#veils — Public Fediverse posts

@lumpley Some of the same concerns I have with #veils are there with the FF feature of the Script Change. I’m scared that something will happen to my char when I’m not looking, like in (cw!) Confessions of a Dungeon Master.

That’s like the second of the first two rules I tell anyone who joins my home group (back when we were playing in person):

Players who can’t make it to a session, their characters are safe. They can’t give out spells, be put on the front line, be ridiculed (“she’s sick in bed”) or anything like that. We use a bunch of weird solutions (and I have some more ideas incoming) but one goto is “They’re just ‘scouting ahead’”

Re #veils it should be obvious that you should think twice before trying to put something into the game that’s so messed up that you can’t even say it.

Yes, some things can be stated quickly while others could be elaborated upon in detail but there’s a difference between stating nongraphically, vs only implying, hinting, nudging.

I’m not the best at practicing what I preach re veils. Sometimes it’s fun to just give subtle, ambiguous hints. But, again, that’s for purps of aesthetics, not safety!

As an aesthetic tool it can be great to leave things unstated, or murky, or contradictory. But that is a deliberately unsafe, spooky or tension-building device, not a safety tool.

Rant never over

@lumpley

A safeword means stop, something’s wrong, whereas the #Xcard is meant to let you keep going with just the subtlest and politest of edits. It’s like an airbag that lets you keep driving after it has blown up. I can’t even…

It’s like… yes, the “try a different way”-card in Archipelago is a genius ludeme. For Archipelago, and its wikilike “co-edit the aesthetics” gameplay. It is part of what makes Archipelago a good game and can definitely be ported over to some other games that have a similar approach to stances and storywriting. But relying on it as if it were a safety tool is…

And if you do have real safety in place, the X-card is complementary at best and confusing at worst.

Uh, this is a never-ending rant from me. It’s like a 24/7 “rant vs X-card and #veils” station that I try to not tune into too often.

Some peeps have tried to push the idea of the X-card as primarily an aesthetics editor a la Archipelago. Use it early and often, use it because you just don’t feel like a particular element that day, use it very freely etc. And I think that might be a good tool for some games. If that did become the primary perception of the X-card that would be a welcome evolution. It could also mean that it could have some safety use, with a lessened “I am revealing a kryptonite” factor, as a complement to real, proper safety use. It would be instantly recognizeable

• as not appropriate for all games, and
• not a robust safety tool that’s enough on it’s own

I think the name “X-card” is burnt, though, for that, but who knows.

Maybe a better response to “this game uses X-card” than “In that case, I need to excuse myself” is “Cool, but how do we signal that we need to discuss OOC or take a break?” i.e. see the X-card as a game mechanic, not a meta-game safety tool. I dunno.