How explicit are your sex moves?
When you engage an Apocalypse World sex move, or any other game’s “intimacy” move where it means sexual contact, how explicit do you get about what’s happening?
For my own part, I haven’t played out too many of these. I don’t have enough instances to say how I generally handle it. But the way I feel like I’ve done it the most, and the way I’m probably most comfortable with, is typified by a scene between my Fae and Jeffrey Dieterle’s Mortal in Shane Liebling’s Monsterhearts game we played a while back.
Josef (if I remember his name right) the Mortal was an immigrant from Poland and a Christian, with a very close, very traditional family. He was innocent. My Fae (can’t remember her name) was the spirit of the free-love / get-high / drop-out 60s hippies (who occasionally went dormant and lost her memories when things got repressive in the culture). Oh, and Josef was a virgin. For character reasons, it was important to me to know in broad terms, what intimacy between them looked like.
We talked it through without roleplaying it out, to roughly characterize the sex. If I remember correctly, we decided my character led, and gently pushed him as far as he was comfortable with, which was great in the moment but freaked him out later. (Correct me if I’m wrong, Jeff.)
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So my answer to my own question is, I assess whether there’s anything I need to learn about the characters from hearing details, and get just to those level of details. In some cases it may as little as be seeing the morning after. I can’t imagine I’d need to know about explicit acts, unless they had become plot relevant, or if it would really matter to a certain character to do a certain sex act.
Of course, this was a private game in a mostly-private place with good friends. I expect for many people, what they’re comfortable with would depend on context. I still think this would be my approach in most contexts. But if I were engaging in a streaming game, or maybe if I were feeling really uncomfortable with a certain table (though that almost never happens to me, which my being cis/straight/heterosexual/white probably helps with), I could see going for less detail, or maybe avoiding these topics at all.
In my games sex is almost non-existent. I can’t remember a single instance in a decade. I simply don’t find it interesting for a game. The sex moves sort of put me off AW.
Not that I’m saying there is anything wrong with it. I’m sort of an emotional coward when it comes to rpg.
Your characterization is accurate! But I was Lucasz, and you were… Autumn? April? Something with an A and maybe a time element.
Man, that was a fun game, and probably my favorite fucked up romance plot.
I think rembering they are intimacy moves and less sex moves was a great boon for me. We had an “in the foxhole, we might be dying” moment where characters got emotionally vulnerable. But as the skins involved were the Battlebabe and the Solace… Kind of a wash
Generally in MH I find I go for a veil if the intimacy is headed to sexual activity
Thanks for characterizing Poland 😉
As I play I don’t shy away from saying what happens in sex act, but I’m not into describing the sex act. I definitely don’t describe it for pleasure (mine or other players), describing anything is for giving context of what and why and how happened.
It’s more about deciding are characters having sex? (important, because mechanics). If yes, than what’s the context? Is it important enough to describe to say anything more?
In one game there was a driver who was kidnapped by a woman chopper, and if I remember correctly seduced her so she would let him go. I didn’t intend to describe it, but when the player made a roll, it was a miss! (On a miss, you gotta go: take -1 ongoing,
until you prove that it’s not like they own you or nothing.)
Before the roll it was supposed to be pretty casual – after the roll I had to ask a bunch of questions: “So you’re having sex on this dirty blanket in her tent, and something happened. It’s different somehow. Why is that? How does she own you right now?”
That’s amazing, Aleksandra.
Sometimes it’s pretty explicit. Think erotica made for a woman’s gaze rather than the typical het-male gaze, and you’re probably close to what we would sometimes do. There was a softness to it, and maybe a little cheesiness (both myself and one of my players work in audiobooks, and that work almost always ends up being erotica, so we have this purple prose spinning around in our heads), but it was reasonably graphic.
I’d say that our intent with these scenes was less about finding out things about the characters, or even establishing plot, and more about creating feelings and emotions*. We wanted to tell hot love stories and weren’t shy about going there with each other. In short, one of our goals in playing the game was to turn each other on, at least a little bit, and that takes…I want to say trust, but also something entirely different too. A willingness and abandon I guess. But each player’s individual involvement varied; my audiobook friend and I are pretty familiar with this stuff and since we work together, our wavelength was good…her Mortal’s relationship with my Serpentine NPC was pretty hot. The dudes in the group needed more veils, but even then, we were into pushing boundaries a little bit…one of my cis-het dude friends was really into playing his pansexual gender-fluid fae, and I’m pretty familiar with trans erotica, so we pulled from that a lot.
(It’s maybe worth noting that although we were all on board for this, they leaned on me a lot to make it go…getting hot and sweaty with my NPCs was easier for them than getting it on with each other’s characters, though eventually we did develop a Mortal-Wyrm-Serpentine love triangle that was pretty fun and involved two PCs).
* I’ll also add that although nothing depicted in the sex scenes was anything that couldn’t have been summarized later after a series of cuts and veils, showing rather than telling the dirty bits definitely changed the emotional texture of the game. And plot/characterization did emerge. I mean, we were basically substituting sex scenes for combat scenes.
Thanks, Renee. I meant to mention in the OP that I could imagine some people playing with these moves explicitly to turn each other on, which is cool!
I think of it like an action scene: how does it reveal the characters and their relationship? But that said, mostly when I play with folks the veils come out pretty quickly! I’m OK with that, but I need to get better at figuring out what the questions I have are, and how to ask them in a way that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. It’s generally pretty in the PG direction, though: intimation that this is happening followed by “let’s look at the sex moves and see where that takes things subsequently”.
Robert Bohl It’s pretty fun, but it’s one of those situations where everyone has to be pretty okay with blushing in front of others. Talking sexy to each other in a group setting, among people who aren’t otherwise romantically involved, is a skill we don’t practice much. 🙂
My big introduction to it was playtesting Paul Czege’s Bacchanal back in its earliest stages, which remains the most important and eye-opening game session of my life.
It varies a whole lot for me. It greatly depends on the people I’m with and the context. I usually don’t push much and try to give people easy outs to stop and cut or veil as they desire. But, when it happens, I’ll also happily play along and enthusiastically encourage (making eye contact, nodding, rolling hand to indicate bring it on, words of encouragement or curiosity). I want to let them know, that I’m not only okay with the direction they are heading, but I am in full support of it.
For me, this happens much more in Monsterhearts than in Apocolypse World. The buy-in and expectations are different, and I think that makes a world of difference.
It depends on who is at my table.
I use X cards when running games that can stray into uncomfortable territory (so far this has just been AW because we’re relatively new to PbtA games).
We had a one-shot using the Sunken Sydney starter that didn’t have any sex in it at all, and another all-day one-shot (something like 8 or 9 hours of gaming that day) that had some sex in it.
The way I handled it in that game was by asking if sex occurred and having the move trigger. Didn’t really describe the act itself because it was a Brainer specifically using sex to brain scan an NPC. The funny thing about that game was that the most intimacy that occurred in it was between the Brainer and a grotesque, and it primarily took place in the maelstrom.
Edit: That being said, I have done one-on-one games with my wife that strayed into far more explicit description, but that’s a level of comfort that is hard to replicate at a table with friends who are primarily gaming buddies.
Yoshi Creelman this is me making eye contact and nodding with your description.
I agree that I see it more in Monsterhearts, too, than in any other PbtA game.
That’s been my experience, too. I remember only one sex move I’ve ever done, and I did it to give a gift (as a hardholder) to an NPC. I don’t remember why.
I will say as much as I love the word frottage I should probably not drop the veil as early as I do…
I think the mechanics in AW says that stating having sex is enough to trigger the move. Of course we need some context (who were when), but details are up to the people at the table.
You specifically asked about AW derived games with sex moves – and I can see that I am more exlicit in different games. And I am more explicit with different games, where sex is more central topic. (anyway I like more problems made by “she slept with him” than describing “she slept with him”).
Harmony the fae
That’s it!
It happened in an AW game I ran, and once there’d been sufficient lead-up, some suggestive foreplay and an agreement that they were going to do the deed, we did a fade to black and came back in with one of the characters looking for her other boot.
We’d set the stakes beforehand, and the act was sorta-kinda sealing the deal, a gesture of trust that one of the characters would follow through. That said, it wasn’t just a trade, as it showed that both of them had found themselves isolated and felt a need to be with someone as the surrounding situation escalated.
I’m another of those people who never described it or plays it out.
Im with Aleksandra Sontowska ; the focus is on “do you enter into this level of intimacy together and if so how does that change things?” and never on “who puts what body part where?” I’ve done the “let’s write shared erotica on this MUSH!” thing, but I have zero interest in blow-by-blow descriptions of sex at the table.
Yup. Trusting someone that much in a place like Apocalypse World is an important statement. That’s why special moves are so important to the game. Indispensable, I would argue.
We have sex / love scenes in our games. We are all old friends (males and females) and we have no problems about. Powerful, moving scenes are pretty common, whether they are violent, self-sacrificing, horrorific (with gore and or extreme victim punishment) and of course heroic, joyful, or loveful too. We like extreme situations, so we liked sex moves too, while playing AW. However, it’s very rare (if not specifically important for the plot), to tell details about the sex act, so we never go in details like “he puts it there, she jumped on it, he stayed inside…”. Usually we just ask if the players are aiming to something specific (why are you having sex? Love? Leverage? Submission? Power show? Wanting a baby? Keep fear/loneliness/desperation away for a while?).
I think I tried more or less all of the possible spectrum from “…and they do it. Next morning…” to very explicit, detailed scenes.
Always try not to make anyone uncomfortable. Or make them a little bit uncomfortable, just to give them a little bit of extra spice, as you would do with any other kind of emotion. Many TV series try to shock us a little bit for narrative purposes, but not everyone is in for Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale. Know your fellow players and do not go “all in” (pun intended).
I just realized that pretty much all of our AW sex has happened, or been recognized, after the fact, probably mostly owing to new players not really being fully aware that it’s a thing that can actually happen, and have mechanical consequences. It’s usually after a time when sex could have occurred passes, and someone asks after the fact if the characters got together.
(The last instance was our Hocus whipping his followers into a frenzy that kicked off an all-night orgy under the full moon, with our Brainer hanging out with the cult. Asked if she stayed around for the festivities, she said hell yeah, asked if she and the Hocus had sex, and after reminding them about the special moves, they were both like, oh, yeah, totally, we got our Weird on together for sure.)