Cringe: Why Sincerity Still Matters at the TTRPG Gaming Table

Let’s talk about being cringe! 

• Pretend play is an essential part of growing up and learning social roles and shit.
• This goes back to Piaget and Vygotsky - pretending is how we experiment and try on identities and learn empathy and problem-solving. 
• Adults often repress that because it’s fucking cringe as hell.
• Sitting down to play a role-playing game reactivates that early developmental muscle, but it’s occasionally awkward and weird.
• Kids: The floor is lava! 
• Adults: If I do enough pretend violence I might be able to afford pretend real estate! 

Irony is the Armor of Sincerity

• Memes, quotes, and in-jokes make the table feel safe — a shared cultural shorthand.
• Emotional detachment also feels safe. Not caring about fake people is cooler than caring about fake people, and we usually want to be cool.
• But irony can also block emotional engagement. If everyone’s half-laughing through their character arcs, no one has to risk being sincere.

The Cringe Frontier

• Why do we generally cringe at sincerity? 
• Is cringe just a way of enforcing emotional conformity? 
• Can being cringy be brave, or is it always the absolute worst? 
• We both come from improv backgrounds where being cringe is kind of a necessity. Has that better prepared us for cringe at our tables? 

Circle of Safety

• I was reading a post recently from someone who was wondering if maybe we’d gone a bit too far on making game tables a safe space. I’m pretty sure I disagree with that person, but I will agree that the tools we have aren’t ideal and probably never will be.
• What are your personal safety mechanisms? 
• How do you invite people to be sincere without forcing them to “act” at the table? 
• What is the DM’s role in creating an emotional stable space for Big Feelings? 
• Huizinga’s Magic Circle suggests that normal rules, even rules about social conformity, are suspended during play. Does that work if the real space (outside of the liminal shared imagined space of play) is not safe? 
• How can we support emotional safety in service to enabling bravery?