Experiences with the X-card in gaming?

The Game Room
1

For folks unfamiliar with the idea, it’s something in tabletop roleplaying games, a relatively recent phenomenon. There’s a literal or (more often) metaphorical card on the table with an X on it. If what’s happening in the game is making a player genuinely uncomfortable, the player can tap the X, and it’s understood that the game will either rewind so that thing didn’t happen, or there’ll be an out-of-game discussion before things proceed.

It’s intended to help with things that might show up in a game, like violence against children, sexual violence, torture, killing the family dog, or other things that can turn the game unfun for some players. There are some groups where torture is part of the game and everyone’s fine with it; but you gotta have a way to recognize when things cross someone’s comfort lines.

Anyway, I’ve played in several games where the X card or a similar dynamic was mentioned at the outset, but I’ve never seen it used. Until last weekend.

I was playing a pickup game with some friends, and I won’t bore you with more than three sentences of detail. Our crack investigative team broke into the security headquarters of the criminal boss, and the sneaky infiltrator zoomed under the boss’s chair and held a knife to the boss’s junk. “Make a move, and snip!” the player said. (This wasn’t a guy I’d played with before, and this sentence doesn’t count as one of my three). When we realized that the guy in the captain’s chair wasn’t the boss, but a scared-shitless pop musician, all of us ran to the next room–except for the annoyed infiltrator dude, who declared, “I go ahead and cut 'em off.”

There were general boos from me and some other players, because what the fuck, aren’t we supposed to be the good guys? But I was just gonna let it go–until one player said, “Actually, I’m using a nope card on that. That makes the game not fun for me, and it’s not the kind of game I want to play in. Can we rewind?”

The infiltrator player was gobsmacked: he’d never heard of such a thing and was genuinely confused about what was going on. But seeing that everyone else was behind it, he shrugged and agreed that he wouldn’t do that, and played successfully in the rest of the game.

Later I overheard him talking to the Nope Card player to get clarification, and it sounded like there was no bad blood on either side. The guy was new to our group (a lot of us have known each other for a couple of decades), and I think he wanted to fit into the group, and this was kind of a moment of learning some cultural norms for him.

So that’s my X-card story. Have any of you had similar experiences?

2

I’ve never played in a game with an explicit rule to that effect. The closest I’ve seen was when the DM asked all of us individually, before an adventure, if we’d be uncomfortable with enemies who are sacrificing children (I said that I could go with it, so long as it was “off screen”).

3

In Live Action Role Play (LARP) games, many groups have a safe word or gesture that will stop a scene cold and signal someone in the scene to get a GM.

Many also have a “check-in” signal that is subtly flashed to make sure that someone who seems uncomfortable with something going on is okay as a player but role-playing the discomfort as their character.

4

I have been to gaming conventions, and have never seen this.

5

Never as an explicit rule, but my group is very close-knit and doesn’t really need one. I love it as a concept though.

The closest personal anecdote I have is from the online game I ran through the depth of covid. One of the participants is an intermittent addition rather than a core part of the aforementioned tight-knittedness. He’s a good guy, but tends to view D&D more like playing a video game and less as a collective roleplaying experience. The kind of player who probably would have done something much like the ball-snipping because why not? It’s a game.

So before the first session, I came up with a simple rule for my campaign. “Every single shopkeeper in my world is a retired adventurer.” I did not tell the players this rule.

Sure enough, fairly early on in the campaign he did something very vulgar to a very innocent-looking old goblin shopkeep who was trying to serve them tea. It went something like this:

Him: I [redacted].
Party: uncomfortable silence
Me: “Okay, sure, you do that. She rolls against your passive perception and surprises you. Her attack roll is with advantage and the bonus is +14. Yep, +14. Since you’re surprised, it’s an automatic critical hit. Hmm? Oh, she has some class levels that give her that feature. Here’s the roll… yeah, that’s a ton of dice. More class features, yeah. You take blah blah damage.”
Him: Okay, that knocks me out. Does anybody have a healing potion or something?
Party: …
Me: Welllllll hold on. That was her first attack. Yes, she appears to have at least two. Okay, that’s another hit. Since you’re unconscious, it’s an automatic crit and you take two immediate death save failures. At this point would anyone like to roll initiative and jump in?
Someone else: Oh hell no. I sip my tea while it’s still hot.
Me: It’s really good tea. She asks if you want sugar as she nudges the body off of the table with her cane.
Someone else: Oh hell no. I say it’s absolutely perfect and look for something else to compliment. Does she have any pictures of grandkids or something?

His character survived, but with a very unfortunate physical deformity as a result. To the player’s credit, he played more thoughtfully as time went on, even though I had to reinforce the concept from time to time. Once or twice I wondered whether I’d have to have an explicit conversation with him about respecting the time it was taking me to put the online sessions together, but it never got to that point. He did have a clear improvement arc and the fundamental disconnect was about different perspectives rather than him being a truly problematic player.

By the end it became a bit of a party joke that he would sometimes do aggressively stupid stuff in social situations and get his ass kicked as a result, but he never again did it with the same level of impropriety as that first time. When that shopkeep made an unexpected appearance much, much later on, everyone was very polite but he was downright obsequious.

That was long! The tl;dr is that I had my own personal Nope Card ready to go.

6

yeah I played woth a party who had aggressively stupid players and made aggressively stupid players so all the NPC’s were hardcore mean and even hateful and such that it would make a GOT villain proud

by the time they left the starter town they realized the bag o dicks approach wasn’t getting then anywhere because they had died out 4 times…

7

I’ve read about using some sort of signal in games that explore “adult themes”. I’ve never played in any games like that, though. Usually our games are much more goofy in tone.

8

Interesting responses!

Chronos, it’s not something I’ve often seen at cons, and never before about 5 years ago. But it’s showed up more often lately, and especially in a small group that meets annually to play games in an informal con.

Interesting! I think the idea of this card is to avoid using in-game solutions to a metagame issue. If someone is playing in a way that makes the game unfun for others, I’d personally rather deal with it through an out-of-game conversation and see if we can come to an agreement about how to make it fun for everyone.

There have definitely been times I’ve walked away from a table because of how folks were playing, and other times where at the end of the session I felt irritated and unhappy at how I’d just spent a few hours. Being able to talk to folks when necessary would avoid that sort of situation.

9

The game I’m talking about was pretty damned goofy up to that point (e.g., my hacker had used an action to outline enemies on everyone’s HUD, giving a bonus to hit, and for shits and giggles I threw up a scoreboard that updated points every time someone successfully attacked an enemy). The tonal shift that came with mutilating an innocent bystander was moving the game out of the goofy fun into something grim and antiheroic.

10

I haven’t played in a game with a Bike card or similar, but I have heard about it listening to a podcast (yes I listen to a lot of podcasts), the episode was an interview with a game store owner and she talked about it and how it helped players. Here’s a link to the episode.

11

Let’s just stick one on the Cards Against Humanity box and bypass the step of opening it and playing.

12

My experience has been similar – it’s a fairly recent phenomenon. I was just at the Origins game convention earlier this month, and some groups and GMs specifically made mention of the X-card at the start of their games (but it was certainly not universal). I think that it’s more relevant in games which can have mature or explicit themes, as well as in games where you don’t necessarily know the other players at your table.

13

Heh. Yeah, it’s not really for games where you know there’ll be transgressions–although even there, I’ve played in CaH where people found certain jokes (e.g., Holocaust jokes) beyond the pale.

OTOH, if I’m playing in a wacky superhero game, and some dude playing a female superhero can’t see past playing full on slutty superhero and ignoring her powers to have her flash the bad guys over and over, I might decide to nope that.

Not that I’ve ever seen that happen, nope.

twitch

14

I agree that it’s useful for role playing games.

15

For anyone interested, here is a Google doc of the “original” X-Card, by John Stavropoulos:

“Safety tools” like that are becoming increasingly common in RPGs. It’s unusual now for me to see a new RPG corebook that doesn’t include some sort of safety tool reference.

16

As I understand it, that’s not really what the X-Card is supposed to be used for. The X-Card is supposed to be used when the players are uncomfortable with the content due to phobias, PTSD, or when the situation being played out would be traumatic for the player. Making the game “not fun” isn’t a sufficient reason to bust out the X-Card. (Though it’s a good time to talk to the player about the tone of the game and expectations for characters.)

The X-Card is supposed to be a safety device designed to prevent the infliction of trauma while playing a game. I use safety devices for activities where there is a decent risk of injury including wearing a seatbelt when driving, a hardhat when on a construction site, a mask while airbrushing, etc., etc. Participation in role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Savage Worlds is not inherently dangerous. And if they are, well, I need to bust out my Ouija Board, summon the spirit of Patricia Pulling, and apologize to her for thinking she was a kook for saying role playing games were dangerous back in the 80s.

17

This page,

has a good, short summary of various safety tools, with links to the creators’ sites and more information on them.

I’ve never played in a game where any of these were explicitly used, but I’ve played in plenty of games where these kinds of tools were just kind of implicitly understood by everyone, and I’ve seen, and used, some variant of “Lines & Veils”, “Exit the Scene”, and “Script Change”, decades before those were explicated as explicit “safety tools”. They were the kinds of things that were just kind of assumed common sense by most of the groups I’ve played with.

But, of course, in a con game, or an organized play event at a game store, or if you’re the new player in an established group, or any number of other situations, you’re frequently going to have people with different implicit assumptions about boundaries. I can definitely see how having these as explicit tools presented to the players would be very useful.

(I’ve got to be honest, of the tools listed on the page I linked, the “Consent Flower” seems kind of doofy and intrusive to me, and I doubt I’d even try to use myself in a session where it was supposed to be in use, and I’d have a hard time trying to process its use by others. But the others are seem like good explications of what I’ve always just kind of assumed were good roleplaying practices).

18

That’s not my understanding of the purpose of the X-Card. And it’s my understanding that using it to stop the game to talk to other players about tone and expectations is exactly the point.

Here’s what the X-Card’s creator actually says about how to present the X-Card:

“I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… [ draw X on an index card ] …just lift this card up, or simply tap it [ place card at the center of the table ]. 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!"

Note that he references “making the game fun” at the beginning and end, and never mentions PTSD or trauma. In fact, the whole point of the X-Card is to give players a simple, clear, unequivocal signal that they can use for any reason to help make the game more fun for themselves and everyone else.

RPGs aren’t dangerous in the way Patricia Pulling or Jack Chick made them out to be. But they are still social interactions, which can get pretty intense, and cover some pretty intense subject matter.

Personal experience: I was playing in a Deadlands campaign, and one session centered on a conflict between a U.S. Cavalry unit and a group of Native Americans. Some of the players, in character, were discussing siding with the Native Americans in combat and fighting the U.S. Cavalry. Out of character, I told everyone that while I understood the U.S. Cavalry weren’t generally the “good guys” in the real Indian Wars, and in this fictional case they pretty clearly weren’t, I still wasn’t going to play in a game where we killed U.S. Soldiers. It wouldn’t have “traumatized” me, but it would have been anti-fun, and I would have simply left the table and gone home.

That group didn’t use explicit tools like the X-Card, and we were all familiar enough and comfortable enough with each other for us to have that conversation and everyone at the table agreed we’d come up with ideas that didn’t involve killing U.S. Soldiers. In other circumstances, like in a con game, or if I were just less willing to articulate my own discomfort to the group, a tool like the X-Card could have been very useful and avoided a nasty moment in what’s supposed to be, after all, a game.

And that’s the thing. Roleplaying games are games. We play them to have fun. They’re a pretty uniquely collaborative game. We all have to cooperate with each other to have fun, and sometimes that means compromising. Just avoiding outright trauma seems to me like a ridiculously low bar.

I don’t know, maybe you’re just objecting to the term “Safety Tool” as being overblown. If so, do you have a better term for the kinds of tools I linked to just before and just after your post? Or do you object to the tools themselves?

19

I think that would make me play the “Ew, really?” card.

20

Well, are you sure?

What part of this statement would lead you to believe that any conversation is taking place?
Because if you don’t have to explain why you used the X-Card and the content is simply edited then there’s no conservation taking place about tone or expectations. You play the X-Card, the DM edits the content, and you move forward without having any conversations.

In your link, the X-Card is referred to as a safety tool. You use safety tools to mitigate the risks of harm.

That’s actually one of the arguments that Pulling made. That role playing was intense, and used for training purposes by the military and others, and young people in particular could be traumatized because they weren’t emotionally prepared to to handle it. People attacked D&D on more than just the occult/Satanic angle.

What compromise? Someone plays an X-Card and you’re supposed to end the scene immediately and move on. No conversation is required as the person who played the card is not expected to explain why they played it. Does that sound like collaboration to you?

I think if you look at how most people use X-Cards it’s to avoid inflicting trauma on players. i.e. Making sure they don’t face their phobias, trigger their PTSD, expose them to racism or homophobia, etc., etc. I don’t believe role playing games are an inherently dangerous activity which is why I oppose the idea normalizing the use of X-Cards.