Have You Used The X Card Or Seen It Used In Person?

[Rainbow Scissors]

What is the X card?

 

[RenleyRenfield]

What is the X card?

LMGTFY

X-Card - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[darjr]

Yes and yes.

Used it myself too as a player and a GM.

 

[cranberry]

Never seen it or used it.

 

[Rainbow Scissors]

LMGTFY

X-Card - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Thanks.

To answer the original post: no.

I had not heard of that until this thread.

 

[jdrakeh]

What were the circumstances of its use (if you can say)?

Having intimate sex scenes fade to black. To be fair, if the other player hadn't used it for this, I probably would have. It's one of very few things I don't like to have described in detail when I play games (the other, of course, is sexual assault).

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, its part person, and part medications. So that's a whole other thing. (and not limited to a single person either...)

I will be honest, for decades I had not really "seen" it before... until I did. Just like with bad systems that players willfully gloss over, I finally noticed that there are bad play habits and bad behaviour that most players just gloss over.

There are a 1001 ways to justify it, but as time has gone on I have come to the feeling that they do need a little highlight, and sometimes need awareness.

Ever since we started using CATS and the X-Card = our games go longer, our groups stay closer, and our plots have gotten more rich and diverse. It has allowed us to lean into content (from goofy to heartbreaking) and see far better player engagement.

What is CATS?

 

[Umbran]

I have it on the table in any game I'm running for folks I don't know. For my "regular group", we don't have a physical card on the table, but it is understood that anyone can call a halt at any time.

One group has a variant, specifically for volume control. A couple of the players have little understanding of how loud they can get.

I've seen it invoked three times in play in games other people have been running. Once for a common phobia content - spiders, iirc. Once for harm to animals content. In the third, the GM did a voice that was apparently uncannily like a player's recently deceased parent, that did really bad things to the player when they didn't expect it.

All valid, I think, and in each case the group and GM were glad to be informed they needed to stop as they were freaking someone out unintentionally.

 

[bergec]

My groups are well-established friend groups so I don't explicitly use it but we've definitely had moments when someone called a stop or messaged me to bring attention to something that was bothering them. It's only come up once or twice in D&D games in the twenty years we've been playing with that group, but it comes up once or twice a year when I run Delta Green campaigns. God's Teeth really needs open communication about this stuff.

 

[MGibster]

A couple posts in the con GMing thread got me thinking about the X Card. I have never seen it used in actual play, or used it myself. I run a decent amount of con games and have run games at stores and other public situations, and it has never come up.

I've never seen it deployed in a public or private setting. I'm going to GameHole Con this October where I hope to play in a lot of horror games, so I'll keep on the look out for any of those safety tools.