The liberating alchemy of dice

I've seen it over and over again, probably because several of my communities include oodles and oodles of people with pretty intense anxiety.  

I, a deft role-player of some 24 years' experience, jump with relish into a scene where every utterance fair drips with both plot and emotional weight.  The PC upon whom the focus of the scene rests stares at me with eyes the size of platters, paralyzed with fear that anything they might say and everything they are not saying will set the party back or harm them in some way.  Maybe their social awkwardness will give the vampire prince the excuse he needs to announce a Blood Hunt on the coterie, or maybe they will pledge the elf kingdom's armies to the service of the evil lich-queen without realizing it.  They have no idea how to find success and avoid failure, and it leaves them with a blue screen instead of a brain.  Play grinds to a halt, momentum breaks, and everyone's fun drains out of the hole.

Many older role-players and adherents of the Old School Renaissance movement decry the development of social skills in RPGs (the Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception skills in D&D, for example) and even moreso the advent of social combat rules like those in Exalted 2e (technicall,y Vampire 5e has them, if you'd like a more modern example).  They worry that all of their fun will disappear as juicy RP scenes get reduced to who can roll the most dice, because their fun is in the application of their intelligence in solving the problem and doing so in an artsy, performative way.

I am not surprised that many of those I see championing this idea are men (and probably/often also enjoy other forms of privilege, as well).

Every time I have seen the women, genderqueers, mentally ill, disabled, autistic, etc. players at my table look at me with that uncontrollable shaking of their head, I have hastened to remind them that it will be a roll of the dice that determines whether or not they succeed or make things worse for themselves and their friends.  That their performative choices carry no weight whatsoever, that no consequences can come from their ability to engineer social situations.

A sigh of relief meets my words, shoulders drop, and almost always the resultant scene is one of glorious role-play and surging fun.  The dice have transmuted a situation which is triggering and dangerous into one in which they can be free and silly.  More than once, I have seen my friends go on to gain some ease in social situations outside of play thereafter.

This is, I think, one of the most common problems with a GM, whether novice or anciently experienced.  Consequences create excitement, we think; it's not risk if there's no danger.  But we forget to make sure that the situation we engineer is safe for the players.  Without that, there can be no safety for the characters.