(note: this article has been updated on the 4th of Sep 2025 to account for the discussions I had about it on Discord and Reddit. in particular, I expanded on the description of the Discord confrontation, and clarify the way I try to address conflicts)
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 the came the sudden and complete rupture.
To write this, I went back and read through the full transcript of the exchange in the server. The original is in Portuguese, and some of the tone gets lost in translation, but I will try to depict it as faithfully as a can.
It began when the "army guy" objected to the server changing its logo from Portuguese flag colours to a rainbow flag for Pride Month. For him, the flag was sacred, and altering it was offensive. His first reply was met with a popcorn emoji. One member gently explained to him that the change was meant to show support for the community.
He said he didn't care. Some people started telling him to leave the server, or mocking him. He said they had to “deal” with him as he was,
Then he pointed out that they had to see his point of view, that he was a soldier, a patriot, and he loved Portugal above all else.
Some people pointed out the colours of the flag in the server logo were in the wrong order anyway and he never noticed that, so he must have other motives.
The soldier replied that he had nothing against LGBTQ+ people, that he even had gay friends. But he did not support “the community,” because, as he put it, “they don’t support me either.” He added that the server wasn’t his, so “you do what you want,” but as a soldier he felt the flag was sacred. Then, inconsistently, he admitted he would be fine if the logo were changed to the “Baratheon” flag from Game of Thrones for a few days. His stance was confused, clumsy, aggressive, and contradictory, but hardly monstrous.
The mockery came quickly. He was accused of hiding homophobia. His mention of gay friends was met with derision and joy, a stereotype come to life. Then someone piled on: “For sure, you are also a misogynist?” The interrogation was no longer about what he had said, but about what he must secretly be.
One participant, a moderator, was clearly not taking any of it: “cry me a river,” “get the hell out of here,” “you disgust me.” And finally: “I am tired of seeing your ugly face around here.”
Up to that point, he had hovered between a clumsy attempt to look tough but somewhat reasonable, and an equally clumsy attempt to be apologetic. “It is your server,” “I can have my own opinions,” “It is ok if you support them, but I don’t, because they don’t do anything for me.” He was trying to keep his dignity and his tough guy attitude while softening the edge; awkwardly, without skill.
But he was also speaking from a culture that sounds outdated by modern standards: the idea that a man stands his ground, defends his honour, does not back down. When he finally snapped “You’re a great man on the internet, nerd. Want to say that to my face?”, it wasn’t just an insult. The word “nerd” revealed his own conflict. He was in a roleplaying group, yet still clung to the image of himself as a soldier, not a nerd. The contempt he spat out was also a form of self-contempt, a crack between his identities.
From there, the exchange collapsed into ad hominems, ending in a threat of violence and a ban. Well-deserved, at that point.
Several people tried to call for calm, asking for the pile-on to stop. It was too late.
What disturbed me most was not the soldier’s outburst. He was unsophisticated, contradictory, ill-prepared for that kind of fight. A practiced right-wing troll would have played it very differently. What struck me was the way the crowd, people I like and admire, gave in to mob energy. The soldier’s own perception of his dignity was chipped away until he lashed out.
He wasn’t charitable, but neither was the group. It wasn’t civil. And it ended, predictably, with the bridge destroyed.
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.
Breaking more Bridges
I saw the same collapse of nuance elsewhere. After an open table of Call of Cthulhu I ran, 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.”
There was no gradation.
I clearly felt I was being judged. There was the challenge in the voice, the "if you defend him, then you must secretly condone his ideas".
And yet there is a profound difference between accepting that people aren't as simple as their most prejudiced views and condoning those same views. And there is a marked difference between racial 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.
Hope for people to be better than they sound, instead of trying to find the rot they are hiding. Maybe that is the real punk rock.
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 as much as these tools can be used for establishing a scope of freedom, they can also be (ab)used to sanitise any risks.
And if a game has no risk, it has no depth. If we completely forbid friction, we may be forbidding growth. And when RPGs are reduced to sanitised bubbles, they stop being shared spaces and become just another form of retreat, an echo chamber.
Safety rules often give us a false sense of security.
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 at the table arose from breakdowns of relation that no checklist could predict or prevent. 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.
Of course, if you are running a game at a con with people you never met before, you need to be more careful than that.
And if somebody says something that it is clearly bigoted, offensive or wrong, you must address it. You must confront the claim or the idea. But you can confront it without attacking the person.
And you can say you don't want to explore that theme during a game, and insist that the person must stop bringing it up. You can offer another time and place for the discussion. Try to get back to the game. And if after this they don't stop, then yes, they should leave.
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.
Comments
Post a Comment