How explicit are your sex moves?
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.
