Would you Play D&D with E.L. James?

Noisms pokes at the latest of the culture-war’s tempests-in-teapot moments which distract from the really cool things going on.

For instance, if we take at face value the numbers from WotC and believe that “8.6 million Americans have played D&D in the last twelve months” and that we can apply the 38% of people playing D&D are female, then that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.27 million American women played D&D in the last twelve months.

3.27 million.

Let that number sink in for a moment.

Even if the real number is half that, and its only 1.6 million, that’s still one-freakin’-point-six million. If you think that only one-in-six folks playing D&D are female, that’s still 1.43 million.

There are, today, literally millions of women playing D&D. Think that’s going to have an effect on the hobby moving forward?

Those of you who’ve read me for a while are probably rolling your eyes already. Yeah, yeah, I’m a broken record. And yes, “gaming fantasy” is now a thing that most folks are exposed to before they begin playing D&D. But as Noisms points out, there’s been nothing stopping you from having gender-fluid elves in D&D before now. Hell, it’s been a running gag in Order of the Stick for the last 15 years. On the flip side, there’s nothing stopping you from having gender-determinist elves now. But I’ve had bisexual elves in my games since ’91 largely due to the women I was playing with at the time being fans of Mercedes Lackey and Marion Zimmer Bradley. There’s nothing more important, or influential, than the expectations and interests of the people at your table right now. And the number of potential players for your games has exploded.

Think any of these women are among those who’ve read the Fifty Shades books (35 million copies sold in the US)? How about a little Pride and Prejudice or, maybe more apropos, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series?

How many of the folks you played with five years ago had read those books? How many of the folks you play with today have read them?

It doesn’t stop there; WotC also claims 40% of folks playing D&D are college age or younger. Working from our 8.6 million number gives us 3.44 million. Think they’ve read Harry Potter? How many of them saw the LotR movies before they read the books? How many of them have any idea who Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are? Hell, how many of them, of any gender, have any idea who Mercedes Lacky or Marion Zimmer Bradley are?

Want to do something really fun and cool? Play D&D with someone whose experience of fantasy is shaped more by JK Rowling and Peter Jackson than Tolkien and Moorcock. Find a DM who wants to build a campaign world that’s “a little bit Throne of Glass mixed with GoT and Evans’ Brimstone Angels novels.” In short, find someone whose expectations of fantasy are different from yours and let them influence your play and rediscover these games all over again.

This is Why We Can't Have Sexy Things

Ok, I may be over-reacting; I haven’t read all of Rappan Athuk. There might actually be some context to this. But as it is…

Anyone entering the room must make a saving throw or succumb to the scent’s intoxicating effect... It generates a feeling of pleasurable lassitude coupled with heightened lust. This prompts those affected to copulate again and again, exhausting themselves. Once they begin, victims sustain 1 point of constitution damage per ten minutes spent in this vigorous pursuit. When their constitution drops to 1 point, they become too weak to continue, though the drive remains; victims typically die of thirst or starvation even while they continue to feel the need to mate.

This looks, well, dull. At first pass, it appears that PCs who fail their save will immediately start with the fornications. With the right group, that could be hilarious as they work out the pairings. It could bring long-simmering issues to the fore. But mostly, this is just slowly losing CON until you die. It’s so slow, I can’t imagine most groups struggling to diffuse it, which makes it even less interesting than a simple pit full of gelatinous cube or green slime dripping down from the ceiling. Considering that Rappan Athuk is described as an adventure that “offers legions of inventive traps, tricks, strange features, and monsters -- many of them never before seen,” I can’t help but assume that the designers were at their wits ends for yet another way to kill PCs slowly. The result is a room that’s going to cause more than a few DMs to snerk and then read the text aloud to their players as an example of design to be mocked, before continuing on as if the room were empty.

Compare this to one of the classic magic items of the first edition: the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity. Many dismiss this as a blatant example of locker-room hur-de-hurs. But it’s actually a very clever bit of design.

How can I say that? It creates a situation that the players can react to in a broad range of ways. Where the room above is pretty much a death trap for everyone who fails their save (and those who pass just drag their friends out of the room, I assume), the GoM/F leaves it up to the players just how much they want to interact with it. Laugh and move on? Treat it as a horrible curse that must be reversed? As an opportunity for out-of-the-ordinary RP? A last-ditch disguise to escape an encircling enemy?

There might be larger issues in the broader world that are brought to the fore in Rappan Athuk, but there probably aren’t. Getting transformed by the GoM/F will almost certainly cause your PCs to have to deal with the consequences in the world outside the dungeon. Maybe your world is so egalitarian there are none. Fair enough. Maybe the consequences are everywhere, in every little interaction your PC has.

The thing is, it’s entirely up to the folks playing the game. If the DM built that sort of thing into the setting, here’s an opportunity to approach it from a new angle and bring it back to the fore. If it’s something your group really doesn’t want to deal with, just get that Remove Curse cast and move on. Or live with it and move on.

That right there is the brilliance of the GoM/F. It’s as important (or unimportant) as you want it to be. It tosses a new toy onto the table, but you get to decide if it’s just a laugh, a temporary issue, or the centerpiece of the next phase of the campaign. It gives you more options and you get to decide what to do with them.

Abandoned Territory

DRAGON magazine #154 was published in February of 1990. It’s largely a forgotten issue (the theme was war, but wargaming was out of vogue in the RPG world at the time, so it mostly talked about historic examples of military conquerors, feudalism, and heraldry) except for an editorial by James Ward entitled “Angry Mothers From Heck (and What We do About Them).” This was the infamous article in which Ward explained that the 2nd edition of D&D (published in ‘89) lacked half-orcs and assassins and renamed demons and devils in order to avoid the negative publicity that had dogged the game through the ‘80s. The article loudly trumpeted the fact that D&D was about good, heroic characters and teamwork, and would feature “wholesome” content that would be beyond objection.

The result? Well, causality isn’t an easy thing to trace, but in ‘91 we got Vampire: the Masquerade, the game where you played a blood-sucking undead slowly losing their humanity. V:tM was wildly popular (though we don’t have numbers to know if it was Pathfinder-levels of popular) and brought lots of new faces (especially female ones) into RPGs and LARPing.

When a successful RPG publisher states, “This we will not publish,” what they’re doing is abandoning territory to their competition. They’re making it easy for you to find customers they’re not servicing (or to peel off customers they’re servicing poorly). WotC did something similar at the dawn of 4e, basically stating that they were no longer going to publish material in compliance with 3e’s OGL and abandoning those customers to Paizo. (You could say a similar thing happened at the dawn of 5e, but licensing issues and a perceived lack of popularity have prevented much of anyone from capturing the old 4e audience, to the best of my knowledge.)

Of course, everyone has their limits, and it’s interesting to note how Paizo has quite purposefully positioned themselves just a smidgen outside what WotC considers acceptable. While what is considered acceptable isn’t always easy to pin down philosophically, most of us can recognize where something falls on the spectrum when we see it. D&D looks like this, Pathfinder looks like that, and the thing over here with the penis-slugs has got to be LotFP.

This is what makes an article like Kotaku’s “Dungeons & Dragons’ Gradual Shift Away From Monster Boobs” interesting. While it’s not an official pronouncement from WotC about what will and won’t appear in D&D, it’s pretty close, including lots of quotes from Senior Manager Mearls and Lead Rules Developer Jeremy Crawford.

While at first blush it appears to make enough genuflections to political correctness to warm the cockles of any HR manager’s heart, that’s almost entirely from the author of the piece, D’Anastasio. If you read the words of Mearls and Crawford, you get a very different message. Here’s a list of quotes plucked from the article and out-of-order to make it clearer what I’m getting at:

“We’re equal opportunity cheesecake merchants,” Mearls added. “We don’t assume heterosexual male players.”

In an e-mail, Mearls said that nymphs were simply unpopular monsters among Dungeon Masters. 5th edition was designed after crowdsourced playtesting, and over 175,000 responses from early testers confirmed that gamers prefer elder brains and beholders, apparently, to monster boobs.

“When we considered the audience, we tried to think of how men and women would react, and make sure the reaction we elicited was in keeping with the monster’s character and the design intent,” Mearls said.

Bare breasts are absent from Volo’s Guide, the latest supplement to the Monster Manual out in October of this year, in what Mearls says was a conscious effort to “make sure that the art we presented was as appealing to as wide an audience as possible.”

“I think there was a feedback cycle where the inner circle of fandom was mostly male, that group gave feedback on what they liked, and you had art that delivered what they wanted,” Mearls said.

The Mearls quotes almost seem to backpeddle on the promise of the article’s title: “No-no-no-no-no! We’re not removing the cheesecake, we’re just recalibrating it to appeal to a wider audience. Calm down, owners of Hasbro stock. We know sex sells; we’re just making sure we use as broad a scatter of titillation as possible.”

It’s an interesting dance, one in which WotC attempts to both cater to current corp-world pieties while still promising to satisfy the entertainment-hungry customers. Of course, it’s mostly for show; as the article makes clear, D&D’s days as part of a counter-culture are over. Nobody turns to D&D manuals for titillation anymore. The idea is laughable, like someone saying they get turned on by perusing O’Reilly programming manuals.

Which means there’s lots of abandoned territory there. And I mean LOTS! Venger Satanis has staked out his claim to part of it, with his focus on campy, ‘70s comedy mashup of Benny Hill and Star Crash. Raggi’s planted a few flags on the hill of sex-as-body-horror, but he’s hardly saturating that market.

And that, to the best of my knowledge, is all there is, really. Both Numenera and the new Blue Rose give a wink-and-nod to sex-as-empowerment, but their love-as-thou-wilt (pun intended) ethos is rather lacking in friction or heat.

Compare that to where popular fiction has taken the subject. The obvious point of reference is Game of Thrones. You can probably get there from the new Blue Rose (there are some intriguing relationship mechanics in the game I haven’t had the time to deeply explore yet), but it’s not the direction Blue Rose is pointed. You can probably tack that on top of D&D, but WotC has no interest in helping you out. Pathfinder would love to point you in that direction, but they won’t go there with you.

And that’s not even touching the real 500 lbs gorilla in the marketplace: romance. Monsterhearts is a (small) step in the right direction, but also an understandably timid one that’s a bit mechanically complicated in all the wrong places. (The fact that it started out as a lampoon of Twilight that morphed to embrace Gingersnaps and Jennifer’s Body says a lot about why the game stumbles. When we get a game that openly embraces Twilight without a hint of irony, then we’ll know we’re on the right path.)

I should add, I say this not having played Monsterhearts, so if someone’s got a more experienced opinion on this, please speak up. Also, if there are games out there that I’m missing, please say something. The market’s so broad now, it’s easy to completely miss huge swaths of it.

Review: Love and Sex in the Ninth World

“Love and Sex in the Ninth World” (abbreviated LaSitNW here) is a 13 page pdf document published by Monte Cook Games for their Numenera line. It’s written by Shanna Germain who is no stranger to erotica, kink, and gaming, and that shows in this little “glimmer.”

LaSitNW is just what it says it is on the tin: the hows (and, unfortunately, also the whys) of adding romance and sex to your Numenera game. I say that discussing the whys is unfortunate because it’s wasted space; if you had no interest in doing so, why would you have picked up this pdf? Beyond a discussion of what sex and romance can do in your game, there seems little point to it, and in a product so tiny, space and time and effort are at a premium. So I don’t see much point in selling the product (or the idea) to someone who’s already bought it, especially when it’s not the sort of thing you can flip through at a store.

The text itself is a mixture of practical advice, egg-shell-walking caution, and flashes of brilliance. I’d love to see what a bolder, unapologetic writer like Zak S. might do with the same topic, but for what it is and who its published by, it’s more than I’d expected.

The very first words of the text are as follows: “Because the Ninth World is so large and disparate, it would be foolish to make sweeping generalizations about sex, love, lust, and courtship among its inhabitants.” Ms. Germain then proceeds to do exactly that. We are told that gender inequality and sexual orientation are no big thing in the Ninth World. This is disappointing from a world-building standpoint, but hardly surprising. Sweeping these broadly off the table right from the start prevents drama, especially in games where people are expected to play their own, real-world genders and sexual orientations.

If this starts you to worrying that Ms. Germain’s Ninth World is some sort of happy-happy rainbow-spangled Seattle-esque love fest where sex is always magical and bright, the brief section on class will relieve your fears. It’s short and deals exclusively with slavery in the Ninth World. The attitudes described are very Roman; slaves are used for sex without much consideration for their opinions on the matter. There’s an interesting fission between the matter-of-fact outlook of the inhabitants of the Ninth World and modern day sensibilities. One NPC, Duke Ingast, is described as “a notorious slave owner”. I can’t help but imagine the phrase would make as much sense in the Ninth World as calling someone in our day and age a “notorious toaster owner.”

The first section closes with a description of the loosey-goosey, term-limited, and rather vague institution of marriage in the Ninth World (called “coupledom”) and an explanation of how attraction is very culturally specific. It’s all very Heinleinian (including legal prostitution and for-hire enforcers of relationship contracts) though without any mention of non-communal polyamory. Which is kind of surprising; one would think that the Aeon Priesthood would be the natural place to find line marriages.

The real juicy meat of LaSitNW comes in the section called Putting Sex in Your Game. These two pages are sprinkled with little gems of wisdom culled from Ms. Germain’s experience as a gamer and author: “Love’s job is usually to portray deep emotional loss… or high emotional joy…” “Sex’s job is typically about power exchange.” “ If a PC is trying to get pregnant, and the guard is clearly expecting (or vice versa—maybe the guard has been infertile for years), the dynamic will have a unique emotional charge.”

Some of what’s in there is your basic adventure-creation advice (romance as a plot point, etc.) and some looks half-baked (an extremely vague section on mechanical benefits from love and sex without any real explanation of how to handle it looks tailor-made to trip up unexperienced GMs). But as an essay on how to use the fact that love and sex complicate everything, it shines. If you’re an experienced hand at writing romance and erotica it may seem like old hat, but for the rest of us, there’s a lot of brain-fodder here to play with.

Unfortunately, it’s followed by a full page on how sex is a touchy topic, “triggers,” and similar warnings. It’s all given the star treatment, but the folks who really need to read it won’t, and it’ll likely scare off the timid.

With that last bit of dreary business taken care of, Ms. Germain allows herself to get playful with her subject matter. She discusses love tokens (instead of rings, Ninth Worlders exchange badges), STIs, pregnancy (“Getting pregnant is a level 5 task between two fertile people of the opposite sex who are not using devices to alter fertility.”) and childbirth, and prostitution. That last is perhaps the most fun. We learn, for instance, that prostitution is not the final refuge of the skill-less and destitute, but rather the domain of highly trained, celebrated, and well-compensated professionals. These professionals are known by their specializations and styles. Goldglams are the rockstars of the sex world, advertising their presence with street performances and then picking their sexual clients selectively. Daupsams trade sex only for numenera, and include aeon priests among their number. Flute boys seemed misnamed to me; they bear little resemblance to the musician-whores of Athens and seem more like the geisha of Japan.

We then get another page of apologia for use of non-traditional sex and gender roles. They do brush against the real issue (using traditional assumptions to limit people’s options at the gaming table) but it’s another page that could have been put to better use.

The final section gives us three artifacts, five cyphers, and eight oddities. Most are good, offering intriguing bits of roleplay and strange abilities that will find all sorts of creative use inside and outside bedrooms. The weakest of the bunch is what amounts to a levitating sex-swing, but even that is fraught with creative uses once you get it into the hands of devious players.

If play that includes sex and romance intrigues you, and you’re not intimately familiar with the art of crafting romance or erotica stories, this is certainly worth your time and treasure. (You should probably also invest in a beginner’s guide to writing that sort of thing, especially if you haven’t read much of it.) The bits of numenera and background details are interesting, but by themselves are not worth the price if that’s all you hope to get out of it. I would have preferred a more in-depth treatment of the subject with greater emphasis on cultural permutations, but I also recognize that I’m odd in that respect. As such, while I bemoan the short shrift such a limited form allows the topic, I’m thrilled it got even this much attention and that it was handled as expertly as it was. I hope we’ll be seeing more of Ms. Germain’s kinky creativity in the near future.

"There's no sex in D&D!"

The title is a link. :p

Here it is again, just in case.

Romance, Sex and D&D: Dragon Sex

Donny over at “The Fine Art of the TPK” has discovered dragon sex. Or, to be specific, dragon sex as it occurs in fantasy literature. His wife talked him into reading The Dragon DelaSangre by Alan F. Troop:

This intense and painstakingly described DRAGON SEX was (to say the least) not what I was expecting, that's for sure. In fact, what surprised me was that my wife though it was pretty hot.

I don't know Donny or his wife, so I can't really speak to their backgrounds and reading habits. However, I think it's likely this is not the first time Mrs. TPK has encountered dragon sex.

I first ran across it when I borrowed my mother's Anne McCaffery novels. At the time, I was crazy for anything with dragons in it, and the “The Dragonriders of Pern” novels had awesome dragons on their gorgeous Michael Whelan covers. At the time, I thought they were wonderfully unusual novels, unlike anything I'd read before. What I didn't know was that they were firmly rooted in a style of literature the Blue Rose folks would call “romantic fantasy”. A young person (usually a woman) is estranged or separated from a family that is not good for her. She forms a telepathic bond with an intelligent animal (in this case, a dragon) and with its help, begins to fashion a new, healthier family for herself. For and with this new family, she risks all to make the world a better place or at least save it from an impending catastrophe.

And, sprinkled within, was dragon sex. It wasn't very detailed, and actually read more like an aerial race where the males attempted to catch the females to prove their worthiness. It mostly served as a counterpoint to the relationships of the people.

Years later, I came across dragon sex again in the books of Melanie Rawn. This was something else entirely. Sex between dragons in her books was more like sex between sharks. It was primal and violent, and served in part as a metaphor for the clash between the chaos fomented by the greed of the villains and the civilized order the heroes were trying to establish.

Dragon sex, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. I've mentioned before the differences between fantasy novels aimed at gals and those aimed at guys. Sex, especially “deviant” sex, is common in fantasy novels written for women and even teens. It's not just authors who are known for it, like Laurell K. Hamilton. You didn't get much more mainstream back in the “ultra conservative” (though they weren't, actually) '80s than Mercedes Lackey, and yet her books included homosexual characters, bisexual characters, and the polyamorous Hawkbrothers. Arrow's Fall includes a rape. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon tangled with incest (as did the non-fantasy but widely read Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews). The trend was continued through the '90s by authors like Anne Rice, and today S&M appears to be popular with Anne Bishop's “Black Jewels” books and Jacqueline Carey's "Kushiel" novels.

Now the ladies in the audience are probably shrugging their shoulders at all this. I might as well be talking about how grass is green and rain is wet. The thing is, even among authors writing for guys who are notorious for sexual themes, fade-to-black was the general rule. John Norman's “Gor” novels, in spite of the rampant nudity and eroticism, always drew the curtain before sex. The erotic exploits of brazenly hedonistic pulp heroes like the Gray Mouser, Conan, and Elric were only alluded to and never detailed. Even Jack Chalker, whose prose could run hot and heavy right up to the act, would suddenly seem bashful as the event was efficiently mentioned and then passed through and beyond, where consequences would arise as the story resumed it's normal descriptive depth and pacing. And while they would seem to be close kin to the relationships of the “romantic fantasy” novels, the raw, painfully honest relationships in Joel Rosenberg's “Guardians of the Flame” series are a breed apart.

Again, my suggestion for guys who won't burst a blood vessel doing so, is to pick up one of these books and give it a try. You might hate it, but you'll likely be exposed to a style of storytelling you've never experienced before. Even if you don't have dragons carving notches into their bedposts, you'll find new ways to work relationships and similar themes into your games.

UPDATE: This was worth dragging up above the fold. Thanks, Chris.

Chris said...

Ursula Vernon did a great post on the antecedents of this subject, seen through the filter of fanfic.

From the article:
I did not, at nine, actually comprehend on any kind of level that homosexuality was something real people did. Like every other girl of my generation, I figured that out from Mercedes Lackey books, and at one point put down the book and went, "Um. Whoa." while the universe carefully re-aligned itself around my newly expanded brain.

Perhaps inevitably, she also drew the odd creature of the subconscious that thrives on such psycho-sexually charged weirdness as dragon sex. She calls it Susan.

Romance, Sex and D&D: Women are from Venus, Men are from Nowhere

I'm having a great time with my Thursday game. In spite of relearning old rules, exercising a few disused mental and gaming muscles, and a bit of player attrition due to the hassles of Real Life, things are rolling along nicely, and I'd like to thank my players for making it such a pleasant experience.

And now that I've done that, I'm going to tease them in public, in honor of the feast of St. Valentine. ;)

Seriously, we have a great cast of PCs to play with, and things are threatening to get even more interesting in the near future. I can't wait for next Thursday. And they also fell fairly closely into a pattern of character creation I'd noticed back in my college days.

Here's the relevant part of the character creation outline I posted:

What I absolutely need are the names and current whereabouts of your character's family, and what your character did before hopping on the boat to Pitsh.

Let's take a look at what I got in response, in no particular order, with names changed and other details omitted to protect the innocent:

Player A gave me a character descended from a long line of heroes who has just finished his training to take part in the family business. However, no names are given, nor do we know anything about the character's parents or siblings, if any.

Player B's character's mother “was a serving wench at a big city inn/brothel.” Obviously, figuring out who dad was in this case is clearly problematic. Mom, unnamed, passed away when the character was 14. The character's mentor, however, is named, and “has become a surrogate uncle” to the character. It was this uncle/mentor who sent our hero to the island of Dreng Bdan to seek his fortune.

Player C first asked me if these family would be nearby where the adventures began or far away, the only one to do so. Player C then named the home community, father, mother, and two siblings of the PC, and explained what those siblings were currently up to. The character's life of adventure was precipitated by a nasty quarrel with the PC's family, leading the PC to head for the horizon, vowing never to return, or, at least, not to return until the PC had proven there's more to life than what was offered at home. Player C also provided me with a mysteriously vanished relative.

Player D's character “is the third child of five from a reasonably wealthy family” but no members of this family are named or described. This PC is “still on good terms with” this family, but “has more interesting things to do.”

Ok, time to cue the music.

Now, keep in mind that I'm not saying anyone did anything wrong here. The differences between them are what make for great interplay between the PCs, and I love it when my players play with each other in addition to interacting with me and the world. And while I prefer to get characters more like Player C's, I'm more than happy to work with the others. After all, if you don't give me the details, I consider that carte blanche to fill in the gaps as I see fit.

But that's not my point today. My point today is that Player C is a woman and this falls right in line with a difference I've noticed in how women and men play RPGs.

Clearly, nothing like this is universal. I'm notorious for deluging my poor DMs with mountains of family detail and background info, and last time I checked I was a guy. And I've known gal gamers to have a great time playing Paranoia,where every PC is a clone with all the family life of a tube of toothpaste. But I have seen a trend in my horribly-not-scientific experience. Keeping in mind that the plural of “anecdote” isn't “data”, I think a lot of it has to do with the reading habits I've mentioned before.

Think of the novels by Anne McCaffery, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, or Jacqueline Carrey. The characters in these novels are either surrounded by family, or immediately work to make a new family once the old one is lost. Family is a source of strength and support, and even villains tend to have family of their own. Stories can become generational epics, with the children of the previous heroes picking up the torch and continuing on in their parents’ footsteps. In the past, this has been true of the women playing in my games, and I've seen it in others games as well. Relatives become resources, not just for in-game goodies, but also in a meta-game sense, becoming touchstones for dramatic RP or bringing the spotlight onto a player's character. And these women worked to create and maintain relationships in the game, fought over them, and worried about them.

And it's not just my games either:

Legwork begins. Rather than roll social skills on the handy-dandy legwork tables and assume a lot of networking has gone on, the girls decide to RP out their search for info. Randi comes up with the idea that Sasha's decker contact is her little brother. We have an awesome RP moment when we find out that Brian, who styles himself "Lord High Emperor of Ultimate Matrix Badasses" is at least as much playa' as Decka'. We meet him in a decker bar, surrounded by teenage weefle-runners held rapt by his descriptions of his most recent datasteal. He is very obviously putting the make on several attractive, illegal female decker-wannabes. In ten minutes of pure character development, we learn that Brian resents the hell out of his sister, blaming her for the mysterious deaths of their parents, and points out that since their party lost their own decker, whom Brian had been involved with, perhaps running with Sasha wasn't such a good idea. There's some verbal sparring about previous events between Brain and Sasha that could have been scripted, but were totally ad-lib. Very much the brother and sister. Finally, with promise of challenge and payment, Brian dismisses his entourage and asks what the girls want, making sure to sidle up to Tyna, who has obviously made him forget the young deckers from moments ago.

It's an amazing technique for massaging more out of a game. Not only has Sasha's player subverted the system somewhat, by making the contact more than just a contact and thus far more valuable an asset than she probably paid for in character creation, but we have a great moment of RP, a cool new NPC, and all sorts of hooks for interesting play in the future.

Most men don't create these opportunities, partly, I think, because the books we read don't really prepare us to think these sorts of terms. And while we all desire the closeness of family, all need to find a place where we belong and fit in, the mystique of the Man With No Name is heady stuff for guys. We all know exactly what Captain Jack means when he says, “But what a ship is, is freedom!” In the novels of Steven Brust, George R.R. Martin, or Robert Jordan, family is something to escape. The sins of the fathers are the torments of their sons. The characters constantly weave about, like moths drawn to a flame, wanting the closeness of intimacy, but constantly veering away, pulled by duty or fear or whatever else. Family is often something that must be escaped before the adventure can begin (as for Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd) or so trivial as to be hardly worth mentioning (Robert Howard’s Conan). Heroes in these novels might see family as a spur or lash, a burden either dutifully or resentfully shouldered, which I see something of in Player A's character. But generally, family is the past, a point of origin from which the character's trajectory into the future constantly takes him further and further away. Compare that to Player C's character, where multiple paths for reconciliation immediately present themselves, and avenues are readily offered to include her character's family in the campaign.

Now, I'm sure some will say that people who create characters who have severed all ties with their family are just protecting themselves, and that past DMs have taught them to do this by using family as a way to screw with the PCs. To that I must ask, do you really think that makes a PC safe? Say, just to create an example at random, someone gave me a character sheet that read “family – all dead”, do you really think that would thwart a creative and sadistic DM? Or do you think I would find a way to make certain that this dead family came back to haunt them?

UPDATE: Spike of Ubiquitous Orcs has more thoughts on this theme.

Romance, Sex and D&D: the College Years

(Part One of this series is here.)

Things changed radically in the game I ran in college. My college crew was probably the best group I've ever played with. Their skill at the game was exceptional, their styles (mostly) meshed very well with mine, and their interests took the game in directions I'd never considered before.

The biggest difference, I think, came from the girls outnumbering the guys. Most of them were already very familiar with 2e (this was the early '90s) and at least a few of them had experience with 1e as well. They also came from different literary traditions. The guys I played with in high school were fairly avid readers, and we'd enjoyed most of the same books: Tolkien and Brust, Moorcock and A Young Boy's King Arthur, Lovecraft and Rosenberg. We were not nearly as steeped in “the classics” of the Old School as some (I didn't read any Lieber until college), but we had our literary models and struggled hard to bash D&D into a shape that could play them, as the whim took us.

The ladies of my college game brought a different literary background with them. They shared a number of the classic influences like Tolkien, but added names like Bradley, Hambly, McCaffrey, and Lackey. I'd read from a few of those names before, so I had some ground to stand on there, but what really rocked the boat was what they brought with them from romance novels.

Romance is the number one selling genre in bookstores. It dwarfs even combined sci-fi and fantasy sales. Today, most nerds have a passing familiarity with the conventions of romance, thanks to folks like Joss Whedon, Stephenie Meyer, and the emergence of paranormal romance, which have brought them more into the mainstream (or, at least, what passes for mainstream among nerds). It wasn't so much the case back then, but the process had already started.

Gents, if you haven't cracked the cover on a full-blown romance novel, understand that you are missing an entire world of story structures out there. Romance novels have their own styles of pacing and conflict, an entire vocabulary of emotional states and expected conventions for their ebb and flow. And these books are not the halcyon daydreams you might imagine they'd be. Your female junior high classmates were reading books chock full of all the topics you've been taught to avoid in polite company: rape and incest, blackmail and character assassination. Yes, some are light-hearted romps, but others delve into a level of brutality that might even eclipse the other Brian Murphy's Top 10 Fantasy Battles list. (The historical romances tend to be the worst. I read one based on the life of William Shakespeare which described in agonizing detail the experiences of a character who is buried alive.)

So when I knocked down the walls and, in effect, announced that the campaign was sandbox-style (though we didn't have that vocabulary back then), sex and romance took prominent roles in the game. No longer relegated to a few laughs while we celebrated in town between adventures, time and effort and detail were expended on pursuing or luring the opposite sex. What are his interests? What is his favorite color? What sort of women does he prefer for marriage, and what sort for a tumble in the hay? What is his favorite scent?

And we went very Old School with this. The dice nearly disappeared as we played out the give-and-take of romantic conflict, a conversation of blades played out with social conventions, fashion, politics, and raw sex appeal. (Anonymous, this is a critical point in understanding the difference between 4e and Old School play. In 4e, this sort of thing might be boiled down to a single skill roll, or perhaps a skill challenge. Was the way we played it out time consuming? Absolutely. But “non-fun”? Oh, Hell no! Detailing the outfits and buying the presents and planning the parties was the fun! But I'll have a more detailed post on the topics you bring up over the next week or so.)

We still rolled for pregnancy, but now some of the PCs were trying to get knocked up. Issues of fertility, birth control, and motherhood came into the game. What do elves, who have so few children, think about a mother or father who leaves an infant with family in order to save a human city from destruction? Can a polymorphed dragon get a human woman pregnant? What happens to a pregnancy if the mother drinks a potion of speed? What if she contracts lycanthropy?

Anything and everything was pretty much fair game for that campaign. Some of the PCs were bisexual and others strictly hetero. Some eagerly played the field while others sought exclusive relationships. Virginity became a noteworthy (as in, we noted it on the character sheets) stat as we played with ideas on why dragons and unicorns find it important. And we explored topics that would make Carcosa look like a Sunday School coloring book. (For example, near the end of the campaign, one of the PCs ended up marrying the arch-lich Vekna for political reasons. But that's a whole story in itself...)

Keep in mind that none of this was the primary focus of the campaign. The PCs still foiled the plots of scheming wererats, battled orc raiders, dared the hidden fortresses of necromancers, and slew dragons. They played an important role in returning the rightful High King to his throne. They hoarded treasure and leveled up. The campaign lasted for years, even beyond our graduations from college. Level limits were reached and railed against. Orcus was slain on his home plane and a god was destroyed. It was D&D in every way that anyone who has played the game would instantly recognize. But it also warped into something so very much more than the ordinary.

Romance, Sex and D&D: the High School Years

James Edward Raggi IV (who has the most fun name to say in all of gamingdom) recently waxed verbose on the topic of Sexuality and D&D. He then invited comments on the topic, posing a handful of interesting questions. Of course, mention was soon made of the juvenile antics of teen boys playing the game, which made me think of the halcyon days of my own youth. And that made me question certain assumptions about our gaming from those days.

The assumption appears to be that sexuality is played as a lark and a joke, and works to further the power fantasies of young men with easy conquests of exotic beauties. Much could be written about that, but, at least in our case, it wasn't true, and judging by some of the stuff I've seen on the 'net, it wasn't terribly true for others, either.

First of all,yes, romance was all but non-existent. When it did happen, it was between NPCs, and was the subject of much lampooning and MST3King (long before there was an MST3K). And yes, it was all about casual romps (“hook ups” as they call 'em these days) and yes, it was pretty much governed by a series of dice rolls. But the results of those rolls bear a bit of investigation, I think.

First was the seduction roll. Do you manage to sweet-talk the object of your affection into bed? (We had one female player in those games, so it wasn't always the barmaid or Duke's daughter being wooed.) Sometimes that was followed by a roll which described the quality of the experience. But after that came an entire series of rolls that just invited disaster. Rolls for disease, rolls to see if she got pregnant, followed by a roll to see if you woke up alone with all your coin or a random magic item stolen.

Sex, in short, was dangerous.

And this pretty much mirrored how we saw it back then. Like delving into dungeons, sex was thrilling and risky, a matter for much preparation and planning, but to be tackled with swashbuckling abandon and enthusiasm. The rewards were found primarily in the daring of the deed rather than any outcome to be expected from it. It was hardly the stuff you'd assume to find in male teenage fantasies and yet it fit the character of our games perfectly. Maybe it was the risky nature of the games we played back then, or just something about the '80s that shaped the character of our games. Maybe it's different today?