Safety Tools

Do you use any specific safety tools, like X-Cards, Lines and Veils, etc? Do you have your own setup? Do you use any at all, or count on everyone being mature enough to have an honest conversation if anything comes up?

Any examples of safety tools in use? Which ones worked best, which weren't so great?

I like to use for reference a public library TTRPG checklist and this Safety Toolkit Guide from the Archive.org

I just tell everyone in the game in advance which themes I would rather avoid, since I don't mind this information being semi-public. Usually in combination with whichever safety tool the game uses, and especially if it doesn't use any.

I think Lines & Veils is the best safety tool among the common ones, especially when it's an extensive premade checklist everyone fills out. I like when you can autonomously check if something you want to write is okay with other players.

(At least in PbP. Can't say anything about face-to-face games.)

I really like using CATS, lines and veils, and the X-Card as a last resort.

In my (admittedly poor) experience, safety tools are all about participation. I use a safety survey because I can self-moderate my own content, but when it comes to a player choosing to be safe, or their fellow player interacting with them in a safe way, it's a lot trickier than just "here are some tools."

I started my first out-and-out horror campaign with a safety survey and a discussion of a less-formal Traffic Light setup, but my players answered to everything on the survey with "I'm okay with that" and never called for a break or a change of subject, and when asked if they were okay during difficult material just said "yeah" or "sure."

I've had way more trouble with the token player who wants to be a little weirdo in-character. Love 'em, they have never been a problem player for me personally, but I've had a running record of that person being paired with one "anti" who just cannot stand the weird character concept, and got more genuinely disturbed and "Bleed" ridden from that, than from any horror content I have done.

I have an ambivalent relationship with such tools. On one hand, ensuring compatibility between participants in a game is a high-priority goal. On the other, some of the stories of implementing the pursuit of this goal make me super-concerned and put off by the way some advocates want these tools to be used.

The concerning parts are that some of the proponents come off as one-true-wayist, almost 'cultish', about some or all tools. Roleplaying spaces which mandate use of some list of tools, or people who see tools as thought-terminating conversation-enders rather than conversation-starters or conversation-aides. I suppose those 'horror stories' (I thankfully never got to experience something so drastic first-hand) influenced my reluctance to use formal tools even though I've grown inclined to grab their ideas and use them informally.

As for the more specific tools/approaches, I suppose the ones I consider the most relevant can be mostly split into two categories: those that are predominately pre-emptive, and those that are predominately interventive, and I'll comment on them separately.

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Predominately pre-emptive / pre-game tools, mostly represented by line-veil-like stuff. Seems like a great way of ensuring player-vs-topic compatibility and, depending on whether a topic is essential to the plot/settting/whatever, filtering out campaigns/players that are not mutually compatible, or adjusting the palette used in a campaign. At this point I settled on describing the broad strokes of what sort of controversial content is and isn't likely to be seen in the campaign and how it's handled, maybe include a media touchstone/example or a few (e.g. 'there might be body horror, but no worse than can be found in Miyazaki/Ghibli works'), and asking players to informally add to the discussion (e.g. suggest extra constraints, ask for clarification, &c.).

I do see the utility of checklists sometimes, but am not the type inclined to rely on them. I'm also bothered by the phrasing in some of those checklists, particularly when a list jumps from 'OK when veiled' to 'enthusiastic consent' without an intermediate greenlit option of neutral consent. I'm sorry, I am not comfortable putting 'enthusiastic' next to maybe half the entries in those lists - putting enthusiastic next to them feels like asserting a kink and/or asking to please add more of that content into the game, and that is very much not what I'm trying to convey. Like this one:
I'm also a bit ambivalent about such lists because perhaps the best horror scene memory I have comes from a campaign that came with no checklist and no forewarning, and I think the scene wouldn't've had such a cool impact on me had it come with either a checklist or other similar discussion of content categories including the one to which it belonged before the campaign.

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The other category is the interventive tools. The Card-like ones. Again, I'm not the type inclined towards formal variants thereof. I do recall a use-case when an informal analogue worked out pretty well, with a player asking to steer away from certain content and that was exactly what was done (I was not the GM, but I was part of the cause of the content). It was a clear adjustment request conveyed in clear language with enough information to figure out the approximate boundaries that needed to be added around the topic from that point onwards.

By contrast, I'm wary of the way at least some advocates seemed to present the card and the rewind, as a no-discussion-no-communication kind of red button that interrupts scenes and retcons the plot/setting at the slightest discomfort. I get that the big red button emergence brakes are worth having, I don't think they should be used so lightly. I think topics that are worthy of the big red button are definitely worthy of preventative measures - the only exception I see if the big bad topic was so outside the campaign expectations that it was never thought to be encountered in it (example: warcrimes somehow coming up in a Golden Sky Stories game).

I don't use any safety tools. When I started playing RPGs, these things didn't exist. While I realize that others in my age group have picked these things up as they've come out, before I joined GP, I'd been playing with the same group of people for so long (decades, yes plural) that we had an unspoken idea of what was ok.

On GP, I lay out in the recruitment thread what themes my game will or won't have. When something comes up after the game has begun that I didn't cover in enough detail, I privately ask the player how far they'd like to go with it and act accordingly (which happened recently). I'd like to think everyone can be mature enough to have an honest conversation about these things, but I understand that some players need (for whatever reason) to have everything spelled out before signing up.

Like ForeverDED, I have been playing with the same people (mostly) for a long time (decades in some cases) and it's still worth having some discussion of themes and content when starting a new game. We know each other well enough that we don't need to do Lines and Veils, though none of us would hesitate if someone asked. I think they are especially valuable in games (such as often happens here) where players don't know each other and don't have body language or other non-verbal cues to rely on.

May people I know (in both personal and professional settings) have some kinds of trauma in their past and not all of them are comfortable "talking it out" when it comes up, so having things handled with anonymous surveys or checklists makes a lot of sense to me. I also think that such players benefit from X-Card type mechanics where they can stop play and fade to black (or even rewind a little) without having to explain themselves. It means people with significant trauma can play in games they might otherwise. Most of them would be hesitant to use them for trivial things, but it might seem that way to others as the discomfort can go from 0 to significant very quickly. With good communication in the prescriptive stage, the X-Card should rarely be needed in a home campaign but it can be essential when it is (and is more likely to be needed in, for example, a convention game where the pregame stuff isn't likely to happen.)