Jason Morningstar​​ right, we see the world very differently.

I guess I would not watch all the “triggers” people have X-carded in your experience. Fiction is the place you can whack spiders even if you’re phobic about them IRL, that’s one of the things fiction does. Hell, that’s possibly the purpose of fiction. If you remove that, if you remove the zones-of-slight-discomfort even in the fiction, you doom people inside of their triggers, you don’t help them, you make them fragile and brittle.

On the other hand, a RPG is not a therapy -it goes both ways and is not meant to deal with trauma so deep that people can’t possibly game about it. This is obviously the case with rape, and other really distressing events. This, I watch for them when running a game with strangers. Let’s not go all abstract here, spiderphobia and rape isn’t the same.

So yes, the X-card is easy but it’s not a fix, it’s a jammer. Because people can use it at the slightest discomfort (how on Earth can there be a dramatic tension without discomfort?) or to push the story any way they want – which I think, with my limited experience, might be okay in games where the authority is shared, hence my question.