081: A Deep Dive into the World of Sensitivity Consulting with Noordin Ali Kadir

Courtney: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Roll Play Grow, the podcast for tabletop entrepreneurs, creators and fans. In this show, we dig into processes, challenges, tips and really look at how to grow a business in the tabletop role-play gaming space. Sit back and join in as we learn from the creators behind your favorite brands about who they are and how they are turning their passion for gaming into a career. Today’s guest is someone who has worked in so many different aspects of the TTRPG community, including writing, game design, editing, sensitivity consulting and performing in several actual plays Noordin Ali Kadir. Most of our conversation today was centered on Noordin’s consulting work, and he goes into the importance of bringing in a sensitivity consultant from the beginning of a project and how much your sources impact your writing and your games. It was a very insightful conversation and definitely gave me a lot to think about. I know that y’all are going to enjoy this conversation immensely, but before we get into the interview, I have an update for you all on Burnaway. Those of you who have been around for a while may remember that I am the project manager for an upcoming TTRPG called Burnaway. Essentially, the players are a group of mercenaries hired to confront Embergeists, which are spirits that are so upset about something that their ectoplasm combusts. You have to either exercise them or placate them, which is where you find clues in the burning building that you are exploring, to figure out who they are, why they are upset, and convince them to leave. It’s a really fun game, meant for short campaigns that will be coming back to Kickstarter on October 3rd. We did try to fund it back in the spring but due to a lot of factors, it didn’t work out. The first time we have revamped the Kickstarter. We’ve lowered the funding goal and we are very optimistic about funding this time in October. If you are interested in keeping up with the game, you can look for Burnaway on Kickstarter, and I will also have a link to the pre-launch page in the shoutouts we are launching very soon, so be sure to give the campaign a follow to keep up with updates. Alright, this is a longer episode, so we are just going to go ahead and jump right in. Enjoy this conversation with Noordin. Hello friends, I am here with the super talented Noordin Ali Kadir. How’s it going today?

Noordin: 2:26

I’m good. I’m good it’s reaching the busy season for me in my real-life day job, so a bit tired but very good I know it sounds like you have a lot going on right now. Yeah, surprisingly not much in the tabletop world, although that’s going to change soon probably. But yeah, in my real world I also do a lot of admin work and I work with tour companies who get very busy in the fall, so I do a lot of scheduling right now.

Courtney: 2:56

Oh gosh, yeah, my real job is a project manager and I used to work in theater as a stage manager, oh yeah. Scheduling is like it takes a talent and it’s exhausting and it’s one of those things that you’re like it shouldn’t be this hard, like why is this so hard?

Noordin: 3:16

It’s wild how like the sheer amount of just time it takes of you staring at a spreadsheet or whatever your system uses, but it looks like a spreadsheet. It always looks like a spreadsheet. Just staring directly at a spreadsheet, trying to figure out how a person can both be available and you’re completely unavailable at the same time. It’s a miracle, honestly, that anything gets done If you rely upon any person to do your scheduling for you, whether you work like a shift job or you’re getting everyone together for a podcast or something, just thank the person doing your scheduling for me. They’re impressive.

Courtney: 3:52

I 100% agree with this. Awesome Well, Noordin, I would love to just hear a little bit about yourself and how you got into gaming.

Noordin: 4:05

There’s such a varied answer to this because, to go philosophical, what is gaming really? When we played hopscotch, was that tabletop game when we were on a blacktop? Is a blacktop a table? No, I got into tabletop gaming because I just love improvisation, I love storytelling and I love creation my three favorite things, even though I’ve got tons of little backgrounds, an actor and stuff. The real reason why I got into tabletop was just because I wanted to inhabit a world. I wanted to create someone who would inhabit a world. I wanted to play around with their story and play around with the world and build things. Build a world creatively with people. It took me a while, though, because, as a guy of my ethnic background and queer history, it is difficult to find someplace where you feel safe enough to be your whole self in tabletop. I’m still discovering things when I started, but it is difficult. I started reading books reading tabletop gaming books well before I ever started playing them, which is a very different process than how most people do it. I found my very first tabletop game. The first role-playing game mode considered tabletop game, was a D&D 5e game A couple of years before the pandemic. I think it was 2017, 2016. Since then, well, as you can probably tell, I haven’t stopped so clearly. I’ve been enjoying it.

Courtney: 5:37

It’s funny, you say 2016, 2017, and I’m like oh that’s kind of similar to when I started playing tabletop games. That feels like such a long time ago and yet it really isn’t that long.

Noordin: 5:51

The more I think about it, the more 2016 makes more sense. But yeah, it isn’t that long, and I think a lot of people are in that position where, when they started to play, it was after the big critical role-boom. Once D&D 5e started getting played at regular tables more consistently, you could find open games a lot more easily because people were inspired by something like a critical role. But a couple of years after that, because it’s always first you have that internal boom and then you have the external boom, and I come with the external boom crowd. The funny thing is, though, when it comes to reading my World of Darkness books, I started reading those more than a decade before. That is a gap. I will say that You’re also right. It is a long time. It’s longer than we think it is, and I think the pandemic has really screwed up with time.

Courtney: 6:47

Yeah, I was thinking back like okay, what was I? Doing back in 2016? Like oh, wow, yeah, that was like the beginning of the end times, that felt. But Right. So I’m curious about how the transition happened of you. I mean, you were reading these books, you were reading World of Darkness a very long time ago, it feels like. But then how did you convince some friends to play with you? Or did you walk into a game store and just say I want to play. How did that actually happen?

Noordin: 7:19

So I did the thing that a lot of Canadians in my area do. I went on meetupcom because I got desperate and I clicked a button and I gave it a shot and it was a drop-in-dropout game, a drop-in-dropout D&D game. I believe it was based on Tales of the Ony Portal, or at least it was just about it, just switched over to that. So I was in like the last game before then and then we switched over and I played a half-drow named Traven and it really was just. I made the decision for myself that I wanted to do it and I was going to do it and so I did it. And I’m not going to say it was the best game in my life, and I don’t think most of my first games were the best games in my life. The second game I ever played after that like one session of that D&D game which I returned to. Then I played a game of 10 candles, which is wild, and then I played a different game of D&D, like a campaign that ended my relationship with that game was awful. It was real like I had one of the worst experiences ever, but I got through that through Discord, so it was really just like I tossed a bunch of darts at a wall and I hoped one would stick, and eventually they did. I go here. God, how that didn’t happen.

Courtney: 8:41

Well, now I’m going to make you figure out. How did that even happen?

Noordin: 8:44

I think it’s because when I first hung around, there was the series of one shots being played of different, different indie games, which got me more interested in indie right from the beginning, because I realized I was playing more with the type of people that I wanted to, rather than, you know, drop and drop out D&D game, which is more like not really adventurous league, but kind of like adventurous league. Right, you stick to a certain set of rules, the story is very structured and you delve into it. The indie games were more world building, they were more intriguing and the more it got into that crowd, the more realized this is what I wanted. This is what I wanted. So I started volunteering, you know, for my local gaming convention. I ended up going to getting lucky enough to volunteer at a couple other conventions in other cities, including like GenCon. You know I volunteered for Magpie, I think in 2017 or 2018, one of the two and at that point now I was getting really invested and this was before I really made contact. I had technically contacts in the games industry, but I didn’t utilize them. I didn’t ever realize that I was going to want to create things, but eventually I created, I homebrewed a playbook for one of my favorite games, Urban Shadows, back in the day, based upon the gin which I the stories I grew up with. I called it the Concealed, and it was about. Every single playbook has their core. It’s not just a creature, it’s a story, right? And the story of the Concealed playbook was just about displacement and being separated from any kind of consistent community, right. It was about being in a world in which you do not belong but you are forced to pretend you do. So it was very similar to already like the other Urban Shadows playbooks, but it was different in some way because there was sort of an active nature in making sure you keep up that masquerade, because if you didn’t, you are something new and unique. People will use that and take advantage of you, and there are certain moves I gave it that allowed it to, and then it realized oh, I can create things, Although I never published it and don’t think I ever will. That is when the Domino’s really started to lead me to where I am now, someone who does not just play tabletop games, performs in them in actual plays and podcasts and writes for them and consults for them and helps design them. It was just like a series of Domino’s leading up to this moment that all culminated into me being here and I think, most recently, the things people probably know me the most from right now are from the podcasts Missing Any Lee and the Atomless. The Atomless is a Starfinder podcast that’s still active and, you know, ready for juncture, blow in the backward hall writing for into the motherlands and, I think, most recently, being this in one of the sensitivity consultants for where will the apocalypse, fifth edition, which is a weird circle. It’s one of those things where the moment you like really invest in something is the moment you realize Okay, I can keep on going and see where this road leads. I can go down the Ellabrick Road or I can stop, and I never chose to stop at any point. I just kept going and I guess I’m here now.

Courtney: 12:17

Just looking at all of the projects that you’ve worked on, like it’s so impressive and I’ve just been it interesting like how you’ve touched on so many different parts of the process of all these projects where it’s like you’ve designed, you’ve written your own things, like you Consult with sensitivity, consult, consultations, editing, you’re out all these podcasts, all of these actual plays.

Noordin: 12:38

I. So I come way back when I came from the theater world where, if you’ve ever done a theater class in a place that is not a conservatory, you know that you’re not just the actors, that’s not a thing. You’re also doing the production, you’re doing the set design, you’re doing the stage management. You’re learning every single piece of this big machine and I have Been in that mindset ever since. I kind of decided I’m going to create in TTRBG’s and not just enjoy them, because I like to know as much as possible about a thing. It you learn a lot from approaching the same thing from different angles, because what you do in an actual play or even a podcast, those are different from what how a person plays at home. Even if you’re not like intentionally playing to an audience, you are aware of an audience, right, if you are writing something well now you know that this is different than writing for a book. Or, you know, writing an essay, because you’re creating something that’s intended to be built on later. It has to have enough Open endings that someone can make something from it and feel like they are doing something, because that’s important. But also it’s got to have a complete enough narrative that someone can drop it in at the drop of the hat and it’ll be somewhat recognizable. You know, an editor learns how much extraneous information is out there what is useful, what is not, and sometimes having something that’s not useful is Still a good thing. It provides flavor. Sometimes it isn’t right. Consulting teaches you a lot about the real-life consequences of what art is, and you may not like the concept of tabletop games being art. The truth is, anything created by human hands with the intention to entertain is a form of art. It’s an art form. All art has consequences because all art is inherently political, because all art affects the minds of the people who use it, not, like, in a mind control way, but in a it makes you think and if something makes you think, it affects your mind. The realities of consulting like teach you a lot about how things can be misused in ways that you do not expect and how things can echo in the you know from the real world in ways that you did not intend and the way that goes directly counter to your game design. It’s actually one of the most interesting things about consulting in general. A lot of people regarded, as you know, trying to not cause harm, and this is true. This is the thing we obviously we don’t want to do that, but if I Create a pathway down the road and I intend for you to take each path relatively equally, but one path has a bias that corresponds to human activity. Ie, I Depict the goblins and I want some good goblins and some bad goblins, but the goblins in the real world Right, or the stories we tell about goblins, often veer towards the evil. You’re more likely to pick the evil. There’s an inherent bias there that goes directly counter to what I need for my game design. To make the goblins work in this supposed game, I need you to pick both relatively the same amount, so I cannot just write them equally. I’ve got a favor the good a little bit more to get that 5050 split consulting teaches you just how common human biases in that kind of situation and how that can have, yes, human side effects. You can hurt people, but also it can really affect your game design. If you’re not careful, you will get Circumstances that you did not intend and I think you know. Funnily enough, we’re gonna talk world of darkness for a split second. Keep in mind I’ve talked with the brand team paradox. I am under an NDA. However, while some of the writing from the those 90s books is Rough and some of it leads into racial stereotypes and cultural stereotypes and queer stereotypes and sexist stereotypes the whole list the truth is it was exacerbated by a community that you know. Double down on some of those stereotypes. That’s not to say all of that community did. There was, you know, pockets. The world of darkness is well known for having a very diverse background of enjoyers. However, the bias does tend to lead to the worst interpretations of some of these people. So if they’re based upon real people, you end up creating a sort of cyclical thing where you’re not gonna get what you want out of this supposed representation. You’re only gonna get the worst version if you’re not careful, which is led to unintended consequences. Right, and if you will support your community. Usually, like you take what they have taken from your material and you canonize it or you make it cool. But if you do that and there’s real human bias in there, what you can do is accidentally just make more racism, and that’s happened not just in the world of darkness but in, like several things where the community feedback is accidentally pushed something into a worse place Because you know there’s bias there and there was no consultants there to say hold on, stop the train for a second. What does this do to our game? What does this mean about a kid? What does this say about the game itself, because it isn’t always equal. Yeah, consultants taught me a lot. Basically and I’m going on consultants taught me a lot about the unintended consequences, and how can that? That can really affect how your games played in the real world consistently is, which isn’t really cool, really scary, but really cool.

Courtney: 18:23

I would I talk about like the ideal scenario and then maybe like the more common scenario. So the ideal scenario like at what point are you brought into the project to do this?

Noordin: 18:32

consult like consultation the ideal dream scenario is, you know when, when the flare gun is shot into the air and the flags fall, at the moment someone presses go, because, while it’s still that very Loosely formatted experience, I can start placing the the warning flags down. I can start saying, okay, this is a cool idea, this is where it can go off. So if we push towards this, it won’t right. So, for example, you come to me and you say I want to make a game in which we all play really cool kinds of goblins. I’m like cool, that’s actually really cool. Absolutely everyone plays a goblin. However, it’s worth noted that, worth noting that goblins can fall into like anti-semitic archetypes quite frequently. So here’s how we avoid this. We avoid this by not making them necessarily greed mongers, nor do we make them the underpinnings of the society that you know constantly lead them straight. We don’t make them the ruiners of a nation. We avoid those two things. We’re probably gonna end up on the better side of this right. Then, as the project goes along, I could help you check, I could check in, you know, and we can find out if, as the game develops and grows, where are the pain points, because maybe you’re like, okay, cool, maybe the goblins are all being mind affected on the low-key level, right just underneath their brains. There’s something affecting them and that’s a core part of this game very cool. However, now we’re talking about player agency and we’re talking about the depiction of how mental illness can be depicted in certain games. So how do we correspond with that? Well, one, we give options in the book for how this mind control can cause A goblin to react and we tell the players that, when overly affected by the whatever this is, these are the options you can take. So we pass the narrative control back in their hands, even if we limit their choices. So they still feel like there’s some control and they can. If they really don’t want an outcome, they can find ways to shift it to a different one. In addition to that, we make it clear that this is not some sort of mental illness. Right, we don’t use words like crazed or Mad, and instead we focus on what it is. So if it’s a voice, we can call it that, we can say the whispers of the brain or what have you, and we push it into this entity realm instead of a Actually, these are all mentally ill realm, as we continue to do. So we can say that we’re not going to be able to do anything about it. Actually, these are all mentally ill realm. As we continue on, eventually it’s the end and then I do a final read and at this point, if I’ve been involved in the project, what I’m clearing up is like word choices, some spelling mistakes. I’m an editor. I cannot help it. If you have me consulting on your project and people who’ve had music consultant they will know this sometimes I just do a spell check to I have to. But you’ll like I’ll clean up words like maybe you have an off-handed reference to Like a type of knife that’s used in actual ritualistic practices today. I’ll be like maybe don’t do that, because that references human culture and these are goblins and we’re only referencing this once, so we Don’t necessarily need it right now. You don’t need this right. Like. You have a curious dagger Cool, but do we really need that? Or can we call it like a river wave dagger instead, because a curious dagger has a specific purpose. If all is well, that’s easy. That part of the job even going through a whole book Takes a couple hours max. I bang it out. It’s really simple stuff. I don’t have to like say all this whole thing needs fixed. It’s fixing. This whole paragraph needs fixing, because by that time we’ve already, like, developed a culture of that best case scenario. Overall, you’re, we’re all saving time here, right? The worst case scenario is I’m brought in right at the end Often and this has happened in one case during the layout process. By the way, there’s been some debate about this on the online once in a while. Please don’t make your writers write in layout Right first, then put it into layout. That is what layout is for, because I know this seems cruel or it may seem like a direct, like a sub to. It’s not. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times across games, cross companies and I’ve been brought in to fix things as they have been in the layout. It is a nightmare, because now I’m very limited in word count. I cannot get rid of too much, so if there’s a whole paragraph of something wrong, I cannot just remove it. I can’t take it out wholesale and say, well, honestly, you’ve never needed it in the first place, even if you didn’t, because now there’s a big old gap on the page and something’s got to fill it and you’re not hiring me as a writer, so either I’m doing something that is not my job or I’m trusting you to fix it without any guidance, because I don’t have any guidance for a paragraph that was never needed Right, even the more macro, like I’ve got to pick word changes. If there’s a word that needs changing or phrase that needs changing, I’ve got to pick something that’s roughly the same in letters. It can get really, really annoying and on the writer side, how much belongs on a page is a thing that has tortured every writer’s brain from the dawn of time. Please don’t make us do that the day of, because then we’re trying to make word choices that correspond to how well it fits in a page and not necessarily how it fits with the narrative of what we’re trying to accomplish or with the game, and that means sometimes we’re picking the worst words because they’re the ones with the right letters. It’s a layout is a different job. It’s just a different job to put it later. But yeah, that’s the worst case scenario and at that point, yes, the layout is already stressful. But also, if no consultant’s been involved and I’m not been involved, I have no idea what your references are, because in the beginning we talked about that goblin game and you listed some references. I don’t know what they were, but you listed some great references and some heavy references and I’m like I can double check these and see where they went wrong. I can use that to inform. By the time we’ve gotten to this part. We’re reaching the end. No consultant’s been involved and maybe you’ve had several writers on your project. Who’s to know what all of their references are, what your references are? So I’m doing this from scratch and there may be huge parts that could delve into very dangerous territory or does not engender the gameplay you want, because, let’s say, we have that sort of the voices towards ruin right, that concept underneath the goblin’s brain. There are voices towards ruin In general, they’re cursed with this, whatever. Also, curses are dangerous. Ignore this, I’m doing this on the fly, but we settle on that. Let’s say that you wrote it without my consultation. It’s quite possible you might call it the underlying madness. And now suddenly you have accidentally caused your player base to try and portray mad mental illness in a way that you did not want, did not intend and is now massively much harder to fix, because I can change the name and, depending upon what words you used in the paragraphs, you may need a wholesale rewrite and that, to be clear, that has happened. I’ve absolutely and I’m not going to declare who one of the biggest things as a consultant, I kind of take my job seriously, whether there’s an NDA or not. I don’t talk about specific things have changed or not changed for a reason Because I’m not in the business of trying to make people look bad and I’m not in the business of trying to make people look good. I don’t really advertise for projects I consult on either. I just do the work and then I walk away and I get paid for it, because, ultimately, it is very condensed to my job. That protects me and it protects you. In any case, though, I have absolutely, in a couple of cases, gone back and said so this whole page, this whole section, is not just deeply problematic, but will cause some inherent problems in the way this is portrayed in your game. Is this something you want? Because if it is, then we need to have a talk about how to do it safer, and if it’s not, then you’re going to have to do a wholesale rewrite, and I can give you guidelines, I can tell you what words to avoid, but we both know that now we’re racing towards publication. We’re near in the end, deadline’s coming up. I do this. The writing is not going to be as good, the rewrite is not going to be as impactful, whatever it was, because ultimately I’m telling you to rush something because you made a mistake that you didn’t need to make to begin with. That’s, I think, the biggest thing about not getting a variety of consultants from the get-go, or not getting a consultant from the get-go Even at a generic sensitivity consultant who is at least aware of multiple different issues in multiple different communities, because ultimately it doesn’t just make more work for me on the back end, it makes more work for you too. To correct things makes more work for you. To that degree, it also means that you may have to get rid of something, rebrand something. You may have to rip up the first print you made. I don’t want to have to make you do that. I don’t want to even have to suggest that you do that, especially because I know the chance of some of that happening is practically nil. Anyways, I’d prefer it mostly done by the time I get there or I’d be there throughout, so that we’re not in this position where we are trying to rush fix something or we are trying to dramatically change something at the 11th hour. It isn’t good for the product, for the company, for me it’s just not good. I can do it, I’ve done it. Most of my projects are like that, to be honest, not in layout, thank God, but just before. Most of what I’ve done is in that era. However, no matter how good I am at finding the word, choice, replacements, making recommendations, doing rewrites, believe it or not, there are times where you’ve read my writing in the words of someone else, because I try to match their style as much as possible, because I know it’s a sentence, and at that point I might as well just push it out there. No matter what, it’s not going to be as seamless as it would have been had I been involved from the beginning or had a sensitivity consultant or any consultant been involved from the beginning. If this was handled sensitively from the get-go, it would, overall, be a better product. No matter how good I fix it, it’s not fun for anyone.

Courtney: 29:48

Yeah, it is a lot of work to do and I feel like a lot of headaches for a lot of people.

Noordin: 29:55

Yeah, I apologize, by the way, for going on, it’s just a lot. It’s a lot of stuff.

Courtney: 30:02

Oh please. I have so many follow-up questions I’m deciding which one to ask, okay, so I’m actually probably going to be a little selfish in this question. So let’s say that you’re working on a project, I don’t know, maybe as a project manager in my case and you need to find a sensitivity consultant, but you’re not sure of what area to have that person specializing in, because I know obviously if you’re writing about different cultures, you want to find someone that is going to be able to consult on those specific cultures, but if it’s more of a generic thing, then it’s like how do you decide what kind of consultant you’re looking for?

Noordin: 30:44

Well, I mean, the first thing is you can pitch it to several and you can see who responds. I am a person who, thanks to having a very diasporic background, I’m connected to several different cultures, all of which I know because they are my own too or they’re very closely related to me or I have a literal family member I can call up. People often ask how do you know so much about, like you know, hinduism? I’m like there are people who have been practicing Hinduism in my family as they’re technically family friends, but they are family to me, as in. I can go to their house tomorrow and cry and they will pat me better and feed me for three weeks. They’re in London so that would be hard, but I could for literally several generations and they have taught me things in their own personal experience. They have partially raised me right, so you can talk to someone for all you know. They might check all your boxes, but the more likely scenario is you come to someone like me and you’re like there’s a whole list of stuff in here. There’s a whole lot of references. I’m not even sure where I could be going wrong. I just know that I want to cover my bases. Usually at that point, someone like me breath or no breath will look over it and will be able to pinpoint where they are lacking, if they are lacking, and so they’ll say, okay, I can cover you generically, I can cover the basic beats and I can direct you to this, this and this person, or I. In some cases, some consultants work as a group, like if you ever worked with Leon and Maple Consulting, who also worked on Werewolf, it’s not just Leona, it’s a couple other people who work with Leona in ways that support her and in ways that at times they’re doing fantastic work on their own to make sure that all the gaps are covered. So you could find that you’re talking to a conglomerate, you could find that you’re talking to someone like me and if I’m lacking there are times in which I am I will direct you to people or I will say, if you’d like, I can get their names and you can credit them, or they can decide if they want to be credited and I’ll conduct that. I’ll ask the outrageous questions. There’s a few cases, very niche cases, in which it is very generic stuff. It’s more like a generic sensitivity, more like am I hurting anyone here or am I being ableist here Because I’m a disabled person. So I tend to see where accessibility issues go wrong and in those cases if there’s like a really niche thing, I might just ask my phone a friend if I’m like concerned about something. So if there’s some anti-Semitism that I’m suspecting, I’m not Jewish, I have very little connection to Judaism, I mean culturally, religiously, islam, complicated situation but I have friends I can call up and I will, and I’ll be like okay, I’m suspecting this, how does this read to you? And once you know, I’ll get an answer back from them. I’ll have an answer for you. Honestly, consultants in general, none of us work alone and none of us don’t know someone else. So shoot your shot, talk to me, talk to you know a consulting industry, and we’ll get back to you with the best course of action. We are not afraid to call and help. That’s not something we’re afraid to do. And if it comes down to it, it’s not like you’re going to pay more in money overall. Because if I’m saying you’re like we’re getting 10 hours of consulting and I say I’m going to take eight and I’m going to give two to this one over here, whoever this person is, well, it works out the same for you. You’re just putting an extra name in the credit sheet or you’re referencing an extra name, you know, on your website. It’s not much work at all. The basic goal I would say is just have an idea of where you think you might go wrong, define where your biggest fears are and have that ready as part of your like pitch of what this is, because that’ll help someone like me pinpoint better, which is always handy.