Dirty

I grew up in the suburbs, in an upper middle class neighbourhood.  Where if a strange car parked on a public road in front of someone's house, the house owner would come out and give the driver shit for parking on "our street."  Where fully grown adults with professional jobs would get into fistfights about who cut which half-inch wide limb off which tree.  Where those who hired a lawn care company to look after their yard didn't "deserve" to own their house.  Where people going to a party at the top of the street would drive their cars rather than walk.

And where everyone knew who was ducking into whose back door to cheat on whose spouse, while tacitly looking the other way ... until the shit hit the fan, and then everyone would get out on their lawns and watch the show.  I mean, why would you hide behind your curtains?  Everybody knows you're watching.

As I grew older, each year the hypocrisy grew thicker as I came to understand the outside world.  That is, as I came to understand sex.  Sex emerged from our Dungeons & Dragons games spontaneously, obviously — we were the sons of doctors, lawyers, engineers, ministers, researchers, university professors.  We lived in a pristine, supra-scrubbed culture both indoors and out ... and so naturally we had a mall, which naturally had a smoke shop, which naturally sold porn mags to all the clean-cut, professional men who were intrinsically too clean to watch porn on film.  The way this joke came into my hands is an interesting story.  It comes from an issue of Penthouse, May 1974 ... when I was 10.  I bought it when I was 14 from a friend, who found the mag under his father's chest of drawers, after his parents got divorced.  And I still have it.  Strange games.

The joke works on multiple levels.  The little boy that knows, hitting the sister where she lives.  The woman admitting that the language isn't hurtful, but where it's coming from.  The way it's ... positive advertising.  After all, Rosalyn's paid to suck.

If we're going to call D&D "an adult game," then sooner or later we're going to have to be adults.  What I remember about the people I grew up around was their privileged, often ludicrous outrage at things they didn't understand.  Which is the same feeling I get when I read someone's list of D&D "don'ts" where no. 7 is "No Sex."  Because, with that familiar suburban taint of hypocrisy, it's "creepy" ... as opposed to, you know, the necessity to produce all the beautiful children in the world.

Oh, I'm sorry, I've gone and written about whores and children in the same post.  Gawd, what a monster I am.  I have no business being a grandfather.

We are living in strange times.  On the one hand, it's perfectly legitimate, and let me stress, a good thing, for an individual to legally and physically pursue the gender of their birth.  And if I can be more clear about what that involves, there are books at the medical library that explicitly details exactly what physical alterations are necessary ... trust me, the disturbing nature of the pic at the start of this post isn't on the same planet as these texts.  We can accept all this, support it, politically ... but as a DM I'm not supposed to mention "sex" in a running.  Oh no.  No.  That's a bridge too far.

Well, I'm not going to flog this.  I've ridiculed it.  That's enough.

Part of me says, don't publish this post.  Lot of people aren't going to read this far.  Hah.  They won't get past the comic.  The other part of me remembers that I'm not here to please.  Not interested in ranting an all, but ... I still want to push boundaries.  Force people to look at things that are uncomfortable.  Question the ad hoc principles that a bunch of moralists who don't play D&D think ought to be the boundaries.

But even I don't dare venture into another description of how sex in D&D could work.

Yep, strange times.

Universally Good

A big thanks to those of you who helped tweet or share my troubles on facebook; every legal redress of wrongs done is a stressful thing and any support is always appreciated.  I've taken down the post from my blog but the matter remains on my twitter feed, for those who don't know what I'm talking about right now.

Moving onto other things.  For those who have a problem with sexuality, spoilers.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a post I hadn't read from seven months ago, written at the time I was on a tear about player-vs-player.  And on that subject - that of Spazalicious' post - I want to proceed carefully.  I believe that the argument made there is legitimate and worth examining.

The crux of the argument is a familiar one that has been argued before: that PvP can be, at a given table, consensual.  I've never argued that it could not be.  Many things are consensual.  It is reasonable to argue that if every player at a given table agrees to the player-vs-player formula, then it ought to be legitimately pursued.

To press the point home, Spazalicious urges the reader to "take a lesson from the BDSM community:"

"Obtain consent from all persons involved, always ask if your partner is okay, and have a safe word for if [sic] things get too intense for 'stop' to make sense in context."

For those who may not know, a significant part of the BDSM community - that part that is most concerned with winning acceptance from the general public that does not practice BDSM - has promoted something for several decades known as "Safe, Sane and Consensual."  The guidance offered by this policy (SSC) is to discourage harm between participants and to encourage the best possible mental health for those involved.  By talking over what sexual practices are desired, it is sincerely hoped that participants will not find themselves regretting their actions and that the greatest possible empathy will be shared by all.

Unfortunately for some in the BDSM community, a strict adherence to SSC denies many of the desired activities that are part of BDSM.  These activities cannot be reasonably described as 'safe,' simply because they are not.  It is further argued that many completely accepted social pursuits - such as mountain climbing, hang-gliding, white-water rafting and hunting - are also fundamentally unsafe, even though efforts are made to make these as safe as possible.  Still, the best way for a mountain climber to remain safe is to not climb mountains.  This, however, does not work for the climber.

As such, some in the BDSM community have opted for a position known as "Risk-aware consensual kink," or RACK.  In this philosophy, it is desired that both or all partners are aware that the proposed activity is dangerous, that everyone is of sound mind and that elements of SSC - such as the use of a safe word - may be legitimately set aside in preference to an experience that is less concerned with safety and more concerned with sexual gratification.

What, then, does this have to do with D&D and role-playing?

Spazalicious is expressing the philosophy - as it is promoted in the BDSM community - that consensuality trumps all other concerns.  Yes, it isn't safe.  Yes, people get hurt.  But everyone agrees - so everything is okay, nyet?

If the reader ever gets an opportunity to speak with a member of a Search & Rescue team - and better yet, has the opportunity to get a few drinks into said member - then do not fail to ask about the 'consensuality' of people who get themselves into life and death situations while mountain climbing or white-water rafting.  Get ready for a rant - a potentially furious rant if said member has ever lost a friend or relative while trying to rescue a 'risk-aware' mountain-climber, hiker, winter skiier or any of the other truly dangerous pursuits that people jump into with a minimum of preparation or real awareness.  Because people are stupid.  People think they are self-aware and prepared to get consensual with the mountain and forest, but it is exactly this kind of thinking that gets perfectly aware people killed while trying to pull a citizen out of trouble.

The reader might, if the reader knows people at a hospital, have an opportunity to meet someone who can tell at least one story about a BDSM participant who was flayed or beaten to within an inch of their death, on the argument made by the top (dominant, dominatrix, etc.) in the situation who says, "But he didn't use his safe word!"  Because it is reasoned by many in the BDSM community that people, in the midst of being tortured, are consciously self-aware enough to even remember that they have a safe-word.  Human beings, made up of chemicals that flood tissue in the most potentially dangerous soup imaginable, simply aren't that reliable.  The BDSM community likes to pretend that humans are reliable, because it helps sell their practices to non-participants . . . those same non-participants who are just aching for a reason to shut down BDSM clubs, to end the careers of a very vocal and protective Professional Dominant community and to encourage everyone, everywhere, to recognize that BDSM is, in Spazalicious' words, "universally evil."

I don't feel that it is, myself.  But BDSM isn't a very good argument for the magical legitimacy of personal consensuality.  The so-called community is more divisive, troll-ridden and predatory than any group of people that has ever existed - except probably the military.  Fact is, participants in that community just don't care.  They're not participating for the glory of social acceptance - they have other motives.  Social acceptance is simply the veneer that has been lacquered over the top by a small number of voices who recognize that acting as leaders in a beleaguered and largely misunderstood community gains them a small amount of personal power.  It is these leaders who have invented terms like SSC and RACK in order to sustain the pretense of that power.  Most participants, however, simply act as they will.

The key error in Spazalicious' thinking - and it is an error that we all make, continuously, since more than a century of brain-function research and psychological investigation has failed to make an impact - is that we are in control of our desires.  This isn't so.  We would like it to be so, we're very certain that it is so, since it very much seems to be the case.  It is very easy to delude ourselves - since it is an unreliable brain affected by hormone-evolved brain chemistry that we use to convince ourselves.

Sorry, however.  I have no actual way to determine, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that all the people at my table who consensually agree to play PvP are actually consensually doing so.  Some will agree because the group agrees.  Some will agree because their sexual partner at the table agrees or because their siblings agree.  Some will agree because they lack information or experience about other ways to play.  Some will agree because they are habitually predatory because of other activities that have shaped their thinking.  Some will agree because it seems that the authority figure at the table, the DM, seems to want it.

None, however, can be absolutely certain to agree on a strictly consensual basis.  Because humans are prejudiced, naive, easily swayed, confused, anxious to agree in order to win approval and on the whole, stupid.

The best solution for this uncertainty is to seek forms of game play that do not promote unnecessary conflict and stress.  Because it is universally recognized that a lack of negative conflict and stress is the best way to ensure that everyone has a good time.  PvP may not be "universally evil" - but it is dead certain that a lack of PvP is "universally good."

Porn

Some readers who blog may have noticed lately that Google's Blogger service has announced that, come March 23rd, they're going to eliminate explicit content from their system.  I'm glad to say that this blog, which has no images of naked people, will not be affected.

I have seen some call this an act of vandalism.  I have also seen the term pornocalypse used.  If the reader has the bravery to follow this link (that I discovered when a blog I shall not name linked it), there can be read a long diatribe about the persecution that large technology organizations perpetrate on the use of porn.  It's interesting, but . . . as someone who has been on the inside of a porn-distribution service, it is way, way off the mark.

It is true that groups like eBay, Amazon, Craig's List and so on seem to be permissive for a time, only to change their minds and apparently revoke the privilege with a moral crusade.  Morality, however, is not the reason why services suddenly condemn the very porn that once they supported.  Nor is it the outcry of mothers or private businesses.  Most businesses, in fact, retain a defacto nod-nod-wink-wink policy towards a company's inclusion of porn in their bottom line.

In my late position working for a pay-per-view service, I spent a few years keeping track and updating the many, many porn movies that were available for purchase.  On average, the service launched about 20 titles a week, provided by a wide variety of both classy and sleazy porn film companies, including Mile High Media, Erobec, Valentine . . . even Penthouse.  These went through the same process as any other film we included, except that great pains were taken to ensure that some child with access to the system could not see any of these films if the adults in the house appropriately net-nannied the storefront.  Many conversations were had about that - and if a porn movie got put into the wrong categories by mistake (where it could be seen by anyone), things got very, very interesting - particularly if it came to the attention of the company's CEO (and here we are speaking of an 11-billion dollar company).

So why did we have porn on the system at all?  One simple reason.  The service was not making money.  Throughout my entire experience - five years - we were firmly in the red.  There was never any chance of our division making a profit; in fact we were making less and less profit every annum.  We were kept alive because the service was a very visible part of the company's public perception and because it's existence drove other money-making services within the company, supporting its competitive acquisition of the marketplace.

In a situation like this, a VP will take any opportunity to reduce the amount of loss every quarter.  Thus, the inclusion of porn.  For a company just starting out, for a division that is perpetually losing money, porn is low-hanging fruit.  It is easy to get, easy to sell and thus easy to turn into immediate capital.

Porn has problems, however.  Yes, like the accidental misfiling that I mentioned above, but also in a host of other ways that affect daily operation.  See, porn is largely created by people who are uneducated, unreliable, unhappy or who just don't give a shit about laws or regulations.  Companies have to care about those things.  Because the porn industry does such a shitty job of regulating themselves, however, companies that use porn have to do it - and that means hours and hours of fixing images that were poorly conceived, fixing titles, fixing descriptions and synopses . . . and actually watching the porn to ensure that no content appeared that could not be legally run on our service.  We paid two people to sit around, all day, doing nothing but watching porn.

Before the reader gets all excited, thinking, "Kewl, I want that job!" I have to explain that having spoken to the people who did it that the job was horrible.  Mind you, these were people who did not have trouble with porn - otherwise, they would not have taken the job.  Porn in large amounts is, however, depressingly uniform in its presentation.  In large amounts (35-40 hours a week), it takes on a degree of disgust that doesn't go away.  The burn-out rate for people who did that job was 1 to 8 months.  This despite the money they were paid, which was very good.

Throughout all this watching, the viewers had to be very careful to miss nothing.  That's because it only takes a couple of frames to start a major freak-out among moral pundits and the mainstream media.  So not only are you watching a lot of crap you've grown very tired of, you have to watch it closely.

Finally, porn can only make you so much money.  At the beginning, that amount is nice . . . but it tops out at a given amount and that's it.  The clientele you have will only support so much.  That's because there are two kinds of porn-watchers (I know, I've tracked the numbers month to month for years at a time): the kind that watch one or two porn movies a month and the kind that watch porn continuously whenever they are at home.  A business depends on the latter kind for its bread and butter - but there are only so many of those guys that exist in the world (yes, I said 'guys').

So porn is a lot of trouble.  So it stands to reason that if you reach a point in your business where you are in the black without needing the porn, what do you think happens?  That's right.  You dump the porn.

In order to justify this dumping, you get on the bandwagon of claiming you're cleaning up your service, you're paying closer attention to the family and the upstanding merits of doing business responsibly, blah blah blah, because if you're going to ditch the porn anyway, you might just as well take advantage of the PR hit you can get by pretending that you now care about family values.

This recent step by Google Blogger means one of two things - either the company has decided that there are enough non-porn bloggers to justify the service's existence without porn . . . or its gotten to be too much trouble to police the mess.  Google, I promise you, does not care the least about the moral implications of including porn.

They just don't need it any more.

P.S.

Porn is also great for bloggers.  Any time a blogger can find a justification for talking about porn, count on the numbers to go up.

The Honey Trap

Rarely does wikipedia fail me.  This is one of those times.

As such, I'm going to have to explain this one before I can move forward on it.  For those who don't know, "a honey trap" is a con game in which an attractive woman is used to lure a fellow into a private location where he can be threatened, robbed or killed, depending upon the variant played. Sometimes, a single man - usually very large but sometimes just extraordinarily dangerous - appears at the right moment (preferably when the dupe has removed most of his clothes) and claims to be the woman's husband.  In addition to robbing the dupe, the 'husband' and the woman may work together to blackmail the victim after initially robbing him.  Alternately, the woman may be part of a gang that turns up in order to viciously beat or kill the dupe.

Either way, the woman's part in this is clear - she needs to appear both desirable and willing.  After doing her part, her male counterparts will mop up the mess and she gets her cut of the take.  Women do it because it is comparably easy work if they have the attributes to pull it off.

It is interesting to note that, although the woman will usually not take part in physically hurting the male, she is often the only one blamed.  The victim - for reasons that will seem obvious to many males - has a sort of grudging respect for the men, who are at least 'honest' in their criminality.  The woman, however, is the worst sort of harlot imaginable.  That is because the woman has been able to hurt the man straight to the heart of his ego - he really did think she wanted him because he was just so desirable.

The reason wikipedia does not include this definition is likely due to an intense hatred that feminists have acquired for the honey trapping stereotype.  Because the honey trap has appeared so often in fiction, a belief has grown that there is a conspiracy among male writers to depict women as evil, conniving, selfish, horrible sub-humans.  It is almost impossible at present to write any story about a strong, capable woman that takes shit from no one without that character somehow being subverted into proof of the author's hatred for women.  She's no darker than any of the characters played by male anti-heroes . . . except that because she's a woman, the character has 'obviously' be created to emphasize how much she threatens men.

Some of you may have felt a little of this heat with regards to the succubus, the female demon based upon Christian mythology.  The succubus is proof positive that men hate women - otherwise, why would we create a monster that looked like a beautiful woman, whose sole purpose is to entrance men and then kill them?  In short, the honey pot all in one character - proof positive that men hate women.

As such, there has always been pressure to remove succubus from the lexicon, as well as any similar female-based monsters.  In part, because female-based monsters are often sexually designed or based. Since corporation-marketed gaming must include children as potential buyers, we must downplay sex . . . and what the hell, most players of any age aren't that comfortable with sex.  I've written about that before.  Also here.

There is something particularly harrowing about the honey trap - and the accompanying succubus - that cuts deep into a man's perception of himself.  The anger he feels for the woman afterwards (assuming he lives) and his consummate association with the woman as demon (as a succubus) is a displacement of that self-understanding.  He knows, inherently, that there was always the possibility of his showing fortitude and resolve by saying to the woman, 'no.'  She does not physically force him into the alley way or into the darkness - it is his weakness in character that drags him there, for a number of reasons.  First, because the possibility of sex seems easy and available - but deeper than that, because he has that knowledge about himself that sex usually isn't easy and available.  In short, he knows he must grab it when it arrives or else he will get nothing.  He understands, even as his feet drift in the woman's direction of their own accord, that he has already lost this game between men and women.  If he could have sex whenever he wished, and knew it, the trap wouldn't work.

The succubus is the intensified manifestation of this internal struggle - for the demon represents the projection of man's wish to possess that which is perfect.  The demon, of course, cannot be obtained . . . yet there remains the terror is in the knowledge that the demon is also beyond denial.  The demon is the male's fantasy and at the same time proof of the male's vulnerability.

The intense hatred of the woman following the honey trap is in the male's complete and devastating comprehension that her sexuality bested him.  As he thinks of her, he understands his inferiority, and in that inferiority is the intense hatred he feels for her.  He knows that if he'd had any strength at all, he'd have walked away at the beginning.

That is a profoundly difficult concept to understand if you don't happen to be a man; and a profoundly difficult realization to incorporate if you happen to be one.  It's easy to see how women relate to the surface perception.  Bad woman = depiction of all women as evil and therefore disposable.  That is then exacerbated by the male point of view . . . Bad woman = fucking goddamned evil bitch, ought to kill them all.

Truth be told, perhaps it is better to remove the succubus from the game.  It's presence in our culture has long represented a difficult evaluation of ourselves as persons of two different sexes, with remarkably two different viewpoints, continously subverted by propaganda that continues to insist that there is no difference.  Presenting the succubus into the game properly - in the sense that it subverts pompous narcissism - requires a measure of maturity that is short in supply.

Sex and D&D ... the Steamy Edition

Discounting an earlier post I wrote on this subject, there really is no reason why sex cannot be part of a player character's agenda ... despite a general feeling that no one would ever want to take part in sex and gaming unless one were, as Roger the GS puts it, "goofy horndogs" ... despite, as he also says, the lack of mechanical means.

This continues to astound me, really ... but then matters of sex always do. For such a universal recreation; for something that undeniably offers the best feeling - however brief - that any human has a chance at obtaining, for free; and for something that yields the most rewarding experience and purpose that can conceivably be available, the insertion of life into one's family and care, this culture just baffles the living fuck out of me.

But then, I grew up in the 70s.

No one in the 70s thought that any of this moral crap was going to hold out much longer. Stonewall had happened, public nudity had broken the barrier, the powers that be were unable to hold back not only the spread of porn but the spread of all kinds of porn. The religious right had failed in their effort to stem the tide of swearing and sex in film, or to keep people from making fun of religion (see Life of Brian) and on the whole, generally, the majority was waking up to the fact that sex could be talked about, it could be admitted openly as something a person liked, and all those people who whined about it were clearly impotent and constipated.

Then ... the moral majority coalesced and went to war against the free press and media by targeting advertisers and money. AIDS happened and the public was deluged with misinformation that expressly misrepresented homosexuals ... and terrified heteros in their beds. Governments and especially the feminist right cracked down on kink with laws and invented morality intended to make everything sound like rape. And political correctness was invented.

So here we are. People still like sex. The porn is still everywhere. Homosexuality hasn't been crushed. Television and movies are full of nudity and kink. All the morality proscription failed in the extreme. Rule 34 reigns supreme. But four guys sitting around a table playing D&D can't deal with one of them saying he'd like to have sex with an Elven princess without being labeled a "goofy horndog."

Baffling.

I don't know if its because boys who play D&D are so socially inept with women that homosexuality is a constant, terrifying possibility - being that they cannot get within touching range of anything but boys - or if it is because D&D boys are so noticeably desperate that speaking out loud of the opposite sex brings derision and hatred because, well, We Do Not Speak Of Them Here. I've certainly been in some games where boys describing sex with women was a wild free-for-all, going back to our high school days when those things were funny as hell. I have it on good authority that there are some profoundly unpleasant moments at some tables for girls where the sex jokes are constant, blatant and abusive ... and so maybe that's the goofy horndogginess that occurs at Roger's table.

That kind of horndogginess would get you punched in the face at mine. Probably not by me - I'm all the way on the other side of the table. There are some boyfriends and women who would be a lot closer to you, who'd reach you first.

Sex is a part of the human experience. It's a huge part of drama, of purpose, of what makes us go. We identify in large part with the need for, and the results of, sex. This is why there is a lot more sex on the internet than there is D&D.

But it makes a player feel ... uncomfortable. That is the whole argument against. "We were playing the game the other day, and we had gotten into town after a hard battle. The DM said there were some prostitutes by the front gate, just to make us understand what kind of town it was, and Jeremy - he's new - asked how much they cost. We laughed, but he was serious. Oh my god. So the DM told him, and Jeremy said he paid the money and they did it in back of the guardhouse. Jeez, it just made me sick. What a fucking horndog."

And ... yeah.

It's not actually difficult to get into a discussion these days about sex. They happen at work, they happen spontaneously at the bar, they just sort of crop up here and there. Hell, I've had conversations about sex with my parents (after I got to be 40, they just loosened up, no idea why). Of course, there's the whole internet. And what's funny is that there are these vast, open landscapes of people talking openly about sex, and the sex they'd like to have, and when they'd like to have it, or when they did have it ... and none of them are snorting in comical shock when someone says "boob" or "pussy" - like a bunch of cheezy grade sixers.

We all know where these chat rooms are. And we know people go there when they'd like to stop being alone, and maybe meet someone of like mind.

I met my present partner of 12 years through one, back in 2001.

The "uncomfortable" argument is a powerful one. It transcends the table, it reaches out to the whole D&D internet, where Roger and many others sneer in disgust at the idea of a player choosing to step into the shoes of a HUMAN BEING. Yes, by all means, hack things to death. Yes, gloat over gold. Please, here, the door is wide open for any mind fucking game-playing you'd like to do with other players or the DM. Yes, welcome to the land of megalomaniacs, narcissists, gluttons and the pompous. "But we don't do that other thing."

The moody, dangerous Pirate Captain heads down to the beach, bottle of ouzo in hand, mourning the loss of her dead husband, whom the party briefly knew and whom they buried. The player character watches her, well aware of how violent she can be, how deep her feelings - and though she's been described by a male DM, the description is compelling, just like every description of a strong female character in a book or story written by a man has been since the dawn of time. And the player would like to do something. He's interested in where events might go if somehow this NPC were induced to be more than just a momentary distraction, but an ally too. But how to approach her. She seems to disdain everyone and everything. But clearly she is filled with passion. What to do?

Like any fighter girdling on a sword and stepping up to a lion, daring to face the thing in its lair, he marches forward and without any weapons at all. He knows she probably carries a dagger. He knows she's murdered men before. But he wants to believe there's more than that. He tells the DM he seizes her by the arm, and turns her around. He's a fighter, he's fifty pounds more than her, and the DM rolls a die. "I tell her to stop being stupid," the player tells the DM. "I tell her she cannot mourn his death forever. She's destroying herself with liquor and this endless sorrow. I shout at her, tell her to be alive now, to recognize that her dead husband would not want her to stay like this."

"She fights you," says the DM, and the player realizes that her hand might in that moment reach for the dagger she has hidden. "I hold on tight." The DM pronounces that the player is successful. The woman doesn't speak, and asks if the player says anything else. The player, daring, says, "I tell her that her husband left her." The DM rolls a die, says the woman breaks free and punches the fighter. He takes a point of damage. "DAMN YOU!" the woman says. The fighter doesn't give in. "He gave you all he had and now he has left you. He's left you here, alone, and you know that there's nothing else he can give you!"

A roll. The DM says the woman stands her ground, furious, trying with all her strength to hold herself together, but clearly she's too overwhelmed to speak.

The fighter says, "I speak to her very gently. I tell her she's not alone. I tell her there are others here who won't leave. Who will fight with you, win with you ... and die WITH you. If you will open your eyes."

She looks at the fighter. The DM announces that she is overwhelmed. He says that the woman lifts a hand, half-heartedly, towards the fighter.

The fighter responds, "I seize the hand. I use it to pull her tight against me. If she makes no protest, I kiss her hard. I make her understand I've meant every word."

The DM says she doesn't fight. She gives in. She yields. The fighter says, "I press her down to the sand. I'm very careful not to push too hard, not to hurry. I want her to understand that this is not sex, this is me caring for her. I want her to understand that I'm willing to be there for her."

The DM judges the moment, chooses 2d6, decides that if its a 7 or more, then she returns the feeling; if it's a 6 or less, she has merely weakened, but she is still thinking about her husband.

The DM rolls a 9.

"She understands," the DM says.





Goddamned goofy horndogs.

Post-Pubescent Design

I am compelled to write more on yesterday's subject.

I find myself quite contentious on the matter of people who want to limit the game on the basis of what players are willing to play or what players are comfortable with.  This only means that the solution MUST be more creative and far-reaching than the limited imaginations of those who dismiss the idea of out hand.

At the risk of repeating the very, very obvious, SEX and LOVE are central, immutable elements of the human soul, more so than morality, magic or social comfort.  The failing here is not that these are not subjects suited for the game ... it is that the game at this time has not risen to the importance of these subjects.

Oh, you may sit upon your toadstool and preach the comfort zones of your players, but were someone to offer your players a rational, reasonable and playable option for them to get HIGH on their characters in love, they would grab it.

So far, I've seen people speak of all the negative aspects.  Of course no player character wants to settle down into a marriage.  Of course no player wants to be gay or have to suck up to a loved one's possible disapproval.  And no DM wants to get into all the bullshit of when a player's lovelife makes a social modifier and when it doesn't.

Playability demands that the whole situation MUST be viewed in terms of how it can be measured mathematically.  We're perfectly comfortable measuring intelligence mathematically, or wisdom, or your beauty.  We have no trouble with numbers for how likely your men are to obey you!  All existing social aspects of the game are already measured!

To remotely consider roleplaying as a fundamental solution to the matter is to propose NO solution, or to propose that a solution ought not to be supposed.  It is Victorian thinking, my dear gentle readers, and its as ignorant as Aleister Crowley and his midnight dinner parties.  You've thrown in the towel before you've begun and damn your frigid, turgid genitalia to your mother's narrow womb for that bullshit.

Betwixt the fantasy and the playability of D&D, my dear readers, a lover is a prize ... it is a phenomenal thing that is to be obtained, just as one obtains gold and magic.  it is, indeed, a 'magic' item ... one that must transform your character's kicking ass ability just as it does Parzival and just as a +4 Dwarven Hammer would.  The only thing that needs deciding isn't WHAT love would do, but how to obtain that kind of love.  We do not speak of the bar wench, or the piece of tail selling itself on the street of silversmith dildo-makers.  One does not wrench free the broken end of a smashed stairwell's bannister and call it a magic weapon.  Just so, one does not slap wet skin with the farmer's daughter and call it Guinevere.

So please spare me the conditional expectations of your players.  I do not care a whit for any such persons more pre-pubescent than their teenage children.  As ever, I'm looking to break the expectations here and lift the game out of its perpetual self-inflicted infancy.  Help or do not, but don't tell me its impractical.

The Sexless Grail

To write this post, I struggled to find some online version of the story of Parzival as told by the 13th century author Wolfgang von Eschenbach ... but that proved unexpectedly difficult.  The original story is written in medieval German.  Those translations I could find were either excessively worded poetry (longer than the original text) or children's simplifications.  Fact is, because I've never read the German (don't speak German) I've never actually "read" Parzival.  At best, I'm familiar with the story.

It's long, and wikipedia covers it fairly well.  It's fundamentally misogynistic, but in an odd way; the knight Parzival adores, loves, aches for his lady love, Kondwiramur ... but this intense worship steals him away from the Grail, which is the true adoration of God and all that is good, right and proper.  Well, this is the 13th century, and this sort of attitude towards women held a lot of power among males who tried to believe camaraderie with one's fellows and perfect worship of the Supreme Being were higher ideals than raw, unrelenting sex.  Not that there is any actual sex in Parzival.

There are many motifs, however, of women controlling or guiding Parzival's 'nature,' however, and the keen eye can see all the erectile symbolism, the collar around the male's throat, the mystical weaving of spells that we know all women possess, etc., etc.  You can miss all that if you haven't had extensive training in literary deconstruction - and you're all the better for it, believe me.  Deconstruction is only good if you want to write for a living, or if you want to be terribly depressing at parties.

The specific part of Parzival that I want to talk about is a famous passage.  Parzival is passing through the woods when a hawk hits a goose above him, and three drops of blood hit the snow next to Parzival's horse.  The knight looks at the snow and sees Kondwiramur - her cheeks, her white skin, her beautiful ruby lips ... and Parzival's heart yearns for the woman he's left behind.  He aches, his heart beats in his chest, he goes weak in the knees, he can't take his eyes off the snow as he drifts into a 'love trance' thinking of his lady love.

As he does this, his lance dips forward, and he's seen by a retainer in King Arthur's party, who is moving through the same wood.  The lance being dipped forward, the retainer rushes back and tells the King's party that there's a knight looking for a fight (the sign of the lance giving the intent).  Sir Sagramor puts up his hand (colloquially speaking) and goes Oh, Oh!  Let me fight him.  Arthur's got other things on his mind, but he says all right, but be back by suppertime (still colloquial).

Sagramor goes and finds Parzival and can't help noticing that he's rather distracted.  So Sagramor says, "Come on, have at ye!" and attacks ... and before time takes to tell, with one blow Parzival lays him out, never taking his eyes off the imagined image of Konwiramur in the snow.

Sagramor staggers back with his tail between his legs, and upon hearing the story Arthur's step-brother Kay shouts, Me! Me!  So Arthur lets Kay have a try.

Kay is a great blustering self-important asshole, and when he finds Parzival he insults him and cries, "I'll wake you up!"  And its the same scene all over again, except that Parzival kills Kay's horse and leaves Kay in a terrible state, so much so that Kay has to stay in his tent in pain after having to walk back.  All the while, Parzival never takes his eye off the snow.

The next to have a go is Gawain, who warned by Arthur to be careful, approaches Parzival in a very different manner.  Gawain recognizes him, calls out as a comrade (note the 'we are men' angle) and then takes note what's really going on.  So he lays a cloak upon the snow, Parzival immediately falls out the trance and says, "What's happened, what's going on?"  And Gawain has to explain how he's whacked two knights already, though Parzival has no memory of it.

There are other things going on - the whole Kondwiramur in the snow thing is part of a spell cast by Kondwiramur's mother, to entrap Parzival's heart and make him a slave to love, and so on, getting back to the general theme.  For myself, I don't really care about the glory of mythical deities, but I suppose there's something to be said about player characters throwing off the yoke of sex and giving obeisance to Gods and Demi-gods.

Nothing good, but something.

Now, I've gone through the exercise of getting across this story because I want to talk about love in D&D, and especially this whole 'love trance' thing.  Love is a powerful force, either for good or bad, as evidenced in the tale above.  Yes, it may not be as 'important' as the Holy Grail, which Parzival seeks - depending on how you define importance - but it is a damn sight stronger than a couple of mere knights.  There is a spectacular cult of passion that runs through most of human history, the better known since the 12th and 13th centuries (and the rise of romance), in which men of all varieties have rushed around getting themselves hacked to pieces over the erotic expectation of getting a LOT more than a pretty scarf to wrap around their uppers.  We may think that that knights and aristocratic ladies did not get it on in the bushes after a joust, but we also know there were a helluva a lot of bastard kings and other unwanted children running about the age, and they didn't pop out of bellies by chance.  Outwardly, it may have been for favors, but it takes an idiot to think that favors were as far as it went.

However, none of this is part of D&D.  You may be rushing around saving princesses, but after the fact its no touchy touchy.  Obviously there's the odd DM promoting the sweaty nasty after a good day's dragon killing, but by and large the consensus is that sex is not the mandate in D&D, and shouldn't get rubbed in the faces of people who are squeamish and all.

We can guess why there's no page about sex, love and the virtues of 14th century rape in the Dungeon Master's compendium of whatever version of the game you will.  For one thing, Gygax and Arneson were creatures of the 50s and 60s ... and though publishing their little books in the 1970s, it's pretty clear from the content that we're not talking about a couple of guys dropping into Plato's Retreat or anywhere near Stonewall in New York.  There may have been a sexual revolution going on at the time, but the Happy Hooker did not have any D&D questions to answer in her Penthouse column.

Now, I'm 48, and I can tell you that I have loved.  I have loved deeply and passionately, and I can certainly attest to the fact that when I am not writing here online or actually working at my job, there's a pretty good chance that I'm in some dark, sweaty place having a very good time without D&D on my mind.  I think this has to be true also for all the husbands and wives who read the various blogs about the game.  We are none of us ignorant in the ways of love, or the way that it will drive us to doing impossible, frightening things, or the way it keeps us chained happily to the work-desk and the bank mortgage.  We are all of us familiar with love.  Some of us are still in love with it, some of us are angrily in thrall to it and some of us stare achingly at the snow wondering why we don't have it now.

So IF we're going to talk about magic, and IF we're going to talk about fantasy, isn't it just a little boneheaded to think that none of that has anything to do with LOVE?  Or is there a special castration ceremony we've been meant to undergo upon entering a convention or sitting at the gaming table?  If there is, then why isn't THAT in the books, hum?

It seems to me the above tale of Parzival gives a hint of what kind of powers love might impart to characters willing to risk all.  Giving an opportunity for players to go to that place in the fantasy forum, where reconciling their nerdish nature with the nympholific, might shake loose some of the boundries of your game ... except that ...

Well, you should be able to see the problem at once.  THERE ARE NO RULES.  Nix, naught, nothing, not a thing to make the least suggestion of how you fall in love, how this love manifests, what should inspire your character or what the effects are.  Beyond the silly tropes of television, where every father hates every prospective mate, what real impact does the character's love have upon the family, searching for a really good sire to offspring.  Let's face it, player characters would make really good sires ... high ability stats and all that.  How about some serious bling for proving love and how about some serious positive consequences for the player willing to act greenly in front of the other players?  How about a grown up stance that says, this is my character and he by the bloodstains on Cthulhu's lips wants a goddamn good woman to have sex with.

I'm not saying that the participants should step into yon bedroom for twenty minutes and consummate a player character relationship ... but damn, what a running that would be!  Eh?  Anyone?

All I'm asking for is a little thought on the matter.  A little less digging of toes in the sand.  A recognition that you have testicles and genitalia, and that they transform interestingly now and then.  Contemplate it.  Give it some consideration.  Muse upon it.

You can go seek Parzival's sexless grail afterwards.

No Sex, Please. We Play D&D.

Where it comes to character generation, I've long held the belief that certain aspects of the character should not be chosen by the player.  These would be things like the height and weight, eye and hair color, the profession of one's father, the total amount of coin available to the character at the start of the campaign, or the character's place of birth.  I feel this way because these things are NOT a part of our choice as beings.  No person gets to pick where they're born, or whether they're born poor or wealthy, or if one's father is a git or not.  These are the breaks ... and a player should be pushed to play characters who are less than convenient.  It builds, if the gentle reader will pardon the expression, "character."

If it happens that some players get lucky, and their character is a small lord in charge of a fiefdom at the start of the game, rather than a bum with no wealth whatsoever, then tough tookies.  Life isn't fair.  Overcome, adapt, win.  That's the game.

There are two elements of character creation, however, that I do let the players pick, though it breaks the above logic.  I would rather not make the concession, but until I get players who ask for it, the concession stands:

You get to pick your race, and you get to pick your sex.

I might put up another post about the race issue after this one.  Race is one of those things that most players are flexible about.  My place of birth tables, however, and the size of my world, and the relative rarity of demi-humans therein, would tend to favor humans for the most part.  I could easily roll ten random characters by place of birth and have them all come out as human, particularly if the starting point were somewhere in central Germany, or India say.  For the sake of players being able to play other races with more frequency, I make the concession.

But that is not the reason the concession is made regarding women characters in D&D.  I think we all know the reason.  Men are not for the most part comfortable playing women.

I have mentioned before, I have several women playing characters in my world, and they quite comfortably mix up the genders of their characters.  They play men or women with equal interest, and don't seem to mind if I have NPC's hit on either, or if in my 17th century campaign I have male assholes make innuendos or generally insult them.

Men, on the other hand, seem to get their back up about that sort of thing.  They seem to get quite uncomfortable over a whole range of potential sexual juxtapositions and circumstances.

This is not to say that male players rush to have their male characters rush into erotic circumstances, either.  D&D is surprisingly conservative in the "love" motif.  It's nice when eyes meet between a female and a male in the midst of a quiet moment while at the bar, listening to the local bard spin some tale.  A few bits of chivalry and gentle friendliness are welcome interludes between slaughtering orcs.  Nobody minds if Eowyn's eyes water a little when she finds Aragorn is alive.

But having Eowyn and Aragorn fuck hard and messy behind the king's throne in a few choice moments would spoil everything.   We can be really sure that a typical male player isn't going to describe in detail how his female mage has a prediliction for cocksucking.

Straight up, I've played D&D with the same sort of people Zak boasts about, because I too have a long and questionable sexual history, nicely stored in the fuzziness of privacy now that I'm an old man not wanting to come across as an old lech.  I've had players whose favorite moment for "backstabbing" was doing it doggy-style, and players who approached the game as an opportunity for quenching their cross-gendering sexual appetites.  But this is NOT the norm.  I think we all know this.

I think it can also be argued that many a face is going to fall uncomfortably when male players are told that, sorry, you've been a woman, and not a particularly attractive one at that.  I don't have numbers, but I'd be willing to bet a study done on the subject would demonstrably prove an increase in female characters for male players when the charisma climbed above 15.

I'd like to live in a world where a male player could be handed a woman and see it as an opportunity, and not as an inconvenience.  Granted, my world is remarkably sexist.  I don't run a Gloria Steinum version of the 17th century.  I do have women fighters and pirates and clerics and such, but they DO get pushed around a bit by sexist pigs in my world and they DO have to push back if they want to succeed.  It isn't that I'm sexist, you understand.  If a woman wants to play a man, and not get all that shit, they're free to do so.  But my experience has been that women players who play women LIKE being able to bury their mace nastily into the skulls of their former male oppressors, and I'm not going to take that away from them.  It is a vicarously satisfying victory, and I've had quite a few women who simply got off on it.  Putting up a straw male chauvanist for a woman to cut down is just as satisfying for her as putting up the sort of straw asshole that he likes cutting down - namely, smug, self-satisfied villains.

The experience isn't as satisfying for a male player, however.  He tends to wonder what the hell is wrong with me as a DM, and why is he stuck playing this obviously inconvenient stereotype (men, I am sorry to say, still view women as a stereotype).  A woman has had a lifetime learning ways to circumvent morons.  Men, not so much.

Do I sound like a chauvanist?  Funny, I don't think so.  I'm saying up front, women are more adaptable to this game where it comes to sex.  They don't get uncomfortable if things get sexual.  No matter what the NPC is like, women just cope with it, using the tools available, and move on.  They don't get uncomfortable or embarrassed.  That may have something to do with the sort of women who play D&D.  I can think of conventions where there were 3,000 boys and about a 150 girls.  If you're in this subculture, and you're a woman, you've already learned emotional tae kwan do.

Guys, on the other hand, have a huge flippin' blind spot where it comes to this stuff.  No doubt, they'll deny it in the comments.  A woman will run a male like a male, but a guy - if he runs a female character - will run a female like a male.

It's a bit disappointing.  Yet so long as it exists, I will make the concession, and continue to allow players to choose the gender of their characters.

Sometimes, illogic is easier.