Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9613763" data-attributes="member: 7044099">Thirsty Sword Lesbians is obviously using queer centric high-drama fiction as its root, with a dash of Monsterhearts mixed in for move inspiration. It's all about being turned on/off, messy drama, sword fighting as ways to find out people's true feelings to draw strings on them, and dives into the sort of "oh no they're really hot" villain stuff where the GM can use involuntary attraction as a potential move downside. It's a very melodramatic game, and so the romances it's going to create through its mechanics are similar. An example of how it structures the conversation is the core "Heartstring" move Entice:Under Hollow Hills is a game about relationships, but without an implicit conflict model like Monsterhearts/TSL. It's also about faeries (mostly), so you get a bunch of gorgeous fantastic high-romance nonsense like this move from the Nightmare Horse:It also has a set of "obvious plays" like Draw Someone Out, Open Up to Someone, Put Someone Off, etc - that are all built to interrogate and establish/deepen/curtail interpersonal relationships between characters. MF0: Firebrands is very explicit that each system is its own game. One of those, for instance, is A Dance, which is a conversation about the sort of very intimate things that might happen in the context of a high-drama ballroom, with questions you can choose pose each other like:There are some other games that do similar things, but one key about all of these is that in the moment the onus is always on the "target" of a move to choose the outcome. The Bakers are especially big on preserving PC vs PC consent in their core design (you see this in AW's Go Aggro, etc as well), and the designers of TSL keep that in mind too. It's on the target of Entice to decide if you're appealing to their physical or emotional sensibilities before any mechanical outcome can proceed. So if you want to design rules to push the shared conversation towards romantic implications, I think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind. Most game designs don't really support that sort of structure, or build it in, so I think mechanical support for relationships writ large much less ones that can get as complicated or easily messed up as romantic ones is left pretty absent.</blockquote>

Verification