Hi,
so I’ve had a one-shot yesterday and for the first time tried to include a mention of triggers.
I printed out a big black X on an A4 and put it in the middle of the table and told my players that should our game ever strayed into places they are strongly uncomfrtable with (as unlikely as it was), they are free to use this sign as a brake for the group.
How do you handle this? Should I handle it differently? What are you experiences with triggers in general?
Well I do not have the luxury of playing with people I know that well. I am just starting to look for people for a more stable group.
I also intend to run one-shots at my faculty to help people practice English and probably most of them I won’t know at all, most of them never having played tabletop RPG before.
I will try to find the Eric Vulgaris speech though.
I applaud you for the effort you put into talking about this with your players. Even thought this should go without mentioning, reality doesn’t always go smoothly in dealing with such issues.
But I must say, not sure if I like the whole execution of printing signs and pointing them out when you need to say something… I don’t know, it feels a bit first gradeish (unless you actually DM for kids)? My point is - why can’t I just say “hey guys, this is getting kinda weird for me, could we skip this” and assuming people aren’t idiots everybody would just move on. It’s just so much more low key without needing to put a big X signaling to everybody how much of an issue this is for me. Of course this is only my personal opinion and feeling and assuming people are not indeed idiots.
All in all it’s a really great idea to talk about this with your players and reassure them that there’s nothing wrong if they want to speak up. Maybe ask those you’ve played with how they liked it.
Moved the topic to Rollplay General because its TTRPG related 
I think it is way less this than a constant reminder of “Hey, I could do that!” There are lots of people that don’t want to interrupt the gameflow and are thinking stuff like “Is this something I’m uncomfortable or am I just a wuss now? I mean, noone else says anything and they seem like they have fun…”, in some cases almost everyone in the group thinks that and noone says anything about it, leading to basically noone having fun in the end.
Of course it’s still sort of handhold-y, but it’s easy when playing with people you don’t know (or only barely) to offend them and scare them away because of something so trivial - like describing an abandoned home with spiders everywhere vividly to a person with arachnophobia (and to stress this point, the telling person does not know about that). Especially if the spiders are purely atmospherical.
Or if you know people rather well and there is some gruesome scene like Torture and there’s some fingernail pulling involved, I for one would immediately nope out of that - but not by telling people, but by pulling back from the play and trying to distract myself with something else, like thinking about how to develop my character next, which is easily misconstrued as “Hey, that guy isn’t fazed by that. Let’s nock it up another notch”
Thank you for the link. I checked out his spiel (or at least on version in one video) and I might include something like it my own games.
I mean in a group of hopefully reasonable people someone can just say ‘Hey can we not talk about this / have this be a part of the campaign cause it bothers me.’ and that’s that. No need to add additional abstract weirdness.
I found these hopes quashed too many times to count on them with people I don’t know.