Vetting as a Leader
Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
Definition
Your risk profile as a leader is the level and types of risk you consider acceptable within the spaces, events, classes, or communities you create. Every organizer, group, and attendee will have different comfort levels, priorities, rules, and approaches to safety. Understanding your risk profile helps you make more informed decisions about the environments and people you allow into your space.
Risk Tolerance Is Personal
Every person and every group will have different comfort levels with risk. What one organizer considers adequately vetted may feel wildly outside another person’s risk profile. One group may prefer a highly structured environment with strict rules and screening processes, while another may prioritize accessibility, openness, social freedom, or lower barriers to entry.
Neither automatically makes a group “good” or “bad.” What matters is understanding the type of environment being created, being honest about the risks involved, and making informed decisions about whether that environment matches your own values, goals, and comfort levels.
Determining Your Group’s Risk Profile
When creating a group or event, you will need to decide what types and levels of risk you are personally comfortable allowing into your space. This can affect things like vetting requirements, sponsorship systems, class etiquette, play expectations, intoxication rules, privacy expectations, photography policies, attendee age ranges, experience requirements, accessibility, security measures, dungeon monitoring, and how boundary or consent concerns are handled.
No group can eliminate all risk. The goal is deciding what level of risk you personally feel is reasonable, what type of environment you are trying to create, and what tools or expectations you want in place to support that environment.
Questions to Ask Yourself
What kind of environment are you trying to create?
Who is your group for?
What kinds of behavior are and are not acceptable in your space?
How much risk are you personally comfortable allowing?
What are your priorities: education, accessibility, socialization, play, privacy, structure, inclusivity, low-pressure environments, advanced skill development?
How will you handle consent concerns, conflict, intoxication, repeated problematic behavior, or safety violations?
What expectations will attendees realistically understand without being taught?
What tools, education, onboarding, etiquette guidelines, or support systems can you provide to help set people up for success?
What happens when someone violates expectations?
And importantly:
Are your rules and expectations something you are actually willing and capable of consistently enforcing?
Boundaries, Rules & Expectations
Clear expectations help set people up for success. If attendees do not know what is or is not acceptable in your environment, they may not realize they are creating problems, crossing boundaries, or making others uncomfortable.
Rules, etiquette guidelines, onboarding processes, sponsorship systems, codes of conduct, negotiation expectations, privacy expectations, and safety policies can all help reduce confusion and create more consistency within a space. What those rules look like will vary from group to group depending on the environment being created and the organizer’s personal risk profile.
Boundaries and expectations are only useful if they are communicated clearly and enforced consistently.
Every organizer will eventually need to decide where their limits are and what behaviors, patterns, risks, or situations fall outside of what they are willing to allow in their space. That line will look different for every group depending on the environment being created and the organizer’s personal risk profile.
Education vs Exclusion
Not every risky situation is caused by malicious people. Sometimes people are simply inexperienced, overwhelmed, socially unaware, poorly educated, unfamiliar with etiquette, or entering environments they do not yet fully understand.
This is one reason education matters so much.
Teaching expectations, etiquette, negotiation, consent practices, safety information, and community norms can help reduce unnecessary harm and give people tools for success instead of expecting them to magically already know everything. At the same time, education does not mean every person will be appropriate for every space, and organizers still have the right to decide what fits within their group’s risk profile.
Your Risk Profile Can Change
Your group's risk profile is not permanently fixed. It may change over time based on experience, education, burnout, past harm, changing responsibilities, community changes, growth, confidence, available support systems, or shifts in what kind of environment you want to create just like your personal risk profile would change over time.
Groups and leaders may become more strict, more relaxed, more educationally focused, more selective, or more structured over time as they learn what does and does not work for them. Re-evaluating your boundaries, expectations, and comfort levels periodically is healthy and normal. I strongly encourage re-examining from time to time.
Final Thoughts
No group can eliminate all risk, and no organizer will create a space that fits every person’s comfort level, priorities, or values. Different groups will have different approaches to structure, vetting, accessibility, education, play, privacy, socialization, and acceptable levels of risk.
As a leader, your responsibility is not to control every other community around you. Your responsibility is deciding what kind of environment you are personally willing to create, maintain, and be accountable for. Focus on building the kind of space you genuinely want to exist and giving people clear expectations, informed choices, and as many tools for success as you reasonably can.
Homework
If you haven't already done so, make a values statement for your group to define and clearly state the type of environment, priorities, behaviors, and community culture you want your group or space to represent and encourage.
