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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6503573" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree that the comparison to realistic combat is apt, but I don't take that comparison the direction you do.  Not only is the actual experience of a ruptured spleen something most players want to avoid, but many - if not most - seem to also want to avoid dwelling on the imagined experience of a ruptured spleen.  Indeed, any graphic fetishizing of inflicting violence on persons and exploring that would probably strike a great many posters as being at least as problematic and disturbing as intense fascination with sexual matters at the gaming table.  This tends to be doubly true because the two things often seem to go hand in hand.  I note for example a general lack of complex rules for inflicting torture or having torture inflicted on you in most mainstream games.  I think this is true for two reasons pertinent to the subject, first, that most games don't want to suggest that exploring being tortured or inflicting torture is a routine aspect of play to be played out even in the abstract.  And second, that most game systems tend to want to avoid abrogation of player free will as a routine aspect of play. GMs forcing players into sexual situations and particular sexual outcomes, or players forcing other players, because the rules say so is something that I'd think most people would want to avoid however abstractly we resolve the situation.  I'm at a complete loss to imagine what sort of mechanics you are suggesting here, and without something concrete in mind, I can't really judge where your are going with this thought.  What mechanics do you need that aren't just special applications of more general social mechanics?  Many systems already allow characters to have a special 'attractive' benefit that smooth some aspect of social interaction with potential romantic or erotic partners, as a nod to the fact that being attractive tends to affect other sorts of interactions. I tend to be of the opinion that detailed mechanical process resolution of social situations is an anathema to good role playing.  I've written essays as to why in the past I ought to dig up, but the basic idea is that since violent combat cannot be played out at the table, it is made more cinematic and more concrete by increasing detail in the rules (provided they don't slow play down too much).  Conversely, social interactions - actual conversations, for example - are made less concrete and less easy to imagine when we add increasing detail to the rules because you can actually do them at the table.  Assuming we regard sex in a similar category to graphic violence as something we prefer to not having acted out at the table, your extra rules won't make the thing more abstract but rather less so.What part of the process of romance or sexuality do you feel the need to get more concrete details regarding via rules because you feel they are missing from your gaming?  Nudity per se doesn't bother me at all - it's usage I approve of in art like the Sistene Chapel or Schindler's List to name a couple that immediately come to mind.  I've got no real problem with locker rooms or doctor's offices.  I've got two kids.  I used to go caving, and a certain clinical attitude regarding the human body is sometimes required in mixed groups that would be immodest and inappropriate in other settings.  But the fact that I usually see nudity coming along as a marker of a raft of other attitudes I find problematic does bother me, and generally it's presence in gaming material (and elsewhere) has not been marker of maturity and health but rather much more often the converse.  Whether it means I'm sensitive or not, I find it's touching on subject matter that requires a deft artistic touch whether we mean it as marker of primitiveness, poverty, innocence, exploitation, shame, helplessness, motherhood, or eroticism or some complicated mixture of all that.Still, I can think of worse things to be accused of than sensitivity.  Surely if censure is due to any group, it would be with regard to their lack of sensitivity and attention to nuance, rather than their abundance of it.</blockquote>

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