Silverblade The Ench
First Post
Glasgow, Scotland, Saturday night, Sauchiehall Street!
or
could be goblins I suppose: Land of the Midnight Scum!
Hehe!!
Mature content
- Thread starter HardcoreDandDGirl
- Start date
Glasgow, Scotland, Saturday night, Sauchiehall Street!
or
could be goblins I suppose: Land of the Midnight Scum!
Hehe!!
DreadPirateMurphy
Explorer
Any topic is "mature" if it makes people uncomfortable. Standards are going to vary significantly. Nudity, alcohol, and violence are examples of topics that trigger very different reactions in different parts of the world.
The risk that a company takes when it publishes mature content is that it will trigger an outcry, which is rarely profitable and often requires the company to jump through hoops. WotC is owned by a TOY company, so is it any surprise that their books on good and evil are cartoony? It has to be, lest the company be accused of promoting anything controversial. It doesn't matter that there is a sizeable S&M community in the world -- in D&D, pain is something used by the bad guys.
I voted, "Maybe, if it were well written," but quite frankly, it would have to be fairly innovative to be worth paying money for it. Applying sex or gore to otherwise mundane gaming tropes doesn't qualify.
The risk that a company takes when it publishes mature content is that it will trigger an outcry, which is rarely profitable and often requires the company to jump through hoops. WotC is owned by a TOY company, so is it any surprise that their books on good and evil are cartoony? It has to be, lest the company be accused of promoting anything controversial. It doesn't matter that there is a sizeable S&M community in the world -- in D&D, pain is something used by the bad guys.
I voted, "Maybe, if it were well written," but quite frankly, it would have to be fairly innovative to be worth paying money for it. Applying sex or gore to otherwise mundane gaming tropes doesn't qualify.
Katemare
First Post
Don't go pitchforks and torches on me, but Book of Erotic Fantasy is what brought me into D&D. Before it accidentally got in my paws, I thought that D&D is only about solving problems with force. "Slay that group of monster because <insert blunt reason here>" and stuff. BoEF showed me that how D&D can handle completely different games, how naturally game mechanics can resolve non-combat situations and how non-standard races aren't just dummies for slaughter.
I don't know about the game balance there (I didn't know D&D mechanics at all when I read it), but it seemed mature in a good way, aimed at adult-mind audience. It least it did me a great good of drawing my attention to D&D.
(It's just a description of my life experience and isn't an attempt to defend BoEF. Strictly IMHO.)
I don't know about the game balance there (I didn't know D&D mechanics at all when I read it), but it seemed mature in a good way, aimed at adult-mind audience. It least it did me a great good of drawing my attention to D&D.
(It's just a description of my life experience and isn't an attempt to defend BoEF. Strictly IMHO.)
Nightchilde-2
First Post
This. While Vile Darkness and Exalted Deeds fit into my game quite well, uttercrap like the BoEF has no place at my table. None. Whatsoever. All such activities take place "off-camera."
Now, if my group were all hawt gamer chixxorz, maybe..however, as it stands, it's a total sausage-fest.
Also, if you want "mature," how about F.A.T.A.L.?
Kichwas
Half-breed
I'm not so sure there. Smut and tabloid seem to persist on a notion that an outry is exactly what drives up profits.
If they burn a 1000 of your books, they had to buy them first in order to burn them.
- course while that might help its own sales, it might do so at injury to the sales of other products in the line it claims association with.
Obviously this won't ever exist under the GSL, and 4E has no OGL, so its simply off the table for that. All you can hope for is a new Book of Erotic Fantasy under the OGL that uses that mimic elements of Pathfinder.
- Or something produced for some other major system that negotiates it way through the sensible heads or uses its own original system.
Celebrim
Legend
My games tend to be PG to PG-13, mostly because I find that face to face, everyone gets a little uncomfortable with too much intensity. I'm quite happy to role-play an NPC being attracted to one of the PC's, much less so extensively describing a sexual act to anyone (with the possible exception of my spouse, and then in private and not as a part of D&D).
Which isn't to say that I think my games are immature. The first time you ride into the big city in my game, you are going to pass under the rotting corpses of bandits and other criminals - and that's the city of 'the good guys'. If you go into a lair and slay a tribe of goblins, at the back of the lair you are quite likely to find a mass of huddled goblin children. I feel free to introduce subjects like slavery, brutality, genocide, infanticide, domestic abuse, murder, racism, madness, and all sorts of other real world problems into my games.
Quite the contrary, my suspicion is that a certain sort of immaturity is involved in running an X-rated game. There is alot going on in any world with real evil in it that could be depicted over the table in an X-rated fashion, but in general can be communicated over the table in much less purient or voyeristic ways (clinicly, indirectly, mechanically, by inference, etc.). That fact the an NPC has been raped need not be communicated in graphic detail since I can rely on the imagination of the player to fill in the details that they think they need to understand and respond to the situation. Torture need not be lingered on, nor an evil rite be described with an extensive narrative. It's enough to suggest the problem, and leave the PC's to infer or not infer as they wish just exactly what happened.
I voted, "Think of the children!", even though that's pretty far from what I mean. It's just the closest to what I think. I really don't think there is a subject that an 'adult' can and should deal with frankly, that a 13 or 14 year can't and shouldn't deal with. It's that I think that there is a line beyond which depictions of evil and horror become voyeristic, titillating, crass, and indeed juvenile. I don't really want to run a sesssion that is 'torture porn', 'murder porn', or the public version of a bedroom fantasy, because I don't think that would be a terribly mature approach to serious 'adult' matters.
My problem with anything labeled 'mature' or 'adult' content is that I strongly suspect that it wouldn't approach the subject maturely. In marketing, I always associate such terms with juvenile smut. Pornography is always called 'adult', but generally is consumed by curious 13 year old boys as much as anyone else and in any event hardly depicts a mature and responsible approach to human sexuality.
I don't necessarily have a problem with a group running an R-rated game provided everyone in it is comfortable with it and handles the subject maturely, and certainly if depicted on a movie screen my games would be R-rated for violence alone. But I have a hard time imagining what sort of 'crunch' you'd need that would be R-rated. I could have rules for human sacrifice that because they are clinical and mechanistic would be no more R-rated (and probably less) than a textbook discussing stone age European religion, and I wouldn't see the need to label such content any more 'mature' than any game that features role-playing sword swinging mercenaries that kill things and take their stuff. So before something would be 'R-rated', it would have to be R-rated because of its fluff - meaning that it would have to treat human sacrifice in something other than text-book terms or that it would feel the need to graphically describe execution methods in a step by step manner.
I just don't see the need for that sort of fluff in a game book.
Some one mentioned 'Black Dog Games'. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Content wise, it wasn't that different than what White Wolf normally dealt with. It was just presented a good deal less maturely than usual. In fact, the biggest problem I had with say 'Vampire: The Masquerade' is that however mature the original intentions might have been (as described by the original game book), the game as played was rarely very mature at all. VtM in play tended to make evil banal, and to brush over anything that might cause cognitive dissonance in a game of sexy black wearing superheroes of the night as played by a bunch of horny nerds. More graphic content would not in itself made the game more mature, any more than making a movie more graphic makes it more mature.
Which isn't to say that I think my games are immature. The first time you ride into the big city in my game, you are going to pass under the rotting corpses of bandits and other criminals - and that's the city of 'the good guys'. If you go into a lair and slay a tribe of goblins, at the back of the lair you are quite likely to find a mass of huddled goblin children. I feel free to introduce subjects like slavery, brutality, genocide, infanticide, domestic abuse, murder, racism, madness, and all sorts of other real world problems into my games.
Quite the contrary, my suspicion is that a certain sort of immaturity is involved in running an X-rated game. There is alot going on in any world with real evil in it that could be depicted over the table in an X-rated fashion, but in general can be communicated over the table in much less purient or voyeristic ways (clinicly, indirectly, mechanically, by inference, etc.). That fact the an NPC has been raped need not be communicated in graphic detail since I can rely on the imagination of the player to fill in the details that they think they need to understand and respond to the situation. Torture need not be lingered on, nor an evil rite be described with an extensive narrative. It's enough to suggest the problem, and leave the PC's to infer or not infer as they wish just exactly what happened.
I voted, "Think of the children!", even though that's pretty far from what I mean. It's just the closest to what I think. I really don't think there is a subject that an 'adult' can and should deal with frankly, that a 13 or 14 year can't and shouldn't deal with. It's that I think that there is a line beyond which depictions of evil and horror become voyeristic, titillating, crass, and indeed juvenile. I don't really want to run a sesssion that is 'torture porn', 'murder porn', or the public version of a bedroom fantasy, because I don't think that would be a terribly mature approach to serious 'adult' matters.
My problem with anything labeled 'mature' or 'adult' content is that I strongly suspect that it wouldn't approach the subject maturely. In marketing, I always associate such terms with juvenile smut. Pornography is always called 'adult', but generally is consumed by curious 13 year old boys as much as anyone else and in any event hardly depicts a mature and responsible approach to human sexuality.
I don't necessarily have a problem with a group running an R-rated game provided everyone in it is comfortable with it and handles the subject maturely, and certainly if depicted on a movie screen my games would be R-rated for violence alone. But I have a hard time imagining what sort of 'crunch' you'd need that would be R-rated. I could have rules for human sacrifice that because they are clinical and mechanistic would be no more R-rated (and probably less) than a textbook discussing stone age European religion, and I wouldn't see the need to label such content any more 'mature' than any game that features role-playing sword swinging mercenaries that kill things and take their stuff. So before something would be 'R-rated', it would have to be R-rated because of its fluff - meaning that it would have to treat human sacrifice in something other than text-book terms or that it would feel the need to graphically describe execution methods in a step by step manner.
I just don't see the need for that sort of fluff in a game book.
Some one mentioned 'Black Dog Games'. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Content wise, it wasn't that different than what White Wolf normally dealt with. It was just presented a good deal less maturely than usual. In fact, the biggest problem I had with say 'Vampire: The Masquerade' is that however mature the original intentions might have been (as described by the original game book), the game as played was rarely very mature at all. VtM in play tended to make evil banal, and to brush over anything that might cause cognitive dissonance in a game of sexy black wearing superheroes of the night as played by a bunch of horny nerds. More graphic content would not in itself made the game more mature, any more than making a movie more graphic makes it more mature.
Ghostwind
First Post
Mature material can be done right if approached in an adult manner. When we wrote Darkwalkers: The Evil Within, we had to present developing evil characters in a way that made sense and touched on the resons why they were evil rather than just handwaving and saying, "they're evil, get over it." The end result has been very well received.
RPGNow.com - DragonWing Games - Darkwalkers: The Evil Within
RPGNow.com - DragonWing Games - Darkwalkers: The Evil Within
Celebrim
Legend
The problem with this is that it's probably going to a personal choice of the DM that varies from campaign to campaign.
I mean I could list mine, but what really would that prove?
fey->goblin
fey->elf
fey->human
fey->orine
fey->dwarf
goblin->elf
goblin->human
elf->human
At some time in the past, but not possible with modern races...
human -> giant (offspring are 'hill giants').
If I state that, does that mean that every campaign worlds hill giants are decended from a stone giant human pairing?
Again, this is something that varies by campaign. Who needs rules for campaign specific fluff?
Again, this is campaign specific fluff. IMC, elves and most fey are nearly asexual (they just don't really have alot of interest in it), humans are well human, orine are extremely sexual but only with their own kind, and dwarves, idreth, and goblins generally either consider it a reproductive chore or have emotions regarding it that are difficult to relate to human emotional frames.
Generally, 1 in 6. Less if the character has low health or older. More if they use fertility drugs, participate in a fertility rite, recieve a blessing, or otherwise take steps to insure fertility.
The '1 in 6' dates back to 1st edition. I've considered using a Fortitude save (failure indicates no pregnancy) for 3rd edition, but it never came up (fewer teenage boys and girls in my more recent games).
Are available. Abortiflects are generally illegal and must be purchased on the black market, because they tend to create some really nasty undead (like Mewlings, for example). Of course, that isn't generally known - you'd have to make a DC 24 Knowledge (Arcane) check to know why Abortiflects are illegal. Most, even those enforcing the law, assume that the primary reason is that a bad batch can poison the mother. This assumption is do to the fact that the society generally doesn't talk about such things, and so forgets over time why it made the rules in the first place.
I actually wrote this up for 1st edition, when in an extended campaign the PC's started getting married and producing offspring. It mainly focused on generating the attributes for the offspring at every stage of life, from infancy to its adult (randomly generated) attributes. It included modifiers to the stats depending on the child's astrological sign - Pisces for instance got generally negative modifiers but an increased chance of natural psionic ability. It's not that hard to come up with, and there are tables for randomly generating appearance and personality traits in the 1st edition DMG - and now that I think about it, the astrological signs modified the throws on the personality tables as well. (Hmmm... that's pretty cool, I forgot I'd done that; I may have to see if someone in my old group still has a copy of those rules.)
I've always assumed that for quarter breeds, say a Quarter-Elf, there was a 50% chance of being equivalent to a full blood (though you'd qualify for the Trait 'Elven Heritage') and a 50% chance of being equivalent to a half-blood. For say 1/8th blooded, there'd be a 75% chance of being equivalent to full blood, and a 25% chance of being equivalent to half-blood, and so forth. That works out well because there isn't alot of granularity between 'half' and full-blood usually.
I've addressed all these questions on my own as they came up. The above is I think 'grandma-friendly'. Why would I need a source book for it? More to the point, why would I need a 'mature' source book for it and even if there was one why would I believe that the answers it gave were anything but specific to the author's campaign? What range of sexual preference elves might have is a very different sort of question than, 'What is the BAB of a 4HD humanoid?' It's much more like, 'What percentage of governments are patriarchal monarchies?' I don't consider questions like that to be something a source book can answer in a general fashion, since its going to very so much from campaign world to campaign world according to DM preference.
Silverblade The Ench
First Post
"Real" horrible stuff is partially what I play D&D to get away from.
Mature doesn't have to mean "real-life horrible stuff that messes you up".
As a DM I love over the top violence and mayhem, coarse langauge is a norm in my locale', and I don't think when someone's trying to gut you, you'd say:
"Oh goodness, don't stick me with that!"
No bloody way, lol. You'd be too busy to say anything or calling him a rampant goblin bodger!
Over the top violence is fun, it's not *real*. Arms and limbs get whacked off...nuts get kicked (or chopped off, long story about a drow swashbuckler nicknamed "Sack Slasher"...'nuff said!!)
Well all that goes on in RL but in D&D, it's not real, it's fun.
See "Conan the Destroyer" for great, over the top, fun, D&D-style battles!
prostitutes, boozing, gambling, drugs, weird cults and fetishes are par-for-the-course in D&D!
Hey, why do you think heroes go into bars, just for a JOB?! Get real!!!! lol
You know that "gimp" scene in "Pulp Fiction"? Kind of makes me think of many D&D back-alley dives, muhaha!
heroes coming back to town, get laid, gamble and booze the night away cause it's fun!
There's no TV, few folk induge in politics (too damned dangerous!), religion or arcane mysteries (booooring!), and even those that do also like more mundane vices.
There's no TV, no internet, no...D&D! *gasps in horror!*
So what do folk do?
Explains the birth rate, don't it?
Sadism etc I abhor, so just desrcribe the scenario/basics, often, the imagination IS much better and all that's needed.
Fear and horror were well described and used in the original Ravenloft.
Horror is a LOT more than just "Hannibal Lecktor" stuff. You go out in some of the eerie places in RL and you'll get the creeps, all right.
"Mature" doesn't have to mean "Purile". And "mature" is usually just normal, believable fun
Mature doesn't have to mean "real-life horrible stuff that messes you up".
As a DM I love over the top violence and mayhem, coarse langauge is a norm in my locale', and I don't think when someone's trying to gut you, you'd say:
"Oh goodness, don't stick me with that!"
No bloody way, lol. You'd be too busy to say anything or calling him a rampant goblin bodger!
Over the top violence is fun, it's not *real*. Arms and limbs get whacked off...nuts get kicked (or chopped off, long story about a drow swashbuckler nicknamed "Sack Slasher"...'nuff said!!)
Well all that goes on in RL but in D&D, it's not real, it's fun.
See "Conan the Destroyer" for great, over the top, fun, D&D-style battles!
prostitutes, boozing, gambling, drugs, weird cults and fetishes are par-for-the-course in D&D!
Hey, why do you think heroes go into bars, just for a JOB?! Get real!!!! lol
You know that "gimp" scene in "Pulp Fiction"? Kind of makes me think of many D&D back-alley dives, muhaha!
heroes coming back to town, get laid, gamble and booze the night away cause it's fun!
There's no TV, few folk induge in politics (too damned dangerous!), religion or arcane mysteries (booooring!), and even those that do also like more mundane vices.
There's no TV, no internet, no...D&D! *gasps in horror!*
So what do folk do?
Explains the birth rate, don't it?
Sadism etc I abhor, so just desrcribe the scenario/basics, often, the imagination IS much better and all that's needed.
Fear and horror were well described and used in the original Ravenloft.
Horror is a LOT more than just "Hannibal Lecktor" stuff. You go out in some of the eerie places in RL and you'll get the creeps, all right.
"Mature" doesn't have to mean "Purile". And "mature" is usually just normal, believable fun
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