Playing roleplaying games is an ensemble activity. You play with other people and you create a shared experience together, riffing on each other’s ideas and creativity. This togetherness can lead to emotionally intense experiences which makes it all the more important to play in a manner that’s considerate of the feelings, experiences and boundaries of your fellow players.

　As a rule of thumb, the wellbeing of the people you share the game with should be a prime concern. In this, roleplaying is no different from any other activity involving a creative ensemble. The same goes whether you play in a band or act in a play.

　Taking care of each other is especially important when playing horror games. Experience has shown that scary or emotionally difficult material is much easier to play when the troupe has fostered a culture of trust and care.

Emotions

　At its best, roleplaying can involve the full spectrum of human emotion. A movie can make us laugh and cry and roleplaying games have the same potential to affect us as any other artform. In the case of roleplaying games, there’s a specific mechanism that often comes into play, called bleed by the designer Emily Care Boss. Bleed refers to the way we empathize with the character we play and thus may experience some of their emotions ourselves. My character is sad and now I feel sad too. The mechanism can also work in reverse: A villain makes me angry as a player and suddenly my ordinarily calm and composed character is furious.

　Bleed is not good or bad. It’s simply a mechanism by which we can have emotional experiences in games. Giving the mechanism a name is helpful because it helps us process emotions that occur during roleplaying.

　Note that character-based bleed is not the only way we experience emotions in roleplaying games. Sometimes we emphasize with something that doesn’t involve our characters at all, leading to emotional reactions using the more familiar mechanisms we know from reacting to movies, comics or novels.

The Context of Play

　You can play Werewolf in many different contexts. You can play at home with your friends, on a stream in public or at a convention with strangers. It’s a good idea to consider how the differences in who you play with and where affect the themes you explore in the game.

　The play culture and calibration theorist Johanna Koljonen divides issues that may crop up into three categories:

Physical: In ordinary tabletop roleplaying games, physical safety is rarely an issue. Our living rooms tend to be relatively free of physical dangers.

Mental: When we talk about questions of consideration and calibration in roleplaying games, we’re usually talking about those in this category. Taking care of mental issues means ensuring all participants in the game feel comfortable and safe to explore the dark themes inherent in Werewolf. Most tools presented in this chapter are about helping players control their own experience so they can keep within their limits.

Community: How does the way we play affect our relationships and role in our community? In the case of private chronicles played in someone’s living room, the community aspect is small. If our play happens in public, possible problems it can cause with our communities become more important as a consideration.

　In an ordinary, privately played Werewolf chronicle, participants should focus on their own well-being as well as that of each other. The people around the gaming table are the people who should be happy and comfortable with the game. When you maintain your own boundaries, you’re also creating a better play environment for everyone else.

　Public games present special issues because problems in the community category can come from people who are not part of the game at all. If you stream a game of Werewolf online, a random viewer may take issue with something that was okay for everyone in the game. This can range from something legitimate, like objecting to an accidentally racist portrayal of a character, to something strange like unrequited parasocial emotions.

Characters

　One of the great things about roleplaying games is that you can play characters different from yourself. In fact, you can purposefully use this to decrease bleed if you so desire. (See Distancing, below.)

　You can play a character of a different ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender expression, nationality, social class or any other identity category. Particularly when it comes to questions of sexuality and gender, many players have used roleplaying games for the purpose of self-exploration, figuring things out in a comfortable, fictional environment.

　The key to playing characters markedly different from yourself is respect. It’s best to avoid caricatures and play everyone as a three-dimensional, nuanced individual, the same as yourself. This tends to lead to the most nuanced and interesting play experience, meaning that the quality of your play will also benefit.

　When choosing what kind of background and identities you may wish to explore in play, pay attention to who you’re playing with. Respectful play is a good idea in all instances but especially considering the people in your troupe. If you create a character matching the identity of someone you’re playing with, you don’t want to insult them by playing a lame, ill-informed joke!

　Note that in the throes of improvisational play mistakes happen. When you make a mistake, for example misgender someone, don’t waste time with protracted apologies and explanations. Instead, listen when someone corrects you, take it to heart and avoid making the same mistake again.

Sex And Romance

　Werewolves are passionate creatures. They fall in love and lust. They have ill-advised trysts and torrid love affairs. They fuck. The background of a losing war to save the world creates emotional intensity that can come out in many different ways, including as frantic trysts between characters. Such scenes can be great fun to play!

　There’s a lot of variety between different players and play cultures in terms of how much people want to play on these themes. Some prefer to keep sex and romance largely off screen while others enjoy playing through a character’s first date in minute detail.

　Although you can use some of the calibration tools below to control your own participation in scenes of love and sex during play, it’s good to prepare for the eventuality by discussing the subject with the troupe during Session Zero (see p. 203). This way, you can suss out who’s interested in playing sex and romance and where their boundaries lie.

　In addition to how graphic things can get, another topic of discussion is how much play time can be allocated to these topics. Hogging the spotlight for a two-hour date scene is selfish. (Unless the date is so compelling that the others players are fine with watching it play out.)

Fascism

　Werewolf is not a fascist friendly game. Because it’s a horror game about contemporary issues, it can be a game where fascism as a theme or fascists as characters show up. After all, they’re an unfortunate part of the real world we all inhabit.

　In the simplest terms, you can use Nazis of whatever stripe seems most appropriate for your setting as enemies. After all, who doesn’t want to go full Wolfenstein every now and then? In Werewolf, you can confront the problems of the world and rip their face off. Nazis are certainly a problem!

　As with all other potentially difficult themes, participants can have wildly different reactions and wishes regarding fascism depending on their personality and background. For some, Nazis are cartoonish enemies to be ripped in half. For others, they’re a clear and present danger, the people who are calling for them to be eradicated.

　This is another topic you may wish to discuss during session zero especially if it’s expected that fascists or fascism plays a significant part in the chronicle. What are the players’ specific comfort levels with the subject? Remember that people are highly individual. One player whose life has been impacted by fascism may not wish to see them in the game, while another with similar experiences enjoys blasting them to bits.

　Note that in Werewolf, themes of fascism may be present in the social realm of the players’ characters. A friend goes over to the Cult of Fenris, seduced by their message of simpleminded morality. A player may decide to explore themes of ecofascism in their own character by skirting close to hauglosk. These situations create opportunities to grapple with fascism with more nuance than as simple enemies. How do you bring back a friend who has gone over to a hateful ideology? How do you avoid succumbing to bitterness and desperation, and the simple answers provided by a charismatic demagogue?

Tools

　There are a number of tools intended to help players and Storytellers take charge of their own experience and calibrate it so that the game works for them. Their purpose is to empower you as a participant to maintain your own boundaries as well as help maintain the boundaries of your co-players.

　A roleplaying troupe is a creative ensemble. The joy of play comes from the interplay of our creativity as we bounce off each other in the context of the game. The troupe works best creatively when we listen to each other, and conveniently listening also makes it much easier to be considerate of each other’s needs during play. Players who listen are good players because they know each other and can support each other, creatively and in terms of comfort.

　Note that you don’t have to use all the tools described here. The purpose of this section is to provide a selection you can choose from to fit your needs.


Building an Ensemble

　You don’t have to take the formation of a creative ensemble as a matter of chance or player chemistry, although both matter. There are exercises you can do during session zero to improve the cohesion of the troupe. The key to ensemble building is fostering a culture of listening to your fellow players. You can do rounds where each player (including the Storyteller) answers a question. Here are a few sample questions:

• What’s a cool scene that I’d love to play in Werewolf?

• What am I looking forward to in the game?

• What am I afraid of in the game, something that would be tedious, cringe or uncomfortable?

　You can add more questions, especially if there are topics that you suspect will require a certain amount of delicacy. The point of the exercise is not to debate or discuss until you’ve determined a final truth but to listen to your co-players’ feelings. Humans are social animals and we are good at adapting to each other.

　When doing a round, you should avoid interrupting others and accept it if someone just wants to skip their turn.


Post-Game Discussions

　Another way to help build ensemble during a chronicle is to reserve a bit of time at the end of each session for a discussion among the players. You can keep this informal or incorporate a round of questions, as you like.

　As the Storyteller, you can ask all players individually how they’re feeling and how the session went for them. Like with all ensemble-building, the most important thing here is just to listen.

　If you want to reinforce a positive atmosphere, one way to do it is to spotlight each player in turn and ask the others to come up with something positive about them from that session. Like so:

　The Storyteller: “Okay, let’s put the spotlight on Hassan. What did you like in Hassan’s play today?”

　A Player: “I loved the scene with the babysitter. You’re ordinary such a gruff badass but that was surprisingly delicate! No wonder she confessed!”


Lines and Veils

　A technique originally described by Ron Edwards in Sex and Sorcery, Lines and Veils works great when done during session zero. The idea is that the players and the Storyteller create a list of Lines and Veils for the game which can then be referred to during play to help calibrate things so that everyone is comfortable.

　Lines are topics that a player feels should not be part of the game. For example, a player adds “cruelty or violence towards animals” to the list. This means that the game shouldn’t feature cruelty towards animals at all, as the focus of attention or even mentioned in passing.

　Veils are topics that players feel are fine as part of the game world but that they don’t want to see in detail. For example, a player puts “domestic violence” on the list of Veils. This means that domestic violence can be part of someone’s backstory, for example, but shouldn’t feature in scenes played out in detail.

　Note that the list of Lines and Veils can change during play. Players can add to it or even remove something they themselves put on it. The kinds of things that players put on the list can be highly individual. A player may put a Line on “gaslighting in the context of a relationship” and still be perfectly fine with minutely described ultraviolence.


The X Card

　Developed by John Stavropoulos, the X Card is a tool where you draw an X on a physical card and place it somewhere within reach of all the players during play. The idea is that if you find the content of the game upsetting or difficult to process in a way that damages your play experience, you can point to the card, tap it, pick it up and raise it, or otherwise use it to indicate your situation.

　The default reaction from other participants should be to immediately stop the scene and move on. You may also use the moment to ask for something specific going forward but you don’t have to.

　For example, the characters are interrogating a corporate executive. You become uncomfortable with the physical nature and intensity of the scene and tap the X Card. The Storyteller ends the scene and jumps ahead: “Okay, after you’re done with the interrogation, you found that…”

　Note that even if the game you’re playing in doesn’t explicitly use the X Card, it should always be okay to tap out when you need to. In any game situation, you can just say: “Hey, let’s stop for a second. I’m not comfortable with this. Let’s move on.” The X Card is just a formalized way to facilitate doing this.


Distancing

　The Swedish roleplay collective Vi åker Jeep talked about bringing the subjects and themes of roleplay “close to home” to increase emotional intensity. The theory was that bleed (see Emotions, above) would be intensified if the substance of play was highly relatable to the participants. The goal of these games was to create emotionally intense experiences and they chose settings such as the family where players can draw on their personal experiences.

　You can do the same if you wish, creating a Werewolf game, chronicle or character with a lot of points of reference that relate to your real life.

　However, you can also do the opposite if you want to purposefully decrease bleed and keep the game emotionally contained. You can decide to make a character who’s more of an abstraction, a marionette you take through the events of the game so that when something bad happens, it won’t impact you as strongly.

　What we relate to is highly individual, and the same goes for the opposite. Sometimes we find experiences outside of our own lives nevertheless highly relatable, so if you want to create distance you have to do a bit of soul-searching and see what kind of things you find interesting but not that emotionally impactful.


More Information

　If you want to read more on these topics, check out the following:

• “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character” by Sarah Lynne Bowman:
nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spilloverbetween-player-and-character

• “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity” by Jonaya Kemper:
nordiclarp.org/2017/06/21/the-battle-of-primrosepark-playing-for-emancipatory-bleed-in-fortune-felicity

• “Larp Safety Design Fundamentals” by Johanna Koljonen:
jarps.net/journal/article/view/16

• “Participation Safety In Larp”, a website by Johanna Koljonen:
participationsafety.com

• “What do the terms Lines and Veils mean?” on RPGStackExchange:
rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/30906/what-do-thetermslines-and-veils-mean

• “Let’s Play with Fire! Using Risk and its Power for Personal Transformation” by Bettina Beck:
nordiclarp.org/2018/03/01/lets-play-fire-using-riskpower-personal-transformation

• “Creating a Culture of Trust Through Safety and Calibration Mechanics” by Maury Brown:
nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safetycalibration-larp-mechanics

• Sex and Sorcery by Ron Edwards

• “The X Card” by John Stavropolous:
docs.google.com/document/d/1SB0jsx34bWHZWbnNIVVuMjhDkrdFGo1_hSC2BWPlI3A