The Wizard’s intimacy move! I’m hoping you guys will help me unpack it a little bit, I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around it.
Let me set the stage a bit. Our Fae, from the Court of Bacchanalian, has a stalker- some guy who’s got the wrong idea and giving her all kinds of unwelcome attention and gifts and what not.
During the course of the game, Urban Shadowy things happened, my Wizard got attacked by a vampire, like you do, and took a wound.
In another scene The Fae used Nature’s Caress to heal the Wizard’s harm, and no simple touch would do! The Fae chose to deliver the caress with a kiss, which we decided triggered our intimacy moves.
In this moment, the Wizard discovered that he did care about the Fae! and so, from now until the Fae gets some intimacy somewhere else, they have -1 ongoing to Escape.
Enter our stalker a few scenes later. If the situation gets out of hand, and the Fae wants to take advantage of an opening and bug out… they are going to have a harder time then they would otherwise.
What does that look like in the fiction? What is it about being intimate with a Wizard that makes it harder to get out of trouble?
From the Wizard’s point of view I can maybe see it pushing the trope that the Wizard would be better off alone and not caring about anybody! Everyone he cares about ends up in trouble they can’t get out of. On the other hand, I’m having a little trouble imagining the mechanism that causes this? What has it looked like in your games?
People that get close to the Wizard end up in troublesome situations. I’d use any miss on an Escape after Wizard intimacy to bring in forces that are looking to hurt or punish the Wizard through the people the Wizard cares about. 😀
On a roleplay-side I could see that as the wizards are so frail, rare, care requiring that they magically tie others to them and they just can’t pull away….?
“I don’t know, there’s something about you that makes me want to nurture you….” 😀
Our MC, Rachelle Shelkey, distilled down in a conversation this morning, what it was about the move that was sticking out for us in our game last night:
“…aside from [the Wizard], all the PCs (and therefore everyone this move applies to) are women. This means that women are going to be made victims because of the emotional choices of a man.”
Not that it is necessarily going to be a problem, or that we’re going to change anything, but it is something we’re going to have a conversation with everyone about and make sure we’re interested in exploring that trope.
Rob Deobald – Ah, that’s a problem! Yeah, I would maybe just write a custom move for The Wizard to avoid that unfortunate situation…