In the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about safety tools in TTRPGs. There are a lot of options for multi-player games, but it can be hard to know where the lines and veils are in a solo game experience. As someone who hasn’t has much experience designing games for more than one person, we’ll be focusing on single player game safety tools.
Generally, safety tools for solo TTRPGs boil down to a couple of things: The ability to give personal consent and trust, agency, and a willingness to be vulnerable. Let’s take these one at a time.
We all have a pretty firm understanding of consent: Effectively, this is giving permission for something to happen. When it comes to solo games, this can be a tricky thing for a player to give. One way we, as designers, can help a player in this regard is to provide content warnings and a detained synopsis of our games. This allows the player to make a more informed decision before they even start playing. Of course, this also means that someone may decide not to play your game, but it’s better to have lost a player to safety concerns than to lose their trust when they stumble unknowingly into triggering content.
Content warnings can take a lot of different forms, but I find it best to include them on both the store page and in the game document itself. For my newer games, I generally include warnings in the copyright text block, along with any other notes. For my earlier games, safety tools are worked into the layout of the game and that includes their content warnings. Any way you want to do it is valid, as long as you do have them.
Warnings should include anything that could potentially be harmful to your player. Remember to think about this in broad strokes, and hone in on the fact that your game isn’t just for you. If you’re not sure where to start on this, check out some other indie games and review their warnings. Some easy things to get you started include common fears and phobias.
Agency refers to the feeling of control over one’s actions and, therefore, their consequences. This one is a bit harder to define for solo games, as the player is always in control of their choice to play. It’s important to remind the player that if they feel unsafe, they can step back at any time.
The concept of agency also extends to the idea of specifically seeking out games with themes or content that the player knows will be challenging to harmful to them. Obviously, this isn’t something you can plan for, but you can do your best to protect them by giving them adequate content warnings and providing them ample opportunity to choose to play your game or not.
Please note that this isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be games with triggering or challenging content. As designers, it’s still up to us to ensure our players know what they’re getting into when they sit down to play. Whether they’re seeing a kind of catharsis, or some other result, isn’t for us to police.
These two ideas dovetail with the concept of the player having a willingness to be vulnerable. Many solo TTRPGs put the player in a position of vulnerability, whether that is from not knowing what comes next (through the flip of a coin, roll of a die, or turn of a card) or through gameplay that may lead to prompts that challenges their worldview or are emotionally impactful. Any of this can lead to feelings of vulnerability, which can make a player feel uncomfortable.
In a game where a Game Master is present, there is a level of trust that is given; in a solo game, that trust has to be created by the designer, a kind of contract with the player. They have to trust themselves, to know when to step back or how to press through an uncomfortable situation to one that evokes better feelings.
In the end, a player’s safety all comes down to trust: Trust in themselves and trust in the designer. It is a contract we enter into with them, a promise to keep them safe, even when the questions we ask and the scenarios we design are emotional, scary, or just plain challenging. It’s a promise we should take seriously, and hold sacred, so we can provide the best experience possible for our players.