https://lumpley.games/2024/05/08/traffic-lights-are-communication-tools/
I’ve seen this recentish post going around, I guess because Ben Milton did a summary of it on his channel.
In this post Meg discusses the use of the Traffic Light Tool (Red, Yellow, Green for scene comfort management), as well as discussing the terminology behind the use of the terms “Safety Tools” vs. “Communication Tools.”
Any thoughts on the post?
As a newb, a few things come to mind:
How often does stuff like this come up while gaming (I suppose like anything, it depends on what game is being run and who’s running it), and since it feels like RPGing is often just one big collaborative convo, are tools like these necessary if you could just communicate your feelings at the table?
I suppose some of this shows my biases… Stuff like this is great if a DM or a player need it, but I guess I have a hard time seeing a need for me personally. But I get that there are gamers of all types and biases and sensitivities, so it’s very much a party of one here. That being said, I am definitely curious how often situations like these have popped up with experienced gamers (I’m looking at you, @jamiltron).
So I tend to use a few “safety tools” or “communication tools” as Meg is suggesting they be called, pretty much all the time, but kind of in a recessed version. I usually mention that I use something “like x-card” at all times, and people are welcome to say they don’t want to deal with a thing. I also use the original version of lines and veils, which means that at any point a player can ask for something to be “veiled” and kind of handled off screen, with faint allusions (like sex, or maybe if torture shows up, etc.) or “lined” which can effectively be the x-card.
I tend to not like focusing on them too much, and I think some people tend to misunderstand them. The x-card isn’t really something someone uses to remove things from a game they don’t like, its so that we remove stuff that would effectively prevent them from not playing again or having a horrible time or something like that. People who bad-mouth the x-card tend to act like its something people use when showing up at a D&D game to “cancel out” dungeons. Obviously if someone sits down to a game whose core premise is wrong for them, you have to say that they need to find a new game, and the x-card isn’t built to handle that.
I think these tools get too fetishized in some communities, like there are people that say “if you don’t have an x-card on your table you can’t have safe play.” Which one, imho is ridiculous, and two, ignores the fact that these tools are just ritualizing certain forms of communication that you absolutely CAN have without them.
Where I think they are useful, is often in con games, and stuff with the meetup - where I want to communicate to people that they have the agency to say “hey no thanks” to an element, and as a referee I don’t hold some authority over them to make them have to deal with something that’s uncomfortable with them. It’s basically just signalling to people “you have a right to speak up, and we’ll meet you as humans.”
That all makes sense, especially the bit about con games, which I hadn’t thought about! Folks you’ve maybe never met or got to know previously, so you don’t know where their sensitivities or lines not to cross are.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know about that original usage. It avoids the awkwardness of people having to list stuff they aren’t comfortable with after only just meeting.
Yeah, I personally HATE the survey version for that reason, and also that I feel people are more likely to misuse it or project too intensely how they imagine the subject will be broached.
Similiar sentiments from me.
Not something for my regular game as i’ve known these players for years but defenitly an tool for games with unknown/little known players.
And i also gotta agree that the benefit these tools provide is in the structure they provide. And if people are comfortable with communicating these things without the structure around it that works fine aswell.
Going in rapid mode:
I really like the framing of these tools as aiding communication. Her examples of using them in more educational contexts are also interesting to me as a teacher, but a bit off topic.
The one time I tried to use something like lines and veils it caused the group to fall apart, as one player insisted that ‘this is what is wrong with society’, hinting at feeling censored I think? He was quite heated, so the conversation wasn’t very constructive, but he was definitely one of those ‘free speech above all else’ guys.
I think using lines and veils up front in a more casual way can at times be useful. When I played in a cthulhu dark game a fellow player mentioned they couldn’t handle spiders but were up for most anything else in horror, which seemed like a valid use case to me.
The only other communication tool I’ve used, was when running games for students. I’d let them ‘vote’ on decisions that would impact the entire group. Stuff like killing a hostage was only allowed if the rest of the group didn’t mind and this would sometimes spark a short discussion on the topic where people could explain themselves. It reined in the more murderhobo kids quite effectively, but I might want to add some communication tools for the kids that are a bit more shy/awkward and so all of them can communicate more easily to me as well.
This is also where content warnings can be useful. If you have a con game listing “body horror, spiders, snakes, bloody violence” then someone can decide whether they even want in on it. Some scenarios would be tricky to change on the fly to remove the entire spider room that is the climax, so it is better for folks to know that ‘horrific spiders’ are going to be popping up at some point.
When things start including ‘young adults in peril’ it becomes diluted enough to not be very useful for me though.
A lot of it comes down to what is likely to happen though, in my view. You might have a giant spider leap on the party in a dungeon once or twice, or you might have an entire Temple of the Spider Queen level. People might be fine with the former but not the latter. Being able to indicate where that line is is really useful, especially in groups of unknown people.
All of the above is really just adding to the consensus though: communication/safety tools are useful, but they are not always essential.
It’s an interesting way to phrase it, for sure. These sorts of “meta-procedures” that exist over top of the play at the table are a really under-developed part of the hobby, and what does exist is often either fetishized or dunked on as Justin said above.
I think the change to “communication tools” is a pretty helpful one, especially because it widens the scope of the topic to include tools/procedures/stuff that isn’t necessarily directly related to triggering content. There’s a pretty clear connection between the point of the traditional safety tools – normalizing and providing a framework for conversations about an uncomfortable topic – and stuff like the clearly delineated player roles that are common in OSR play – the “caller”, for example, is a framework for table organization that helps the referee reduce their cognitive load.
To me, those things would benefit from being considered the same genre of “tool” to generate more cross-pollination/innovation on them for smoother play. The standardization of stuff like the X-Card and the Traffic Lights thing help people who haven’t built up a strong play rapport share the familiarity a more acclimated group has from the rip. Ideally, this would dovetail with other tools around game efficiency/speed to make people better at playing with each other across the board.