Dealing with Adult Issues in Game

[acrosome]

So... less healthy females are more likely to get pregnant? No. Unhealthy and/or physiologically stressed women have trouble conceiving, and healthy ones conceive more easily. Getting pregnant is how such an organism is supposed to function, so it is indicative of health. They should get pregnant if they succeed in their HT check. I'm not sure where you and Mark got the idea that it's the opposite. And taking birth control improves her chances of getting pregnant? I think you failed your Writing check regarding that or something. :)

Also, your ages for STDs are backwards, at least in the modern age of antibiotics. The highest rates are men aged 20-24. Young people. That's just a simple google search, brother. Because (in liberal societies) young people are more likely to have multiple partners, whereas older people are more likely to be in something-approaching-monogamous relationships. (Though rates in older people are certainly on the rise.) Rates of incurable stuff like herpes might be expected to be age-dependent in the way you say, but the classic and more common gonorrhea/chlamydia/syphilis triad is the opposite.

Honestly, unless a male has the Sterile quirk he probably doesn't need to roll against HT for an attempted impregnation. It's the woman's reproductive process that can go awry in many different ways; the male's is pretty reliable, outside of the obvious exceptions. I wouldn't even bother.

Frankly, your players' obsession with roleplaying sex in such detail is kind of adolescent. (Are they in fact adolescent? Because if so, hey, go for it- whatever floats your boat.) I mean, sure, I could see it coming up now and then, but in general would think that one could find more interesting themes. Or maybe it just seems tawdry to me. Or, worse, mundane.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Frankly, your players' obsession with roleplaying sex in such detail is kind of adolescent. (Are they in fact adolescent? Because if so, hey, go for it- whatever floats your boat.) I mean, sure, I could see it coming up now and then, but in general would think that one could find better themes.

I don't agree with that part. Down in San Diego my campaigns ranged from G to X—but I had to give specific instructions to get anything short of PG. And my players were not adolescents; at the start they were largely in their twenties, and now most of them are in their forties.

We weren't necessarily looking at pregnancy, though that was an issue in some campaigns. We definitely weren't looking at STDs. But we had a number of scenes where the explicit details were portrayed. And we had even more where the occurrence of sexual interactions was important.

What I did find over time was that giving explicit details only worked for specific treatments of sex. It could be used for bawdy humor; or for horror; or for cold clinical detail, if it was a medical or legal situation. If I wanted a romantic effect, a soft focus worked better. But whether sex occurred was still important, as it tends to define the state of a romantic relationship in important ways.

I'm not disagreeing with any of your preceding statements, which strike me as quite sound.

[edk926]

Really what happens afterward is only relevant in a long-term, long timeline campaign. Otherwise, you can just waive it off as "She wasn't fertile then" or "If they had an STD, you wouldn't find out until after the story ends anyway because it's one of those with an incubation period" or "meh".

[hal]

For what it is worth, most of the campaigns I've ever run for my group involves bawdy behavior from time to time, but rarely as the primary focus of events. I've a wife who games, and a few other friends who would play, that took certain disadvantages (such as lecherousness and compulsive behaviors involving sex) that required them to roleplay their characters as seeking companionship of the opposite gender.

Ironically, if I recall correctly, the basis for the GURPS SEX material in the past, became the foundation for NAUGHTY AND DICE, a role playing supplement that was intended to be game system agnostic, yet give the GM tools to work with for portraying sex and its subsequent aftermath in games. The advice it gives on various things involving the taboo of sex (or talking of it etc) was somewhat interesting from a "readers" point of view, and I did implement a few of the concepts and ideas in the book for use with GURPS.

Whether or not such a book would be useful to you in your games is up to you. If I recall correctly, I purchased my copy through Amazon.com and looking it up just now, find that you can purchase copies for as little as 12.26 (used and sans S&H costs) or as much as $19.95 new.

In addition, there is an 8 page PDF available for free - at a HARN WORLD based forum, titled FAMILY TREE. It not only is useful for simulating when an NPC woman will bear children, but also in determining their life expectancy in a medieval world (probably useful right up until maybe TL 5 when Medicine starts to make its effects felt on general child bearing and rearing life). If you're interested, let me know via private email and I'll point you the way towards the location where you can download FAMILY TREES by Jonathan Nicholas. For what it is worth, I've used Family Trees as a means for simulating the life cycles of villagers in that it tracks the birth year an NPC is born, their life expectancy (ie when they will die, although not WHY they will die) along with how the cycle of births work with women as a pattern. The die roll mechanics is to determine when the woman in question has her first child, and then rolling the time that passes before she has her next child. It presumes that there is the normal incidence of "dry runs" leading up to when the next child is on its way. The tables even include the possibility that the child born won't even survive a full year. As the author notes, the data he worked with from grave yards, did not indicate whether or not stillborn children were part of the data or excluded from the data.

In any event, if anyone wants to know anything further on NAUGHTY AND DICE, I can always pull it out and maybe give a quickie run down on its table of contents.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

If you search the internet, you can find a fan work titled “GURPS Sex” from the era of the third edition that tackles these topics in much more detail. Most of it is usable in 4e as written, or with minor adjustments (e.g., it calls Techniques “Maneuvers”).

Decent link here:

http://www.barkingduck.net/ehayes/essays/gurpsex.htm

As you might expect, doing a web search with the term "sex" in it turns up a lot of profoundly scummy web sites.

The metaphorical cobwebs really hang thick on this venerable work. Not least it includes a lot of "maneuvers" for things that GURPS 4E would consider to be basic elements of the Erotic Art or Sex Appeal skill, and heavily overprices a number of "color" disadvantages.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Frankly, your players' obsession with roleplaying sex in such detail is kind of adolescent.

I dunno. It all depends on the gaming group. In-game sex can be anything the GM and the players want it to be.

As long as everyone's having fun, and it all happens in private between consenting adults, I'm not going to judge what happens at the gaming table.

But, unless the characters are really into kinky dice-rolling, I'd leave "sex with consequences" as the GM's prerogative rather than leaving it to chance. The potential plot value, and plot disruption potential, is just too high.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by hal

For what it is worth, most of the campaigns I've ever run for my group involves bawdy behavior from time to time, but rarely as the primary focus of events. I've a wife who games, and a few other friends who would play, that took certain disadvantages (such as lecherousness and compulsive behaviors involving sex) that required them to roleplay their characters as seeking companionship of the opposite gender.

I was going to say that my campaigns' PCs don't take Lecherousness, but checking my files, I find at least half a dozen who did. For example, Errol Flynn had it in The Foam of Perilous Seas, which is appropriate, considering the great scandal of his career.

Nonetheless, a lot of the overtly sexual content of my campaigns has come not from PCs with the disadvantage (particularly not in systems other than GURPS!) but from general roleplaying.

I don't think I've ever run a campaign where sexual activity as such was the primary focus of events. But I've run more than one campaign where it was thematically relevant:

* Oak and Ash and Thorn was about five present-day British teenagers straying into Faerie, which was a realm of unrestrained passions and a thematic exploration of adolescence;

* Zimiamvia was about characters who were avatars of God and Goddess, and evolved into a kind of Shakespearean comedy about how they found each other, or failed to do so (a big departure from the original, which was much more tragic and had only rare comedic scenes);

* Boca del Infierno was about a vampire slayer in 1810s California and her coming to terms with her role, including its short life expectancy;

* Manse was about the heirs to an ancient castle controlled by several magical lineages, and about their carrying on its traditions, including courting potential spouses or seeking to find such spouses for their children;

* Tapestry is about trade and partnership between different humanoid races on a Bronze Age world with animistic magic, and includes the different customs of different races and cultures regarding sex and procreation.

There have also been incidents in other campaigns; for example, in DC Realtime, there was one session that focused on the attraction between Captain Marvel, a boy from the 1940s who still had old-fashioned assumptions about what was appropriate, and Sterling, Superman's granddaughter from a planet of bisexual polyamorists, and on their reaching the decision that a relationship between them would be too likely to make both of them unhappy.

On one hand, I do include the pursuit of sex for its own sake, if the players like to fantasize about their characters being so motivated; it strikes me as comparable to providing wandering monsters for players who like to fantasize about fighting. But on the other, I also examine the development of relationships, and allow players to do this as well between their characters, and sex is an important element of many relationships and an influence on how well they progress. You can find it in everything from serious novels like Anna Karenina to romances like Le Morte d'Arthur to television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I don't think it's inappropriate in games.

[AlexanderHowl]

I agree, having sex in games is no more or less adolescent than having violence in games. In fact, I find myself being more comfortable dealing with the consequences of romantic encounters in games than I do just having PCs slaughtering dozens of enemies with no consequences beyond 'you loot their bodies for treasure'.

Even in the latter type of game though, sexual partners can be a form of treasure, as every war involves the sexual victimization of women and children by every army or guerrilla group. Avoiding that topic is no more realistic than avoiding the topic of a taxation, though I know that most GMs will not touch that topic with a ten foot pole. When you have a group willing to play real heroes though, it can be a rewarding game.

For example, I once played in a game where the characters were American GIs who were faced with a Soviet unit taking German women as sex slaves during the occupation of Germany. We did not even get through the first session before the characters attacked the Soviet unit, slaughtered them to a man, and rescued the German women before going AOWL with the intention of doing the same thing to every Soviet unit they found. They did not last long before the Soviets found them, but the game was fun because the players got to play real heroes and they got to die like real heroes.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I dunno. It all depends on the gaming group. In-game sex can be anything the GM and the players want it to be.

As long as everyone's having fun, and it all happens in private between consenting adults, I'm not going to judge what happens at the gaming table.

But, unless the characters are really into kinky dice-rolling, I'd leave "sex with consequences" as the GM's prerogative rather than leaving it to chance. The potential plot value, and plot disruption potential, is just too high.

It comes up for my game and it's often appropriate (there's even the line "You learn most about someone when making love to them").

That last line is most important; I've never dealt with STIs largely because I dislike using or having disease in general come up. As for pregnancies, unless there's a reason not to, I just let the story determine it, and that's if the player(s) in question doesn't have some sort of Fertility Control (which one player often takes since xe don't want to play a parent unless they choose to play a parent).

I guess my approach is more on the cinematic side; I tend to lean on what would be fun with the back of my mind and out-of-game research making sure it's plausible.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I agree, having sex in games is no more or less adolescent than having violence in games. In fact, I find myself being more comfortable dealing with the consequences of romantic encounters in games than I do just having PCs slaughtering dozens of enemies with no consequences beyond 'you loot their bodies for treasure'.

I completely agree, in fact I know I have less combat than even I want (let alone my players) when I GM.