First, the obligatory meme where this question came from:
But where the question really came from? The presence of sex and sexuality in a particular strain of indie games.
I think explicit discussion of sex is a legitimately important development in RPGs, and probably one of the primary early divisions between trad and indie. I mean yes of course sex has been in RPGs since the beginning, but at least in my games? Off-screen and implied at best: so-and-so is “in love with” so-and-so. Queen X and King Y are married although Knight Z and Queen X both long for King Y. Some of that was a function of my age — teenage Paul wasn’t getting any as a high school sophomore, talking about it was unthinkable. Some of it was a function of what RPGs were at the time.
The earliest I saw sex brought in in actual words, as a formal part of an RPG’s procedure, has to have been Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer. When you draw out relationship maps in that game, connections of sex and family are privileged over everything else. Smart!
That was 2001, maybe earlier.
I speculate the trad/indie division has something to do with the fact that fucking is about human relationships. Actual connections between people. I’d done r-maps before of oaths and hatreds but those are kind of…constructs. They’re not actually visceral biological connections.
So, like…our favorite genre fiction, yeah? Everyone’s boning all the time. Jackson added implied boning to Lord of the Rings, the most chaste fantasy story ever told. Sci-fi? Boning. Fantasy? Boning. Postapocalypse, espionage, westerns? So much boning.
My speculation ends here: if you start explicitly including sexual relationships in RPGs, you’re explicitly aligning them with genre fiction, with story-making. And despite everyone’s best efforts on both sides and a decade-plus of online fights, I think there are huge swaths of trad players for whom RPGs have very, very little to do with fiction and story-making.
Anyway, rolling sex to have dice. No wait, the other way. Terrific addition where the games are more about human situations than external plots. Assuming the GM doesn’t just straight-up murder your lover/spouse “because that’s dramatic,” it’s one of the most protagonizing things that ever happens at the table.
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It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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I’d go so far as to say, trad or not, thank god that not all rpgs have to do with fiction and story-making.
Vincent Baker agreed!
Listening.
Teenage Keith wasn’t getting any either, but we had all kinds of sex in our RPGs. Probably for that very reason. The accuracy was somewhat circumspect, of course.
So glad to see someone finally mention Sorcerer in the context of this question. Sex and Sorcery is the only serious text I have ever seen on this subject.