Consent is vitally important to RPGs (especially horror RPGs), yet is often taken for granted. Often, consent’s building blocks—trust, plus shared social expectations, desires, and goals—are only analyzed after something has gone wrong and the illusion of agreement is broken. I don’t think anyone needs to constantly check for consent at every new moment in their games, but you can save yourself some anguish if you establish those building blocks before playing.

Why do I think consent is so important in RPGs?

At the most basic level, RPGs (roleplaying games) are just a way to agree on how your game of make believe will work:

This number-crunching (the system of mechanics) is actually just a mediation tool. You know when, as a kid, you played pretend with other kids? What happened when two kids disagreed? Whose imagination won out? Maybe it was the kid other kids liked most, or the kid who painted the coolest picture. In roleplaying games, all of the numbers are supposed to represent a semi-objective way of determining what happens when there is disagreement.

RPG systems are how you as a group consent to resolve uncertainty, disagreements, or challenges covered by your game system. They’re how you agree to add a little (or a lot of) randomness to the story you’re making with your fellow players. They might also be how you agree to create interesting challenges or puzzles for each other. But these games don’t work without buy in from all the players. If the group can’t agree on how the story moves forward, or how the rules apply, or whether to accept a certain interpretation of the rules, or how you’ll behave with each other outside the game… then you’re at an impasse. With a big enough disagreement, your game (even your gaming group) might fall apart.

That’s why reaching and maintaining agreement, achieving consent, is foundational to a good game—you will struggle to play make believe together without it. Reaching agreement is also an art form in itself. Here’s a set of principles that have helped me with the process: don’t use coercion, build from the basics, aim for ‘good enough’ and then experiment, and be ready to fail.

First, no coercion. Yes means nothing if you can’t meaningfully say no. Twisting someone’s arm until they agree with you, like making someone suffer for not saying yes, might convince someone to play with you briefly but it won’t win them over. Plus, those are both asshole moves. Neither one is likely to create a healthy game. This also means supporting people when they retract consent. People might find out part way through a game that something isn’t working for them—that’s normal, and you can probably find something that does work if you talk things through as I’m outlining them here.

Second, try building from the basics below. You could answer these as a group, or track your own feelings on these and then get feedback from others. Or you could just think about these basics in the context of your current groups. Chances are that if you’ve played with people for a while, you can accurately guess at least some of their answers—though their own responses might surprise you!

Ask yourself: what are your…

• 1. Shared social assumptions (how you’ll act with and towards each other in and around play)
• 2. Shared ideas of what kind of fun you’re trying to have, and what’s fun for the players
• 3. Shared understandings of the basic rules (and how you’ll adjudicate disagreements)
• 4. Shared genre conceptions and story expectations for your specific game, plus any extra story flavor players want, or dynamics you’ll include

Each of these could be an essay of its own. I’ll try to expand on them quickly. Shared social assumptions cover things like how much you talk about life beyond the game, or how you communicate about your emotional experiences in and around the game or in the rest of your life, or how you’ll deal with anger or disagreements between players. For shared ideas of fun, some players might want a logistics focused survival horror dungeon delving game, while others might want a social game full of emotional depth and political manipulation, or maybe straightforward combat puzzles utilizing characters’ abilities—it’s best to figure that out beforehand, and identify which kinds of fun your game will focus on. For shared understandings and adjudications of the basic rules, start by picking an RPG system. Some players might want a consensus driven model with in-depth discussion over any confusion, or they might want fast rulings from a single point of authority, or some blend of those things. And for shared genre conceptions, it really helps to understand what genres people want to find in a given game and how much overlap players have in their circles of belief around those genres.

Third, for each of those elements above, try ‘good enough’ instead of ‘perfect.’ You don’t need to be completely in agreement on every particular, you just need your group’s perspectives and goals to be roughly compatible, without any insurmountable objections. If you can’t agree on something, reassess. Find places where you can agree and then build on those. What’s more, you can experiment with your options—if one player craves superhero stories and another needs fantasy adventure to feel alive, try blending these desires into a game of fantasy adventures with the hero/villain dynamics of classic superhero comics. Try out games and genres which are at the edges of your preferences or tolerances. Think of these games as experiments, where it’s okay to find out that something doesn’t work. Remember that any of you might need to change the game significantly part way through, or stop playing.

Fourth, be ready to fail. Failure is fine, it’s normal. You might try a game and find out that it doesn’t work for you and your group. You might disagree loudly and vehemently. But if you and your fellow players are ready to experiment and fail, you can even have a good time identifying games that don’t work for you. You can always find other games that you can all enjoy playing together. Alternatively, you might really want to play a game that no one in your current group wants to play—and that’s okay. If you crave something your group can’t provide, find other people to play that game with.

You don’t have to obsessively embrace this system. Lots of people play lots of RPGs without ever putting this much thought into their games’ social dynamics, and they do just fine. But if you run into trouble and aren’t sure why, try thinking through these principles point by point. Are you missing one of these? Is there some lingering issue that could be solved by talking through one of these elements with your gaming group? Do you want to put in the effort to fix it?

Whatever your answers, I wish you luck.

This is part of the Social Skills of Storytelling series.