Running Horror: Consent, Transgression, and the Ritual
During winter break of my freshman year of college, one of my partner’s exes parked outside their house and refused to leave. They were out there for hours, waiting for my partner to come outside so they could talk.
My partner didn’t go; they would text them or a mutual friend and then go back to distracting themselves with the videogame we were playing. I like to think that we weren’t in any danger, but the feelings of powerlessness and the loss of control the experience inspired stuck with me.
Years later, after an ugly breakup, that same partner who refused to go outside would text me every few weeks or months asking to meet up and talk. They wouldn’t take no for answer. They cared about me too much to let it go, they said.
But like them, I refused. I kept refusing. And that worked, for the most part. For years, I’d still get the occasional message from them. My phone would buzz on the subway and I’d see a text from a number I no longer had saved that was just an attempt to “check in.”
The game
A few years after that, I was in a horror roleplaying game campaign that I didn’t find particularly scary. Our characters were supposed to be a sort of Scooby Gang solving mysteries in an idyllic college town, only to catch a glimpse of the horrors beyond our world and slowly slide into madness. Quaint, right?
The experience was largely a railroad with our proverbial train car rolling past gruesome imagery every once in a while — the sort of “haunted house” experience I wrote about earlier this week.
Then an NPC tortured my character for information. This was fine. I hadn’t noted torture as a line or a veil during our session 0, and I don’t think anyone else had either. What was there to be upset or scared about? It happened at a remove from me, to someone who didn’t exist, who couldn’t really be hurt in any meaningful way.
But then, a session or two later, the NPC who did it showed up on my character’s doorstep. She said she wanted to talk. She said that she was sorry. She also said she wouldn’t leave until my character agreed to talk to her.
She cared about me too much to let it go, she said.
That moment dredged up feelings of powerlessness and a loss of control that I hadn’t touched in years. This wasn’t the GM’s fault — I honestly don’t remember what the lines and veils sheet looks like years later, but I doubt I had put anything close to describing those college experiences on it. And horror is all about the things that scare you, right?
But the GM made it abundantly clear that this character wouldn’t leave. He had a particular scene in mind and it required my character to do something that reminded me of some of the uncomfortable and genuinely upsetting experiences of my life. The haunted house equivalent would be spending an hour or two harangued by actors in unconvincing ghost costumes only to take a detour into a real-life doctor’s office where your actual parent is being diagnosed with genuine cancer in front of you. From canned, lifeless scares to the real thing.
I don’t know what I could’ve done to better protect myself in that situation. I have some ideas as to what my GM could’ve done differently, but the window for that is well past. (I did manage to squeeze some catharsis out of that nightmare, so props to them for giving me the opportunity to exorcise those specific demons, I guess.)
What I know now thanks to that experience is how to protect myself and my players in the future.
The ritual
Horror is a genre about transgression. It is about people and things that violate assumptions we have and agreements we make, knowingly or not. Horror is about the unnatural and the inexplicable infringing on the routine and the mundane.
That makes horror incredibly powerful at the table. When you play a horror game, you are being given or granting explicit permission to invoke feelings of discomfort and unease in other people, or yourself, for fun. You’re being told that you can scare the shit out of your friends and get away with it.
But that license isn’t an excuse to hurt other people. It isn’t an excuse to be cruel. Being given such a powerful tool means you need to handle it with the proper care.
My approach to doing this right when I run horror games is the ritual.
After everyone at my table has gotten introductions or pleasantries out of the way and settled down, I give a speech that goes something like this: “This is a horror game. We’re here to get scared, but we’re also here to have fun. I’m trying to make you feel uncomfortable, but I’m not trying to make you feel unsafe.”
And then I introduce the tools and the agreements that will allow us to be safe when we play together. Not just lines and veils and the X card and other safety tools developed by people much more thoughtful than me, but the understanding that we care about each other — that we’re not trying to do harm, and that if we do so, we’ll fix it.
I don’t always do the best job of taking my own advice. I don’t always complete the ritual. But when I do, the game is better for it. The people at my table are better for it. And I’m better for it, because I know that when I transgress, I’m doing it as respectfully and as carefully as I can.
Postscript
Initially I planned this blog post about a different aspect of "the ritual" — an agreement I make with players to never dictate their character's emotions or reactions. This is also a really powerful tool at the table. But as I tried to write about it, I realized that I had something more important (and much more difficult) to say. I think it's cool to bring these lived experiences into RPG blogging, but it's also uncomfortable. I feel pretty raw writing this, but also lighter. It's good to get these kinds of things out, and if you have the opportunity to get something similar off your chest in a way that feels healthy and safe, I suggest you take it.