly, to ourselves. As an accessible storytelling medium, RPGs can't be beat. They have been, and continue to be, a great help to me. In introducing these techniques, I am hoping that they can continue to be a help to others as well.

This is not limited to "heavy intense" sorts of stories that directly reference trauma. Ordinary RPGs can be stories about friends sticking together, or triumphing over evil, or just being clever and solving traps and puzzles, all of which have the potential to be healing narratives. Don't think that I'm limiting the healing potential of RPGs to "serious" games or "serious" stories. I'm not.

It's a reasonable reaction to say "I don't want to do anything that heavy in my RPG!" or "I can't be responsible for this!" And, obviously, don't play in circumstances that you're uncomfortable. But RPGs, and the people I've played them with, have given me so much healing. It's wrong for me to dismiss, deny, or belittle that simply because games are a recreational activity. I hope that, in looking at problems of accessibility of RPGs, we can look to their potential to heal as much, if not more, than their potential to harm.

My hope (edited addition)

My hope is that this essay will start / continue a conversation where we look critically at our tools and techniques for RPG play. I hope that we can get to a place, as a community, where we understand that they are not one-size-fits-all and that we are able to take a look at what that means in terms of accessibility. I'd like for us to be able to make better-informed choices about accessibility and our RPG play, and the trade-offs that entails.

--

[1] Because I have no alternative vocabulary, I'm going to use "triggering" in this essay to describe images, words, or ideas that trigger traumatic flashbacks, panic attacks, or other PTSD symptoms. I'm aware of the popular usage of "triggering" as a derisive term for an emotional reaction. I am not using it in that respect. Please, also, refrain from doing so in responses. Thanks.

[2] I'm not sure exactly when the pivot from "veil as not playing out blow-by-blow" to "veil as erasing the content from play" occurred. It might have been after this.

[3] I use the term "meta-technique" to mean "a role-playing game rule intended to be used with any game." In some cases, it is "a role-playing game rule intended to be used with every game."

[4] I am not sure about the historical relationship between the X-Card and the Veil. It's possible that there was some inspiration. It's also possible it was a parallel development.

[5] I do not want to cast any aspersions on John or Avery for our failure to communicate. Both of them listened as well as they could have to my concerns, even though I was unable to communicate them clearly. The failure was definitely on my end, and I want to thank both of them for their patience in waiting this long to hear my thoughts more clearly expressed.

I've designed a new game that uses wikipedia as its base.

Three Steps to Genocide

Go to Wikipedia. Click "random article." In three clicks, can you get to a description of genocide or ethnic cleansing? If so, you win.

It's a very, very easy game to win.

Me, at the deli when there's both chili and bibimbap on special:
"Lee, Narrativism means making hard choices."

I am having rather complicated thoughts about game design and instruction.

I can't hold them all in my mouth yet, but here's a stab.

I can teach you how to do a thing, without knowing what you're going to do with it.

Or I can create a structure for you to engage with, without know exactly, but knowing where the limits are.

I might be able to, sometimes, do both.

Tearing paper, self hatred, and consensual violence in A Real Game and Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator

(I'm not going to be particularly explicit or personal in this essay, but it does talking about self hatred, body dysphoria, and kinky sex. So if you don't want to read that, don't read this.)

Paper folding and tearing is a regular motif in +Caitlynn Belle's games. I first came across it in Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator (KDS) where you simulate kinky sex acts by folding, tearing, and puncturing a sheet of paper, with tearing and puncturing being obvious metaphors for fairly violent sexual acts. To be clear: all of the sex in KDS is mutually consensual and positive for both / all parties. But it's also representing some fairly taboo, physically violent actions.

(This is an utterly brilliant design, by the way. if I ever need to role-play sex in a game, I am going to steal this technique and use it.)

So, going into A Real Game (ARG), that is how I understood the function of paper tearing.

And then A Real Game, in a fit of self loathing and textual dysphoria, asks me to tearing, stab, and fold it. And I paused. Because it seemed to me that this was very clearly an externalization of self-harm, and I didn't know if I wanted to participate in that or not. I didn't know if I trust the game (hahah I know, right, but the game does a very good job of establishing itself as a character) to know what reasonable limits were, or to not hate or blame me afterward.

And so, of course, I thought about kink.

The kink world is often portrayed like KDS: a bunch of happy, well-adjusted people who just so happen to have these particular deviant / fucked up sexual desires, and want to practice them in an ethical way with mutually respecting partners. And, while the kink world contains the same bullshit as any social circle, this is not a particularly unreasonable presentation. But it's also a very surface level presentation.

For some people, of course, that really is what it is. But for a lot of people, kink is a place where they are expressing their anger at themselves or at others, their hatred of their body or the bodies of others, their relationship to messed up gender power dynamics, their powerlessness and self loathing and impulses towards self-harm. This isn't a bad thing. In fact it can be a really good thing: it can be cathartic and healing. But it can also be re-opening or aggravating those wounds, or an excuse towards self-harm using others as the conduit.

I don't know whether the consensual violence in ARG is healthy or unhealthy (and, of course, the game is a fictional character and not a real person). But it certainly throws some scary flags, and it lifts the veil towards some of the other stuff that's going on in the context of kink, not part of the shiny happy outward projected image, but (what is for some people) the psychological core.

One of the most important things is that it gets away from the idea that the only thing that can go wrong with kink (or sex) is that it's non-consensual. Often we end up fencing ourselves into a libertarian ideological corner of "if there's consent it is necessarily okay." But people can make consensual mistakes, and can hurt themselves or others very badly in the process. The (paper based) violence in ARG is clearly consensual. The page itself is literally asking you to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean its okay, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do, emotionally or personally.

That's really cool to see in a piece of media. It's critical in a real sense, unlike "kink critical" texts which are largely about dismissing kink as depraved or evil. In the context of KDS (and also Orgy in the Fens, which uses the paper-folding technique for sex), ARG's consensual violence raises the actual questions, difficulties, and rewards that (at least in my experience) come along with kink as a practice.