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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4699473" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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