[Adult] Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, thread 2

[Isawa Sideshow]

Hrm. It was just a suggestion, but I'll leave this closing argument.

Who are we doing the guide for, and why are we doing it?

Are we doing it just for ourselves, without any concern to what people actually want out of the guide? Are we not trying to make a "serious" netbook that people can actually use without batting an eyelash?

Because if that's not our goal - making a book full of serious crunchy bits that can be used in game - then why bother worrying about how feasible the rules are and how well-balanced the items within are? Why even worry about it, if all we care about is doing as close a translation of the original BoUCK as possible. Let's face it, while the original was a good read worth a few chuckles, the rules within weren't so good. I definitely wouldn't have used the vast majority in the game.

However, if we're actually making a book for people to use in normal games -- ones without a lot of overt slapstick humor -- then we should focus on doing just that. We should focus on getting the crunchy bits as smooth and polished as possible, and removing elements that might make people disregard the book as juvenile humor.

What I'd like to see is the d20 BoUCK to be a sort of "Kama Sutra" for gaming - a serious discussion of sex, sexual techniques, sexual persuasions, sexual circumstances, and the consequences of sex. The Kama Sutra isn't full of information on inflatable dolls and prismatic dildos and such, but it's still a classic guide on sex, and is revered as such and consulted often.

Meanwhile, the humorous aspects can be moved to a more "Xxxenophile"-type add-on, where the people who want the goofy humorous spells and items can go. I'm not saying that they don't have their use, but they don't honestly belong in a serious guidebook. That's why they have an add-on of their own.

And as far as "hentai" goes, I consider hentai to be over-the-top sexuality that just borders on silly, not necessarily dark. Hentai can be dark, but it can also be very light-hearted and silly, too - check out Rei-Rei or F3 some time to get an example.

Anyway, that's my take on it. Agree or disagree as you wish.

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And on a completely unrelated note, I won't be able to make playtesting Friday night - something popped up early Saturday morning that can't miss; can we reschedule for sometime next week? That will give me more time to revise the rules, then.

 

[2late]

What about on focussing on a "complete" guide first and once this is completed, making a light version without the humorous parts?

("Light" as in "Cocke Light" not as opposite to "Dark")

 

[Zelda Themelin]

Smilies: Great idea... Not necessarily this one: ,but I think I can find some dingbat that conveys humor. One of those theater-masks maybe. Or we just put the funny stuff into side-bars and shaded boxes.

That's what I meant. Not everyone wants to see them gone. Why should 'over the top' sillyness bother the reader so much if it was marked humorous? And some of that stuff Isewa mentions may be silly as read, but doesn't have to be if it actually used in some game.

We could also put more extreme silly stuff into it's own chapter, if it doesn't fit so well with rest of our hentai-themes. If it does, we just move it there.

Of course there is much humorous hentai out there. Do we want to think hentai in terms of 'hardcore'/'nasty stuff' only?
Maybe we could give humorous stuff it's own chapter in hentai book?

I like the idea of not mixing different 'themes' too much. Like there is a difference between 'Spiderman', 'Toxic Avenger' ,
'Blade' movies, all from 'Superhero' genre, but from different sides of it. (I wish better examples had come in my mind, but those will have to do).

Our genre is 'sex', and since we are reworking the guide anyway, we could untangle this genre mix-up at same effort, like Isewa seems to be suggesting. Though some things are silly in 'name only' (D&D has silly enough name-terminology here and there). Those should IMO not be moved into different book/chapter/marked humorous just because of it.

 

[kolvar]

How about a silly appendix? That way everybody got it out of the way and still can read it without consulting another guide.

@Isawa: sure, hentai is not allways dark, but have you read Tenilens rules?

About the polling. A majority would like to see the silly rules gone. And: we should have done this earlier. Some people are giving ideas, they did not give before.

 

[kolvar]

Another question: A lot of new ideas came up during the last round of wish-making. Do we want to integrate more into the version 1.0 or should we stay with what we got and do a guide II?

I would prefer the second, because I am very eager to see the guide on my desk and fear, that if we do not make a cut soon, we will never do one.

 

[Gez]

To give my two eurocents to the debate

- I'm absolutely not interested in hentai, so I would not download it even for the funny bits. I would even find it distasteful to associate both hentai and funny silliness, because I don't think a genre that is basically about young girls being raped by cthulluh-esque ETs should be associated with fun.
- Things like magical vibrators and dolly golems are not only silly, they are also realist. Real people are often silly when it comes to sex. Look at cybersex. Or at these people who waste their money on porno sites to download lagging, pixellated, time-stamp sized movies. If you want a guide to sex, you need to acknowledge that is has silly aspects inside.

Sure, some of the sillyness (pimp class, random periodicals, for example) could be put in a supplement. But that's silliness pertaining to the rules, or the world (you don't need a pimp class to have pimps, and porno periodicals would not fit in all settings -- hey, I tried the javascript version and got a magazine titled "something harpy balls").

 

[Isawa Sideshow]

Again, I reiterate - hentai is not solely about tentacle sex. In Japanese, "hentai" means "pervert" (or "abnormal"). It's used to refer to any entertainment with hardcore elements, be it anime, manga, computer games, live-action movies, etc.

That said, there's a reason why tentacles are a common theme in hentai - in Japan, it's illegal to depict genitalia - all thanks to General MacArthur and the laws he brought to Japan after WWII. To get around that, Japanese animators used large beasts with many tentacles instead of penises. It fit in with the classic Japanese oni, and also allowed them to show phalluses without showing genitals. A lot of hentai that's been brought over to the United States uses tentacles, because US markets have the same problem - show genitals, and you're X-rated. Show monsters with tentacles, and you're a hard R rating, and you can be sold in Best Buy and Suncoast.

Not all hentai involves tentacles, though. I've mentioned F3, which is about a girl who can't have orgasms. Though some odd inventions are brought into play, no tentacle rape takes place. The Cool Devices series, a set of 10 animated shorts by different artists, are totally uncensored (which suggests that they were done "underground" in Japan) and mostly focus on taboo subjects such as S&M, domination/submission, incest, and such. On the manga front, there's a huge range of adult "doujinshi", which is fan-created manga based on popular video games and anime series. Most of this is just depictions of straight-up male/female (or female/female, or male/male) sex, without any monstrous elements involved. Finally, for computer games, there's a wide variety of hentai games. Most are "dating" games, where the protagonist is a young single man who must interact with various women in the hopes of bedding them and living happily ever after.

So you see, hentai is neither dark nor completely tentacle-filled. In fact, a lot of hentai would fit fine into the "serious" guide without crossing the line of "too humorous" or "too Cthulhu-esque". Personally, if we needed to divide the guides, I'd say there's a "serious" guide and an "outrageous" guide for over-the-top items such as prismatic dildos (my favorite example - it just rolls off the tongue) and tentacle monsters.

 

[Kichwas]

[BWhat I'd like to see is the d20 BoUCK to be a sort of "Kama Sutra" for gaming - a serious discussion of sex, sexual techniques, sexual persuasions, sexual circumstances, and the consequences of sex. The Kama Sutra isn't full of information on inflatable dolls and prismatic dildos and such, but it's still a classic guide on sex, and is revered as such and consulted often.[/b]

This is where I stand also.

It's the sillyness and 'impossibly long charts and tables for things that aren't needed' that put me off of older versions of the guide.

Meanwhile, the humorous aspects can be moved to a more "Xxxenophile"-type add-on, where the people who want the goofy humorous spells and items can go. I'm not saying that they don't have their use, but they don't honestly belong in a serious guidebook. That's why they have an add-on of their own.

Agreed. Maybe putting it in with the Hentai isn't right, but putting it in with the serious is even less so.

Perhaps the Hentai and Comedy can both be appendexes of the main book?

 

[Sorn]

News Flash first According to Monte Cook, the upcoming Book of Vile Darkness will not have any rules for Prositution after all, unless WotC put them in after he turned over the manuscript.

Silly stuff: I guess the trend is going towards leaving out the sillier stuff. Personally, I would have been fine with the smilie/shading indicator, but in any case I'd like to see at least some of the stuff survive, possibly in it's own "The Funny Side of Sex" Web Enhancement. Appendix or own chapter won't work too well, since that would scatter spells and items all over the book. The easier things are organized, the better. I personally wouldn't want to flip through the entire spell section only to not find what I was looking for, and then having to check the Silly section and the Perverted section to see if it's there.

I'd suggest a few people go over the current material and check for silly stuff. If it is only silly in name, put it on a list, post it here and we can all come up with alternate names for it.

The periodicals which seem to be disliked by quite a few people would make an excellent 2 page web enhancement. Since it does not pertain to any rules, we don't even need the OGL page.

Hentai: Yes, Hentai means pervert in Japanese. However, the mainstream definition for hentai is "tentacle madness". We can have long discussion on what's the correct one, but that doesn't lead anywhere. I saw one discussion about Pulp settings that went completely out of hand. Anyway, anything remotely tentacle-like, move it over to the Hentai book. Since we don't know what people consider perverted, let's leave anything non-tentacle in the main book..

 

[Sorn]

Missed Kolvar's question re: Guide 1 .

I for one am itching to do the layout and get a copy printed out. We've been hanging in some sort of Limbo for a little while now, so I think we should set a deadline for any new material and a proposed date as to when we'll be done.

I'll be delving into the guide over the weekend and compile my own silly/needs-to-be-cut-list. I'd suggest everyone does that, we compare lists and go from there. Once we know what is not going to be in the main guide, we can check and see which chapters need filling. Once a chapter is deemed okay, it goes out to the editor, who in turn passes it on to me for layout. If Averil is too busy, I'll gladly do both. And of course once we have all chapters, we are done and can finally print out a copy.