Spirals
The world is being eaten by spirals of mistrust. Friends vanish into propaganda loops, strangers turn into enemies after a single Facebook comment, and even the idea of a “shared world” feels like a relic.
The instinct is retreat. Block. Unfriend. Mute. Pretend the problem is solved. Build a sanitary cordon and call it tolerance. Create safe spaces and imagine the intolerant will roll over and die if we ignore them. But they don’t. They fester. Every time we abandon common ground, we push more people into echo chambers where rage grows unchecked.
I am not mocking safe spaces. People carrying heavy trauma sometimes need them just to breathe, and it would be cruel to deny that. But most of us are not that fragilised, and most of the people we disagree with are not monsters. What is very fragile is trust. Once shared spaces are gone, trust becomes impossible.
Breaking Bridges
I saw this unfold in an RPG Discord server. It was a thoughtful, friendly community, open to everybody. Then a newcomer arrived. His grammar was rough; he mentioned being an “army guy.” Curious about RPGs, he asked how to try them solo. Soon he was running a short 5e game for the server. A bridge was forming.
Then came Pride Month. The server logo turned rainbow. The soldier said he preferred the old logo. Immediately: “What are you against?” He replied he didn’t want to support “that community.” The replies grew sharper. He eventually reacted with threats of physical violence. He was banned at once. Deservedly so. But the escalation could have been prevented.
Because nothing was gained. A man from a different background who had already taken risks to play with us left feeling mobbed. He might have learned tolerance. Instead, the chance at trust was gone. And I guess that his views, instead of softened, just hardened.
I saw the same collapse of nuance elsewhere. After an open Call of Cthulhu game, a player said: “Lovecraft’s stories are great, but he was a horrible person.” I mentioned that his biographies describe him as generous, funny, gentle. The reply: “Well, he was a racist.” And that was the end. No gradation. Yet there is a profound difference between prejudice and exterminationist ideology. If you had told Lovecraft that Black people should be slaughtered, I am convinced he would have been scandalised and vehemently opposed. My grandmother thought “white people tend to be smarter.” Should she be put in the same moral category as a genocidal ideologue? Once we refuse nuance, we flatten them into one, and we lose the chance to build true change in people out of small steps.
Some degree of tolerance toward the intolerant makes sense in this context.
The Safety Illusion
There is growing pressure in RPGs to make games safe by scrubbing them of anything that might unsettle. Etiquette guides, content bans, table policing. Session 0 rituals. Relations between players are increasingly mediated by rules. The intention is good. The overwhelming majority of people does not want cruelty or humiliation.
But if a game has no risk, it has no depth. If we forbid friction, we forbid growth. And when RPGs are reduced to sanitised bubbles, they stop being shared spaces and become just another form of retreat.
The more relations are regulated, the less natural they become. And no protocol ever solved the problems I have seen at the table. RPG culture loves to claim that conflicts vanish if expectations are aligned by forms, safety tools, or sessions 0. But most problems I have witnessed arose from breakdowns of relation that no checklist could predict. No rule can replace civility and trust.
Trust Over Rules
Psychological research supports this. In small groups, shared identity and emotional bonds do more to prevent conflict than rules ever can. Too many pre-set agreements make a casual gathering feel stiff, and in leisure settings formality quickly saps the joy. What people value most is not being told that “the protocol says X,” but being heard, acknowledged, and respected.
A quick check-in — “Are we all good with this?” — combined with humour, kindness, and the willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt is often enough.
Rehearsals for Humanity
RPGs bridge the gap between people because they are cooperative. It is not my tribe against yours, but us against the evil that threatens the fictional world. Not duelling narratives of reality, but a common framework of rules and dice. Not fragile egos on display, but masks and characters that let us act without turning every moment into a fight over identity.
This does not erase disagreement, but it reframes it. Once you have laughed, cursed, and mourned together in a fictional world, it is harder to wish death on the person across from you. The spiral loosens its grip.
We do not heal the world by pretending division isn’t there. We do not heal it by hiding behind walls of agreement. We heal it by staying in the room with each other, even when we differ, and making something worth remembering together.
Roleplaying games are not utopia. They can be messy, even frustrating at times. But they are also rehearsal spaces for humanity, places where trust can grow, where enemies can become companions, if only for a night.
We may not agree on reality.
But maybe we can agree on a shared fantasy. And build from there.
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