Set Healthy Boundaries in Your RPG Experiences

Running RPG sessions is intense. It’s a labor of love for your players — at least it is for me. However, for all of my joking about loving to tantalize players on the brink of their characters’ deaths the confidence is often a sort of mask  I wear to hide the truth of my anxiety. Before I begin I need to stress that if you’re struggling with severe mental health problems please seek help. This post is not a replacement for therapy or medication or even coping skills. This is meant to be an honest discussion.

Being the forever GM is weird

Today I want to address you — not with tips to make your games better or a new product I think is cool but as a person who loves playing RPGs to others like me. I want to employ transparency to hopefully alleviate your insecurities as a Game Master whether veteran, newbie or somewhere in the middle. We’ll talk about setting boundaries for yourself and how boundary setting can help you improve your RPG sessions.

For years I took the role known as the forever GM. I was the go-to person to run things. It was assumed if my friends wanted to play an RPG whether fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy AGE, Cypher or whatever else I was expected to run it.

On the one hand this gave me a tremendous adrenaline surge every time. My players have always been very gracious and made sure to tell me how much fun they have after each session. It’s empowering.

But with every compliment came greater insecurity.

I’m going to get a bit personal here. I grapple with anxiety. I have for most of my life. Along with this I’ve experienced the thing called impostor syndrome rear its ugly head time and again. Impostor syndrome tells you no matter how good people tell you that you are, no matter how much success you achieve, it’s never enough. It’s almost like a twisted, self-deprecating greed, a hunger that can’t be sated with any amount of success.

And it sucks.

Forever GMing means if you have gracious players you’re going to be built up — sometimes to loftier expectations than you can ever achieve. Sometimes the forever GM branches into a new experience, becoming a player or GMing for others, shifting the dynamic. When this happens I’ve found either the new players or GM lift me up higher, making me feel like I have further to fall when it inevitably happens, or the new game table is underwhelmed, which thrusts the crushing weight of failure on me. And I don’t mean to make it sound narcissistic or all about me but that’s how I processed my experiences for years.

There’s no winning in this situation and it was all fabricated by my mind. Impostor syndrome isn’t only for authors and content creators with massive success stories. Impostor syndrome can prey upon anyone, given the thought space to fester.

That being said, don’t lose hope. There are ways to deal with impostor syndrome and other anxieties I’ll write about. Self-inserts can’t always be avoided and that’s okay.

For many of us 5E D&D is a therapeutic experience. It helps us process what we’ve got going on. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve given a character a backstory of trauma eerily similar to my own or I’ve coded fantasy tropes to mirror my own experiences. To a degree I don’t think anyone can fully separate a character they make for any RPG from themselves as a person. There’s always a seed of truth — a spark of reality — bringing the character to life. This is why I feel comfortable embodying and exploring this character for multiple sessions.

However, when characters become personal then more aspects of the game can as well.

Setting boundaries in and out of game

This self-insert sort of experience causes each character to become deeply personal. I had to learn early in my time playing RPGs how boundaries are crucial. When playing any RPG we have to remember the game is a game and life is life. The two are separate things. While I might have a lot in common with my character it doesn’t mean I am my character.

Even if I copy and paste myself into the fantasy world, codifying all of who I am, the small amount of paper called a character can never truly embody all of my nuance as a person. I confess, my first character was a bit of a self-insert and I struggled to maintain my boundaries at times. If someone’s character was upset with mine, for example, I would sometimes take it personally. Part of this was the anxiety talking but part of it was my own poor boundaries between reality and fiction. For all of the head knowledge the game is pretend, emotional moments don’t leave us unimpacted.

Movies, television and books can offer similar experiences. However, with all of those media there’s a degree of separation because we only watch. We’re observers in those experiences. With an RPG we control the character’s actions and real people control the actions of their characters too.

When my character died I had a hand in the choices leading up to it. Even knowing this can be heavy. This is why it’s so important to establish boundaries in games and use things like safe words or snack breaks. Checking in with everyone ensures all involved are entertained with the game and not truly impacted by it.

Learning from games – the good, the bad and the ugly

Setting boundaries is necessary for life in general and RPGs are a great place to practice setting healthy boundaries as well learning to recognize the healthy boundaries of others. Because RPGs are a shared experience we can use the game to help us learn to interact with others. I had to learn to set those boundaries in every aspect of my gaming life.

As a GM, setting healthy boundaries means we acknowledge things for face value. Not every game needs to be epic. Not every session needs to be the best one yet. Some sessions will be crappy or boring or a slog and that’s okay.

Not every character is going to have a consistent voice or accent. I won’t remember everything I said about every NPC. Sometimes as a GM I’m simply going to fail. Acceptance is crucial to boundary setting. Accepting how “it is what it is” will take you further as a GM than the fanciest bit of worldbuilding advice or the shiniest miniature. Accept situations at face value then work to move past it, whatever this looks like for you in the moment.

Sometimes you just have to end a session early or call one off before it begins. Sometimes you have to take a break and ask your players — your friends — what they think could help. As a player, not every player character and NPC is going to like my character just like in the real world. If everyone loved them that would make them a Mary Sue and I can’t begin to trudge through the numerous rants about those in stories.

The conflict and hardship my character encounters is what makes their journey memorable and worth the experience. I can explore traumatic, frustrating or complex problems with my character and not let it affect how I feel about myself because I’ve put up the boundary of separation.

I can explore my character having a conflict, a romance or a struggle with another character without it impacting my real world relationship with that person behind the other character. By setting the boundaries between my character and theirs I ensure the focus of the game is the entertainment derived from story drama and not real world drama.

Setting boundaries in session zero

Session zero is a concept increasingly discussed in RPG circles. Session zero offers players and GMs a chance to meet before the proper beginning of their campaign story to set expectations for what unfolds throughout the campaign. These preparatory sessions often look different from group to group and game to game.

Session zero is a time to establish mood, tone, system, themes and — you guessed it — boundaries. Everyone has different boundaries at the game table. Some boundaries are soft and some are hard. (Get your mind out of the dice gutter.) For some people romance with NPCs or other players’ characters is on the table while for others that’s a hard line they won’t cross. As friends we must work as a group to respect others’ boundaries, even if they’re different from our own. Especially if they’re different from our own.

Recently with Quill & Sword — the dark fantasy 5E D&D game I run with my writer friends — we’ve encountered several very dark themes and world-shattering events. Before we ever played our session one we met as a group to discuss limits and boundaries. They’re what enable us to enjoy the story we’ve been building together.

Ultimately building a story together while playing a game is what RPGs are all about. We make something truly unique to our experience and shared only among those witnessing the session. It’s beautiful. It’s trying. And it’s a hell of a good time.

By setting boundaries we overcome obstacles standing in the way of our good time with friends even when those obstacles stem from mental health concerns. Through boundary setting and coping we mature as players, GMs and people.

What do you think?

Have you grappled with setting boundaries? Have you found coping skills that work for you to help you overcome obstacles in gaming? We’d love to hear from you in the comments or on Facebook. If you liked this post please give it a like and share it! Stay happy. Stay healthy. Stay safe and stay nerdy.

*Featured image — The kids of Stranger Things, re-imagined as characters in a Dungeons & Dragons game. [Art by Bob Al-Greene]