How do you feel about nudity in RPG books?

[pickin_grinnin]

I think the important question is to ask yourself what purpose the nudity serves.

In general, nudity needs to have a purpose when included in a gaming material. It has to serve a specific purpose that is easily seen and understood. Otherwise, you risk serious misunderstanding.

It doesn't have to serve a purpose, any more than depictions of violence do. People in general tend to like sex and violence (hopefully not together) in their entertainment. There's no reason to justify it.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

Seriously, if you're writing something like Black Tokyo of course you want nudity. I'd really rather you didn't write something like Black Tokyo - but putting on your cover what the game is about will put off people who wouldn't want the game and attract those who would.

Black Tokyo is one of the few games I have purchased as a PDF (I can't stand PDFs in general), mainly because the authors had the guts to do something that everyone else was afraid to do. It's an extreme game, and they didn't pull the punches. I'm glad there are developers out there who are willing to do that.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

It doesn't have to serve a purpose, any more than depictions of violence do. People in general tend to like sex and violence (hopefully not together) in their entertainment. There's no reason to justify it.

Then you're not producing a game. You're producing an art book.

Seriously, even in DnD books, the depictions of violence do serve a purpose; they help highlight the high-fantasy kind of fighting your characters can be doing, and in some cases help highlight what things would actually look like for aiding the player's imagination. They are not just there to be pretty. In other games, the depictions of violence tend to be there to either help a person imagine the introductory story being told, get an idea of what something would look like, or see how it could be described once the results of the dice and rules had been worked out. It's almost never just there to entertain people.

So, yes, it does have to serve a purpose.

 

[Umbran]

Exactly, which is why we need to stop being afraid of the dirty looks and angry moms and start being GREAT!

But "great" is not an objective, well-defined term. If you say, "we need to be GREAT," I am driven to ask - Great at what? For whom? What is great for a 12 year old kid is not necessarily great for a 40 year old. In fact, audiences can be pretty solidly opposed in their needs and desires, so the addition of mature material, which is not suitable for all audiences, does not promote greatness, in general. At best it promotes the greatness that you, personally, seek.

Art must be dangerous to fulfill its potential. It is time we stepped up and broke out of the box and tackled serious stories!

1) No, art does not need to be dangerous. Leonardo da Vinci took no particularly great risks in painting the Mona Lisa, you know. There's no danger in it.

2) What is in the game books won't make the actual thing in play "art". That requires a certain dedication, talent, and skill on the part of the players. Your argument really assumes players who have a goal of producing art, rather than engaging in play - so far, we are talking about role playing *game* systems, not role playing art-facilitation systems. I submit that, if you want a way to produce artistic improvisational theatrics at home, the large amount of material designed to facilitate *play* serves as baggage to that end, and you'd be far better off with some other system for the purpose.

3) RPGs and art have a problem - while a session of RPG can have artful moments, overall, it suffers from the fact that art typically requires rehearsal, editing, and/or revision to produce, and RPG play is typically improvised one-offs.

 

[gamerprinter]

3) RPGs and art have a problem - while a session of RPG can have artful moments, overall, it suffers from the fact that art typically requires rehearsal, editing, and/or revision to produce, and RPG play is typically improvised one-offs.

While I completely agree that D&D while creative is not art unto itself, I will say, that all of the maps I design for RPGs can certainly qualify as art, and in most cases I create the entire maps in one sitting, with no rehearsal, revisions, nor editing - not even for publisher commissions. My maps tend to be skilled one-offs in every case.

 

[Celebrim]

But "great" is not an objective, well-defined term. If you say, "we need to be GREAT," I am driven to ask - Great at what? For whom? What is great for a 12 year old kid is not necessarily great for a 40 year old. In fact, audiences can be pretty solidly opposed in their needs and desires, so the addition of mature material, which is not suitable for all audiences, does not promote greatness, in general.

Joining my opinion to that, if daring to oppose social norms and daring to face condemnation was the measure of what made art great, surely and unquestionably F.A.T.A.L would be the best RPG ever written.

But in my experience, when people say that they think art has to challenge social norms, they tend to mean 'only those social norms I personally don't agree with'. And in my opinion, writing to be shocking in and of itself ceased to be brave and became it's opposite with everything that follows Baudelaire.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Is Shindler's List in the bargain been? Is Eyes Wide Shut? Quality wins every time.

And yet. The highest grossing film of 2014 was Transformers: Age of Extinction. Second was Peter Jackson's CGI-fest expansion of one short novel into an epic trilogy. (Third was Guardians of the Galaxy which I do think was genuinely good). With those two in 1 and 2 I really don't think we can say quality wins every time.

No one keeps playing schlock over and over.

You've never heard of the family that watches A Wonderful Life every Christmas? Or James Bond. Or pick just about any comfort book/film. Most of them are pure schlock.

I am not advocating that. Re-read my posts. I am saying adult stories and drama can be added to games for mature players. Violence and sex need not be graphic or titillating. Watch "Veronica Mars". Hell, watch "Buffy The Vampire Slayer". BADD is a dead horse, RPGs are going mainstream. We're the cool ones now, we can stop acting afraid...

BADD isn't as much of a worry as ending up as The Human Centipede 2 or with a whizzard as a GM. I don't actually want to know about the fetishes of some of the other members of my gaming group.

Exactly, which is why we need to stop being afraid of the dirty looks and angry moms and start being GREAT! What frustrates me most is the people I meet online who are scared to rock the boat and do something challenging and risky. Art must be dangerous to fulfill its potential. It is time we stepped up and broke out of the box and tackled serious stories!

I'm not worried about the dirty looks and angry moms. I'm worried about exactly how terrible you can make handling sensitive issues badly. I've read precisely one tabletop RPG that handles sex as a plot element well (Monsterhearts), with most games being about as effective as a group of teenagers trying to be edgy and spurring each other on. For dangerous art that fulfils its potential, RPGs can be great excercises in empathy, and I invite people to look at Monsterhearts (coming of age stories) and Dog Eat Dog (colonialism) for starters. But you don't get that in an attempt to be edgy; that almost always merely ends up at the puerile. You get there by having something you are driven to say. And then if you attempt to go edgy beyond your point you merely add distractions that hide your central point. And as [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] pointed out, The Mona Lisa isn't dangerous. But it's great art.

 

[Balesir]

I agree that a lot of what came out for Wraith represented attempts at an RPG being high art.

I also feel that as written, much of it was unplayable as a game, and that it would have been the rare group that could have treated the subject matter justly even if it was playable. Wraith therefore was less RPG as high art, than RPG book as high art where the game itself existed only in the abstract. I admire some of the books, but in practice what I saw of Wraith largely ignored artist's artistic intent and well was a bit tragic considering the text. For that matter, I feel the same about Vampire:The Masquerade and the sort of 'supers in black' and 'Machiavellian politics as game' that I saw as typical of play, and the sort of adventures written for the game didn't help it at all.

I have quoted a short extract, here, from a post that I agreed with much of, but I do have one modification to punt in.

I think a large part of the reason that many of the WoD "artistic" supplements failed as game material was that they gave very slight consideration to system. For all their fluff about "storyteller" mechanics and such, the WoD systems really don't do anything to support the (fantastic, in my view) setting concepts and themes they presented. I had some modest success running a Vampire/Faerie/Wraith game using home-brewed mechanics built around Theatrix, but I'm sure that a better system could be created with the experience we now have from later games.

Regarding erotic themes, I think these would inevitably descend into either shallow experimental relationship sessions or toe-curlingly embarrassing catastrophes if attempted with the RPG systems generally used now. The issue is essentially that the system does not deal with issues of arousal or inter-character attraction at all, so that those elements have to be supplied by player narrative and improvisation. This leads to direct player-to-player resolution, rather than resolution through the medium of the rules system; the analogy concerning lack of suitable protection I will leave for the reader's discretion to deal with...

 

[Celebrim]

I have quoted a short extract, here, from a post that I agreed with much of, but I do have one modification to punt in.

I think of it as less a modification than enlargement on a point that I didn't touch on in the midst of an already large post. It did occur to me that I might meet this objection though.

I think a large part of the reason that many of the WoD "artistic" supplements failed as game material was that they gave very slight consideration to system.

I don't mean to suggest that including violent or erotic themes is the ticket to artistic failure in an RPG. I personally think that if we could make an analogy to painting, many of the 'colon' games failed less because their subject matter was handled badly (though see 'Black Dog' games for some obvious counter examples), than because the painter's skill with a brush wasn't up to the grandness of their conception. And at times, even when the skill matched the subject matter, too little thought was made concerning the fact that the medium they were creating in was just supposed to be a storyboard for a different sort of medium entirely.

For example, the big problem with being a ghost - if you were playing a ghost well - would IMO be the extreme difficulty of actually interacting with anything at all and if at all in a rational way. And even more than the difficulty of that, would be the difficulty of actually growing, changing and maturing in a way that is natural for the living (though often painful and hard) but seems unnatural for the dead. Isn't the whole ghost mythology predicated on being eternally trapped in the past? For example, I've learned over the years that you can't give players truly free expression in creating characters, lest you end up with characters with no reason to engage in a story. Yet Wraith had a tendency to be silent on the extremely important subject of the fact that if you weren't haunting together, you weren't together at all.

It's not enough to describe with great power and emotional depth the situation for a character. You've got to describe how to use those characters and the mechanics of the game to create an ensemble story. Wraith failed to do this, and devolved in play I observed to yet another version of prototypical Camarilla centric Vamp play.

Regarding erotic themes, I think these would inevitably descend into either shallow experimental relationship sessions or toe-curlingly embarrassing catastrophes if attempted with the RPG systems generally used now. The issue is essentially that the system does not deal with issues of arousal or inter-character attraction at all, so that those elements have to be supplied by player narrative and improvisation. This leads to direct player-to-player resolution, rather than resolution through the medium of the rules system; the analogy concerning lack of suitable protection I will leave for the reader's discretion to deal with...

While I admire your optimism here, can you think of anything less essential regarding a person's sexuality than the mere mechanical measurements of attraction? How can we possibly say that's meaningful exploration of the theme? Supplying these measurements in place of narrative and improvisation, as a purely procedural resolution to the process of acquaintance, attraction and consummation tells you nothing about the characters and adds almost nothing to a game (and has other problems, like 'raped by numbers', where the system tells you that you (or your character) were taken by force and liked it). Moreover, this sort of clinical approach in my opinion would add none of the distance between the character and the person playing the character needed for honest and free exploration.

To be quite frank about it, the general MUSE population locked in their private rooms were not exploring the consequences of attraction and sexuality on their characters, they were actually engaging in sexual exploration itself and gratifying themselves. In some cases this was the equivalent of risk free pick up at a bar for people that might not feel comfortable in that situation. In a few cases this was actually acting out real erotic attraction by proxy - I new online lovers that agreed to fly to meet each other. For some of these people their constructed identities were more important to them than their real identities, which again, gets into the problem of role play when it ceases to be merely a game. Without judging these people, we need to at least recognize we are no longer talking about games in any meaningful way, but role play as an intimate act, as identity construction, and as improvised psychological therapy.

I'm not arguing that the distance isn't there because there aren't enough layers of rules to protect the players from the emotional consequences of erotic play. I'm arguing that it's not possible to have enough layers of rules to create that emotional distance. The only way to play it at an emotional distance is for it to happen off stage, and even then this is not enough if we are talking about the decision to have your character have sex with a real person's avatar - much less if that person is physically present in the room. That's not even getting into the fact that to begin with, 90% of all players are in my experience fundamentally unable to play anyone but themselves. Point is, if you are designer creating a game with heavy erotic themes, you are going to have a very hard time creating a wall between your game and reality. There won't be a sharp division between the game and a bedroom game, for better or worse, and in my experience consequently no sharp division between play and reality. You'll get actual exploration of conflict between people because of jealousies, arousal, and feelings of betrayal. Or conversely, you may get actual romance and play as a means of pair bonding. That's not really hypothetical.

Like the creator of Wraith who I feel creates this powerful setting and powerfully describes the emotions of the characters trapped within the setting, but yet doesn't necessarily describe the process of play and seems to expect it to just happen and yet be meaningful to the setting, I feel reading Monsterhearts that the designer has created skillful mechanics but neglected to describe how play is supposed to proceed in any meaningful way. I mean, I can guess based on my experience with Vamp players how it will proceed, with people either ignoring it, making light of it entirely, or else it ceasing to become play and becoming either rape by the numbers or consensual gratification in some form, but I can't really tell what the designer means to happen.

All of this is straying a bit far from the question of just nudity in art though.

 

[Umbran]

While I completely agree that D&D while creative is not art unto itself, I will say, that all of the maps I design for RPGs can certainly qualify as art, and in most cases I create the entire maps in one sitting, with no rehearsal, revisions, nor editing - not even for publisher commissions. My maps tend to be skilled one-offs in every case.

So, you are telling me that, once you set a pixel to a color, you don't change it? You never change the size or shape of a room after you first draw it? You do no touch ups to anything as you go along? Unless you never make *any* changes to *anything* once you put it in place, you are engaged in editing as you go.

If you do try to tell me that... I disbelieve.