There's a growing movement in TTRPGs that decries the use of common safety tools – uniquely to the current moment, among queer people who're historically more sensitive to trauma and oppression. Jay Dragon's "The Palette Grid" specifically calls out the failures of Lines and Veils and tries to iterate on the concept. Darling Demon Eclipse's "Faggot Games" notes that her favorite games feature a "departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust." Even in my own social circles, I've heard some complain that people seem to use safety tools as a way to unilaterally reject the possibility of emotional complexity & catharsis.

After a fashion, these people are right. Every safety tool sucks (yes, even the Palette Grid) – when you aren't having the right conversation in the first place.

What I want to do with this post is digest a recent academic article by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, "Philosophies of Psychological Safety in Analog Role-playing Game Discourses," with a special focus on their model of the Zones of Safety, Challenge, and Risk (which I will call the Zones of Safety for short). If I do it right, I will simultaneously convince you that before you start talking about safety tools, you should be talking with your play group about how safe you want to be in general, using these Zones as a guide. That conversation will then inform which safety tools you should be using, why you should be using them, and how each should be used for your group. Let's get into it.