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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6500968" data-attributes="member: 4937">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 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. 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.</blockquote>

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