Speaking With My Body – PinkSpace

Public / Private

Sex is contested ground. The boundaries of sexual morality are pushed and pulled by social forces that dictate the circumstances under which sex is permissible; where, how, when, why, and for whom is sex Natural, Right, Good, and Just? For those of us living in the shadows of Christian religions — regardless of whether we ourselves are practicing or not — sexual morality has shaped our relationship with sex on a fundamental, precognitive level.

In “The Apocalypse is the Mother of All Christian Theology,” filmmaker Jim Finn pulls together a portrait of the apostle Paul across space and time, exploring his influence well beyond his death. Some of the most influential media clips collaged throughout the film are the product of American Christian fundamentalism. In these clips, we repeatedly see fundamentalists espousing the virtues of celibacy which, by the fundamentalists’ interpretation of Paul’s words, was a divine, virtuous path. Sex ought to only be performed for the holy act of procreation.

The reality, of course, is perhaps more complex. Finn juxtaposes these clips with historical accounts of the political realities of Rome, where sex was an expression of status. The right of a man to fuck someone —specifically to penetrate them — was a demonstration of his power over them. It was equally expected for those without personhood (women, non-roman boys, sex workers, and slaves) to submit to this sexual responsibility. Paul’s decision to remain chaste was in stark contrast with Rome’s own concepts of sexual morality, a refusal to participate in the practices that enforced social stratification. In other words, celibacy was politically rebellious.

Paul’s teachings have been decontextualized. During his life, he was likely more concerned with the material conditions of the world and how he might change them for the better. The emphasis on an eternity in heaven is a product of theological transformation in the thousands of years since. In this way, what was once a secular concern is now religious, as is the way with many Christian teachings. The ideological underpinnings have remained, however, and shaped the role of sex in the social sphere. Now, even as the wave of Christian popularity recedes, we can still see its outlines in the way we have situated sex in the social world. Something terrifying and sinful, like a secret we all know but never show. A taboo.

I detest the fact that sex has become a private affair. We take this for granted, as though it were a biological imperative for sex to be hidden away, known but never perceived. Why does this go without question? Why are we incapable of accepting that we continue to bear the weight of Christian morality, even in our most secular social circles? I cannot say this with enough force: this needs to be denaturalized.

Baby’s First RPG

For a long time I have wanted to explore ways to systematize sex in roleplaying. In fact, my first ever bit of RPG writing was a sex supplement for Pathfinder 1e that never saw the light of day — rules lovingly written to convert your character attributes into erotic action, carefully written out for a group of friends who ended up not being interested in that kind of thing. (It was actually not very good so it’s probably for the best.)

While systemizing sex has remained a persistent interest for me, playing with sex in itself is its own challenge for a variety of reasons. Like those friends, some people just don’t want sex and romance in their roleplaying, which is obviously just a nonstarter. I’d hazard a bet, however, that there are many folks like myself who want to want to delve into the depths of the dungeons and the depts of their holes. What is there for us perverts?

I think the Faggot Games movement is just a testament to that interest, but the works that occupy that space tend to hit another pain point: sex tends to be an all-or-nothing game. Star Crossed and Praise the Hawkmoth King are both fantastic, incredibly horny games, but their horniness is their purpose. They are in some way defined by sex and romance. This limits the play space in a different kind of way and allows these games to exist safely in the division between public / private.

In the episode on Apocalypse World of RTFM, Max Lander, Aaron King, and their guest Sarah Frank begin a recurring observation that RPGs tend to struggle to integrate sex casually into play. If sex is part of a game, it is either a primary focus of the system or sidelined, if present at all. What appealed to me most about my Pathfinder sex supplement was that I was intent on seamlessly integrating it into play. Sure, we could go into town after fighting for our lives in the wilderness, but we could also go to bed together, and it’s rare to find a game that brings these experiences in parity.

Fun in Abstraction

The actual act of systemizing sex, too, tends to have its own challenges. How do you make sex interesting to play? The answer, of course, requires some level of abstraction. Suggest this to the general public, though, and you’ll usually get some reticence around abstracting any kind of mechanic that isn’t just fucking killing people. Yes, I am that kind of person, and I equally find my own behaviour hilarious. Like, why am I happy to build up my combo meter so I can score some big damage but as soon as I have to chain together flirting abilities, I’m out???

To find a satisfying solution here, my hunch is that we have to take a lot of other questions into consideration: What makes sex fun? How do you emulate that feeling? And how can it key back into the other parts of play? How do you keep some kind of tension in the experience so the story stays interesting? How do you make room for surprise and disappointment? How do you make sex an engaged activity? In what ways can sex have variable outcomes? How do you create challenge in cooperative play? Is challenge even a necessary or helpful way to think about sex? How might we make play interesting without it?

Let’s quickly take a cursory look at how sex is handled in a few examples, including the ones referenced above:

• Skill check based systems ask players to roll against a target number to seduce someone. “Your Charisma check beat my Willpower score so now I am horny and want to fuck you.” Inspiring stuff.
• Apocalypse World and other PbtA descendants like Monster Hearts give you sex moves. Like other moves, they have a narrative trigger (”when you have sex with someone”), and a mechanical outcome. There is little uncertainty with these moves,
• Star Crossed uses a jenga tower to reflect the building tension between a couple (or throuple if you’re playing Love Letters) that really, really wants to but really, really can’t for Reasons. The inevitable collapse of the tower (traditionally the moment of failure) is where the hot, steamy stuff kicks off. It keeps its attention on the foreplay (which yes, is a part of sex if you ask me).
• In Praise the Hawkmoth King, sex is explicit, ugly, and violent. It asks you to play sex the way you would play a combat focused RPG and it takes that translation seriously. You’ll fuck your friends and your enemies to get what you want. Fun and sexy and horrible all at once. Maybe even a bit Roman.
• Vice & Violence has sex woven into absolutely every part of the game. There’s a straightforward sex skill check for healing, sure, but sex can also be what you do to distract a guard, how you find rumours for new adventure hooks, or part of the experiments you’ve volunteered for as part of a trade with the local wizard lady. Also you can train as a (pole) dancer and monogamy is a negative trait. Sex just oozes out of every orifice in play.

I recently took another stab at this problem on my own, with some inspiration from an unlikely source.

Signs of the Sojourner

Signs of the Sojourner is a digital card game about conversations. In the game you play as a young travelling merchant taking over your mother’s business in a small town that mostly survives through the patronage of the caravan that your mother was a part of. It’s your job to travel the countryside and gather goods to sell in your mother’s store when you return. Rather than managing money and inventory, you will instead meet others on your journey and build relationships to get access to the stock you need.

The mechanical meat of the game is in the conversation, which is a card-matching game that abstracts out the minutiae of speech. You and your partner draw a limited hand of cards from your own unique conversation deck, each of which has, by default, a pair of symbols (an “intro” and “outro”) corresponding to your communication styles.

You take turns playing these cards to contribute to the conversation. To have a “concordant” conversation, where effective communication takes place, you’ll need to match the symbols on either side of the card to form a chain. This effectively twists a kind of card play often reserved for competitive games into a cooperative format. Both participants in a conversation generally want to reach concordance as it’s usually in their best interest, but doing so is complicated.

At a basic level, there has to be some overlap in communication styles for a conversation to chain properly, so some decks will fundamentally be mismatched. Then, during the conversation itself, each participants’ hand is limited and pulled from a shuffled deck. As a result, your deck will need to have enough of those symbols to account for random draws. This is further complicated by the fact that each participant in the conversation is unable to see their partner’s hand (unless specific conditions are met), so participants must intuit the kind of symbols their partner might have available to them at the moment. The key to reaching concordance is for each partner to communicate in a way that responds to their partner’s communication style while also leaving an opening for their partner to respond in turn.

Sometimes a conversation doesn’t work out. Whether you just didn’t say the right thing at the right time, or you just don’t share the same communication style, you will fail to match your cards. This results in a discordant conversation — where you’re not really able to meet each other. With enough of these, you might not be able to build the relationships you need to meet your goals.

Sex is a Conversation¹

As I mentioned already, conversations, like sex, are notoriously challenging to design for, so when I considered how Signs of the Sojourner solved for the challenges of conversation, the idea for a mechanical adaptation was not far behind.

The premise is simple: each character has a sex deck. When things start getting hot between two or more of them, they pull it out² to see how the encounter goes. The characters will draw and play cards from their sex deck to describe the encounter through a few different positions. Form enough chains of cards and you’ll be able to reach the climax — perhaps literally.

This is a minigame designed to be used within another game. Like my pathfinder supplement, it clicks into place when it’s needed and gets out of the way when it’s not. I do think it should properly key into whatever campaign game you are playing though. While I have not provided any structure for that (which means this is technically MOSAIC Strict), I have some ideas on how it might work in my games. I think it could be a pretty fun little addition to my toolset if I give it the balance it desires.

At April’s RPG Nite, I playstormed this basic idea with my lovely friend Grace Workman. Here’s how it worked.

1. Choose your characters

Since Grace and I were playstorming outside of a specific campaign, we instead wrote up a bunch of couple concepts. The two couples we ended up playing were “awkward gay nerd/jock” and “lesbian knight and squire”. Hot stuff.

2. Draft your decks

I used four basic symbols to refer to sexual dynamics. Choose 4 shapes for your decks and assign them these meanings:

• Firm
• Resistant
• Flirty
• Submissive

For each character, consider their personality and mark 10 cards with pairs of symbols. Symbols can be the same, and you can have more than one of the same card. Draw an arrow between them to indicate a direction that they flow. For instance you might have a deck that looks like this:

• Firm > Firm
• Firm > Resistant
• Firm > Flirty
• Firm > Flirty
• Firm > Submissive
• Flirty > Resistant
• Flirty > Flirty
• Flirty > Flirty
• Submissive > Firm
• Submissive > Resistant

3. Foreplay

Shuffle your decks. Determine who made the first move and have that character flip the top card of their deck. Both characters then draw five cards, being sure to keep them hidden from their partner. These are the moves available to you.

4. Positions

Each round corresponds to a position. For the teens, the first position was flirting over their math tutoring session. When they transitioned to the next position, the jock pushed the nerd onto the desk. Each position changes the physical relationship between the characters’ bodies.

To complete a position, you must form a chain of 5 cards.

5. Make moves

Beginning with the character receiving the “first move”, take turns playing a single card from your hand and describing how your character acts according to their symbol (in as much or as little detail that feels good). If the symbols on the edges of the cards are identical, the next player may continue the chain.

Reach 5 matched cards to complete the chain, shift positions, and mark a point of concord. A successful chain might look like this:

[Firm > Firm] + [Firm > Resistant] + [Resistant > Flirty] + [Flirty > Flirty] + [Flirty > Submissive]

If any symbols are mismatched, the chain instead breaks and has to be restarted. Mark a point of discord instead.

6. Go for another round

Gather your cards again and reshuffle them, excluding the final card played in the previous chain. The remaining card begins the next chain.

Both players draw five cards and repeat the procedure.

7. Climax

Reach three points of discord and things don’t work out. Maybe the sex isn’t that great, or, like our gay teens, one of you just awkwardly cuts the encounter short. You just weren’t on the same wavelength.

Reach three points of concord, however, and you find the pleasure you were looking for. Together, your bodies spoke and they were heard. You have reached climax. Feel free to interpret that as literally as you want. 💦

Aftercare

The system as-is was extremely hard to play. Grace and I failed to reach climax with BOTH of our couples. This may, in part, have been a product of the trimming that I did from the peripheral mechanics in Signs of the Sojourner for the translation. For instance, there are no special cards or cards with multiple symbols, which provide some level of power scaling that is just not represented here. I think these are opportunities for further exploration.

I have also not discussed the way characters can evolve their sex deck at all here — mostly because they are floaty ideas in response to the card-copying that happens at the end of every conversation in Signs of the Sojourner. I hope to try playtesting some of my own mechanics, exploring both how they can fit in with consistent partner play and with someone who’s a huge slut. I even have ideas on how multi-partner play could take place! Orgies anyone?

I also think there is room to adjust some of the fundamentals. Do I need 4 suits? Can “matching” suits be different symbols? etc. etc. etc. Plenty of playtesting will help me figure out how best to evolve this idea and to help it take shape. I’m looking forward to it.

So… wanna have sex?

Notes

1. Did you notice my stupidly subtle reference to Apocalypse World here? This line is pulled from “The Conversation”, which also notably includes the following text, which forms the basis for this system: “All these rules do is mediate the conversation. they kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right?” (p. 11)
2. Pun intended.

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