Personal Statement

Fundamentally, tabletop games, and especially tabletop RPGs, are all about

communication. With very few exceptions, they are games you have to play socially. The people

you play either need to know very well or, in the context of a group you don’t know, get to know

as you play and in the aftertalk afterwards – the celebrations

It was June 7th, 2021, when the Adventurers League, a community ran organization

made to help get both players into Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) via special premade

adventures alongside the adventures normally published and a unifying ruleset to supplement

the ones in the Player’s Handbook, released a rule set for their Mist Hunter series of

adventures. Unlike the high fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms campaign though, Mist

Hunters was set, rather, in the horror based setting of Ravenloft and its many smaller

sub-settings known as the Demiplanes of Dread. With the many frightening occurrences and

possible triggers that could be experienced while playing through the series in mind, the ruleset

went over how safety tools – tools meant to help ensure players felt safe during player – worked

over to a larger and more receptive audience than ever. This is not the first foreray that

Dungeons and Dragons has made into increasing accessibility into its game though, nor is it the

first tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) to engage in the usage of safety tools. Early last year,

their release of the expansion book Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft had, amongst many other

pieces of worldbuilding and rules mechanics, an entire chapter dedicated to run horror to be

scary while still being respectful of your players’ triggers. Likewise, the expansion book Tasha’s

Cauldron of Everything had a section about having a Session 0 – a session dedicated to setting
up rules and boundaries for what is and is not appropriate to talk about or to talk about

minimally.

Move to Paragraph 2. Talk about the increase in communication during play within the

last decade via resources such as Safety Tools alongside ideas such as the Session 0 becoming

more widely known and accepted. Tell a story about how X-Cards were used properly during a

game to skip over excessive details and continue to have the game run properly.

Move to Paragraph 3. Talk about how, as a gamemaster (GM), you have to juggle both

what the players want and what you want from a game alongside having to communicate what

the rules and story is while keeping the game at a reasonable pace. Talk about mental health a

bit and how you need to be in the right headspace to play; tell stories of personal burnout due

to playing/GMing too much or doing so while stressed out.

I care about the safety and comfort of other players and, outside of that context, the

safety and comfort of other people. People and their experiences, both at the table and in their

own daily lives, are different and entirely unique. Respecting the experiences and boundaries

people have alongside making sure everyone is heard is key.