GURPS Sex revision

[Keiko]

After talking with the document's original creator he's given me permission to work on a potential revision and hopefully expansion for 4th edition. It's sort of a back burner project that I intend to work on at a gradual pace as I learn more about the rules. If anyone has any questions, comments or suggestions please feel free to drop them here or PM me with them, thanks. I also probably be using this thread to "think out loud" and post ideas as they occur.

[JCurwen3]

That's a great idea! I'll be looking forward to seeing that when you're done. You should take a look at the authors' published book for additional ideas as well:

Naughty & Dice: An Adult Gamer's Guide to Sexual Situations (amazon.com)

I bought it, and it's just a great supplement with plenty of information. It's not much on crunch or rules, but it's meant to be applicable to any game system so that makes sense.

This book is for d20 players but is also covering the same subject matter:

Book of Erotic Fantasy, by Gwendolyn F. M. Kestrel (amazon.com)

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

In this context, copulation. Well, actually, preferably the whole line of physical closeness, starting from a hug/kiss and up to the final stages of copulation (which isn't an euphemism, but rather an acceptance that different encounters can end differently without diminishing their significance).

Oh, some descriptions are quantitative. In a way, all descriptions can be expressed quantitatively, if only by reducing them to enumerated states expressed by integers.

But many of them aren't scalar, and thus making their expression through neat numbers deceptive. Again, for the erotic case, the simplistic scalar analogous to the Reaction Table ('How good was it?') hides private axes such as intensity, originality, arousal level at a given point or on average, duration, and even trust level etc. None of those axes can be simplistically reduced to 'high==good', in fact most of them tend to have preferred levels per person and, what's worse, per situation/day/mood of any given person.

Discussing all this feels as if I'm trying to grasp at concepts of a narrativist system of some sort. (I mostly play RPGs more as simulations + freeform narrative, not combining the two to any significant extent.)

The thing is the above applies to many areas, not just carnal performance. People have their own measures and reactions. Social interaction in any form. But when you reduce the world to game mechanics. You can't really cover that. i've heard these same arguments used against having rolls for social interaction at all in fact.

You have to make some assumptions to quantify things in a playable format. Ex: If I get a Good reaction in this reaction it has the mechanical effect and narratively the effects are equal to or as close as possible to what would be "Good" for that target.

The dice rolls shape the narrative. At least that is how I run rpgs and prefer to play them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Keiko

The thing is the above applies to many areas, not just carnal performance. People have their own measures and reactions. Social interaction in any form. But when you reduce the world to game mechanics. You can't really cover that. i've heard these same arguments used against having rolls for social interaction at all in fact.

Of course you can make exactly the same argument about combat rolls. It's perfectly possible to "just roleplay" combat: the SCA does it all the time.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Keiko

The dice rolls shape the narrative. At least that is how I run rpgs and prefer to play them.

I would say that my approach is almost exactly the opposite. The players narrate the characters' actions, and from the narrative, I decide when a dice roll is called for, what they should roll against, and what the modifiers should be. Or I just say, "Yeah, you did it, what next?"

Bill Stoddard

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Keiko

The thing is the above applies to many areas, not just carnal performance. People have their own measures and reactions. Social interaction in any form. But when you reduce the world to game mechanics. You can't really cover that. i've heard these same arguments used against having rolls for social interaction at all in fact.

I've heard the same arguments against GURPS level of combat precision, and not only on this forum either.

Hmmm. Probably the one of the ways to avoid strong clashes of expectations is to allow players to customise their own characters to some extent. How such customisation is implemented will depend greatly upon the exact mechanics used for the act. In a way, a reconstruction of the system will be a sort a feedback loop between 'stats' and 'mechanics'. Which is probably not too unlike the construction of any other P&P system from scratch.

Now, to remain RAW-compliant, most or all customisation-traits need to be Features, because players already have the option of giving all their partners a permanent +4 to Erotic Art for 0 points (though it comes with a -4 to resist Interrogation* and Fast-Talk during the act). Keeping them 0-pt also allows players to put off such customisation until later, avoids a potential point discrepancy between PCs of players who are more/less into it etc.

* == Speaking of which, I need to re-read Social Engineering and figure out under what circumstances such a combination is even legit. AFAIK Interrogation assumes a distressful situation, not a eustressful one.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I would say that my approach is almost exactly the opposite. The players narrate the characters' actions, and from the narrative, I decide when a dice roll is called for, what they should roll against, and what the modifiers should be. Or I just say, "Yeah, you did it, what next?"

Bill Stoddard

Sound more precisely like 'Players make the decisions, dice resolve the questions whose answers do not seem obvious/unambiguous at the time'.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I bow to your much greater experience. ;)
I've only been with one woman, so I can't generalize.

You've been with one? That's one of my eventual long-term goals in life. I bow to your greater experience. ;3

[fifiste]

Just popped in to say that having this title and title named "penetration modifiers" on the same page made me giggle.
That is all.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by fifiste

Just popped in to say that having this title and title named "penetration modifiers" on the same page made me giggle.
That is all.

Since you mentioned it, and Peter Knutsen posted a LoL thread, I'll share this funny bit:
Since characters doing both magical and physical damage needed to deal with both physical damage resistance and magic resistance, the gamedevs added new runes that helped get through both. Guess how the runes were informally referred to?

--------------------------

Back on topic, found and skimmed the original fanbook. Eugh, the crunch is even more unwieldy than I remembered. So, I'd want to look at the basic premise of the mechanics:

An encounter is separated into several named, semi-abstract phases (we can make them more concrete later - let's look at the basic system, not tactical). There's a typical progression between them, but some variation is totally appropriate. E.g. the possible outcomes of a round are typically:

• Botch of some sort.
• Meh - advancing the phase is impossible or strongly not advised.
• All good - advancement at the participants' discretion.
• Things getting wild - some sort of semi-obligatory or obligatory phase advancement.

Not that these do not necessarily map onto pure crit/fail/success/crit spectrum, nor are single-phase advancements the only possible ones.

One issue that might be worth considering is that since there are two DX/Erotic Art/whatever rolls, the outcomes between two partners may vary significantly. This should be of some narrative use.

This approach seems to answer the typically interesting questions (how did it start out? suddenly what?! etc.), while also provides narrative freedom (which can then be trimmed down to a more tactical scale as appropriate).

Thoughts?