Okay, Intimacy Moves:

Okay, Intimacy Moves:

Okay, Intimacy Moves:

This is one of those things that I’d been planning from the beginning but just wasn’t able to get into a place that I really liked how they were working. They need to be different from Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts moves because this is MORE about Intimacy than either of those games. Here’s my latest brainstorm. Needless to say, these are ideas that I’m playing with; nothing is set in stone.

Players have a new resource called Tension or Spark or something. It may replace Leverage, but I’m not positive yet. It is generated through the Express Your Love Passionately move and probably through some kind of Audience move (possibly an End of Session or Commercial Break move?). It is a shared resource; Amada and Carlos have 3 Tension between them regardless of source.

When you share a moment of intimacy (what this means will depend upon the rating of your telenovela), you empty your Tension back to zero and trigger each player’s Intimacy Move. Here’s what that looks like:

-Players read their Intimacy Move to make sure that it doesn’t change things (Maybe La Empleada keeps 1 Tension even after a moment of intimacy?)

-Lower Tension from wherever it is to Zero.

-For each point of Tension lowered, each player gets one statement (probably a sentence or two) to describe the intimacy and the surrounding scene. The two(+?) players trade off back and forth until all of the Tension has been spent.

-The consequences of the Intimacy Move of each player are completed

Play resumes.

So how does this differ from just regular play? That sounds like it’s just tying the hands of the players!

First off, the players have this moment. Nobody else gets to interrupt it (except maybe for cheering… Maybe the Audience can grant an extra Tension during the moment if we get enough?) This includes the GM! No sneaky, terrible, horrible things until after the kiss is done!

But after? Well, the GM gets to make a move once the moment of Intimacy is completed. If you want your characters to have their True Love’s Kiss, you’re going to need to build up intimacy to make sure the moment is just right.

Thoughts?

Note: A big part of this brainstorm came from me seeing an episode of one of my favorite telenovelas where two characters FINALLY came together after something like 20 episodes of dancing around each other. It also owes some definite roots to Nathan Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling’s Heat mechanic.

7 thoughts on “Okay, Intimacy Moves:”

  1. Initially it sounds…complicated? I’m not personally a big fan of tracking shared/symmetric resources like that, though that may just be a bookkeeping thing, not necessarily a play experience thing. Though, as you alluded to above, the possibility of more than two characters sharing a moment of intimacy further complicates the shared pool, maybe.

    If you were already considering Tension replacing Leverage, maybe it could go the other way? Like…the intimacy move process you described, but fueled by Leverage. The moment of intimacy forces all Leverage to be spent, so the character with the most Leverage has the most control over the scene…something like that. And maybe the intimacy move has a roll that gives somebody a Leverage back after a moment of intimacy?!

    Ehh…I’m getting in the weeds now.

    I at first balked at Tension replacing Leverage, but now I’m kinda liking the idea of some combined thing that could act as either. Emotional currency that can be spent either on influence or sharing. That’s a pretty big shift, though.

    Is the idea with Tension that you’d need to meet a certain threshold before being able to trigger an intimacy move? Or more like it can trigger whenever, but the amount of built-up Tension kind of describes the epicness of the moment?

  2. It sounds like an interesting idea, and reading you go into it a bit more on the discord helped me grasp it better. I think the way its written is a little confusing as to how it works and how it would interact with the mechanics already in the game

  3. This is definitely all just Wild Ideas that I’m playing with! I haven’t gone through a large process of thinking through the implications that come from it yet!

    I’m torn on how Leverage works and am playing with it which is part of the reason that I had some pause related to Tension and Leverage both existing… I feel on a certain level that spending Leverage to take advantage of someone also is betraying their trust in some way that effects your Tension?

    The core idea, Rob Abrazado, is that the moment of intimacy can happen at any time, but the amount of built up Tension helps push that scene better/more romantic before the reality of the ever churning telenovela takes back over (and possibly give you bigger Intimacy Move effects?). So if you don’t have much Tension, then maybe a kiss is just a kiss. Cool. Something triggers. But if there’s a kiss that’s been building up for 4 sessions? Let’s give it a little space to breathe and revel in it a little bit.

  4. Gotcha; thanks for the clarification. I do like the notion of the two currencies, and like how using Leverage could lead to Tension. That feels pretty beefy. I make a face when I think about tracking them, but the idea feels cool. 🙂 Hrm…

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