Personality is impolite

[james_west]

Two guys will meet on a  park bench and start talking about God. Did you ever notice that? Guys that wouldn't talk about God to their best friend.

I first read through 'Sex and Sorcery' about a month ago. There's a lot there to like; Ron's got a talent for making concrete that which needs it. There was something that substantially bothered me though.

I couldn't imagine playing the scenarios in S&S with my normal game group, probably not In Utero and definitely not the Ask'arn scenarios. This is a group of folks who would probably help me dispose of bodies without asking pesky questions, and the line is drawn far too conservatively to handle these scenarios, let alone the curtain . I couldn't immediately put my finger on why I wouldn't feel comfortable running these scenarios for them. I asked myself if I would be comfortable running it with just the men in the group, or just the women; it wouldn't help, still with just a vague uneasiness. I asked myself if I would be OK running it with a group of strangers at a convention; that, I found, I'd have no problem with.

I'm uncomfortable knowing too much about my friends; distance, formality, is the greatest of social lubricants. Appropriate boundaries, tightly drawn, are at the heart of etiquette. Showing too much personality is impolite. I am confident that this is why I'd be willing to run these scenarios with strangers, but not with a group of people I've known for years. This is actually the fundamentally funny thing about Sorceror in general; this game makes it very difficult for the player to hide behind his character. I think that this is something that makes folks more than a little uncomfortable.

- James

[Trevis Martin]

Wow, James,

I've thought the same thing about my group.  That whole thing that's mentioned in sex and sorcerery...we can fantisize about violence because we have little real experience with it.   But (especially) sexual issues?  Love? Romance?  Heartbreak?  Pain?  These are things that we all understand and naturally only share under more intimate circumstances.  i would say not that too much personality is impolite, but perhaps too much personal authenticity is.  But that's a quibble with terminology, I quite understood what you meant.

I tend to get the giggly group when we approach some of this stuff.  Distraction through jokes.  I've been much more successful with it playing in Lxndr's online Sorcerer game.  There is a certain veil of anonymity that helps a lot.  

At the same time, that risk, when it has worked in my live group, gives a strange and powerful energy to the situation an energy which can (I have found) be genuinly moving.  It's a scary energy though, it feels very dangerous. and it is not easy to do (or perhaps endure?).  The same energy occurs online but its definitely diluted.  There is a sense of freedom to do what you really want.

No doubt the dynamic in my group contributes to it.  Four of its members are related to each other.  Two brothers, a sister and her son.  The other two are more recent additions, a good freind, and a female co-worker who is very pleasent and likeable but is pretty new.

The sister tends to embrace romance and romantic themes and I play to them seriously but there is humor tossed about that does deflate or de tense these situations.

The teenage son,  tends to stay away from any romantic or even parental creations in his characters so far, mostly creating only vocation related contacts and freinds.  More recently in our TROS games he set up a situation with a family and having two sisters. I don't think he'd want to expose that more intense romantic or sexual stuff in front of his mom or his uncles and most certainly when they are together.

One of the brothers plays with romantic relationships quite a bit as well as family.   The other brother is also a newer member and is just starting a divorce proceeding so perhaps romantic elements are too painful just now.  Perhaps not.  In any case he hasn't created any for his character.  

Anywho.  I'm sure that the group dynamic may not permit high intensity intimacy issues in play.  At least at this time.  We approach but we abstract quite a bit and then defuse with humor.  In some interior sense that disappoints me, but I'm  leary of putting myself so far out there as well.  But those moments of truly juiced play have been golden, and some even lovely.  Its very potent stuff though, not the tonic for every evening to be certain.

Anyway, thanks for the thought...it made me think.

regards,

Trevis

[Christopher Weeks]

I want to be impolite.  I want the energy that I detect when reading Sex and Sorcery.  But I don't really know how to capture it.  The discomfort that people feel with these issues is the whole point.

I've already played the game where a puzzle is spoon-fed to the players and they either solve it or don't.  Over and over and over.  Adding some emotional tension; some investment would be really invigorating.  I want exploration.  I want the game to be a boundary-pushing emotional ballancing act for the players, not just an opportunity for theme-park waldos to perform tricks.

I'd play those games with any group, mixed sex, face to face, non-gamer, friends would be best.  With some regular old game group, I'm afraid you still wouldn't capture what you're supposed to.

Chris

[Sean]

One thing to note about this thread: the primary subject seems to be personal comfort zones and, if there is such a thing, etiquette. Everyone seems to agree about the potential intensity of the kind of play championed in Sex and Sorcery and its potential impact on personal relationships. So the question just seems to be whether we want that for ourselves, and with which people, and why or why not.

Seems like a great thread topic to me.

One other note though: James_West wrote: "This is actually the fundamentally funny thing about Sorceror in general; this game makes it very difficult for the player to hide behind his character. I think that this is something that makes folks more than a little uncomfortable."

This is the fundamentally funny thing about all Ron's games, or at least Sorcerer, Elfs, Trollbabe, and Zero at the Bone. Ron seems to really value owning one's own actions out of game, too - witness the pressure he puts on people to use their real names here at the Forge, and his listing the real names of authors rather than the ones they published under in Sorcerer and Sword.

In my opinion by pushing in this 'Exploration of Participants' direction, Ron's designs are actually pushing towards a fourth type of CA, or at the very least a distinction (analogous to the vanilla vs. pervy distinction wrt Exploration of Setting) to be made within the existing CA. But I already said what I had to say about that a while back.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Thanks for this topic and the discussion, everyone. All of you are right on track, I think .

Sean, you're right: ownership of one's creative input is a big thing for me.

Furthermore, although I don't push people emotionally because they are close friends, I do demand emotional honesty when someone's under stress, and I provide very little buffering to shield people from their own behavior.

And I do demand emotional stuff from people during role-playing. Walk into a game with me? I'm expecting to see some guts, eventually. To me, this is not a safe art form - it's dangerous in exactly the same way theater, literature, poetry, dance, painting, film, cartooning, and all the other forms are dangerous. Get into the studio with me, and it's like getting into underground comics in 1967. Or guerrilla theater in 1932. What will happen? Will you find yourself suddenly stripping off your clothes? Lighting your hair on fire? Or perhaps just necking with exactly the wrong person in the back stairwell, afterwards?

Maybe so. Do the games make you do this? No ... but they are a means to an artistic end which admits to no particular limits.

The limits people are stating about who they would or would not play (e.g.) hard-line Sorcerer with don't surprise me at all. It's just the same as the other art forms. Would you enter into, say, a project which breaks the boundaries of dance, video, and theater in an astounding fashion (oh, Blue Man Group comes to mind) as a close friends and family activity? I wouldn't. I'd look for people who were as bent about the topic as I am. People who are already committed to grope & kill to see what they sort-of-envision become something that others can see.

As it happens, I don't think that this kind of perspective or priority is itself a unique Creative Agenda; instead, I think it's a kind of extreme "guts" extension of Narrativism.

I also think it's interesting to think about it on a larger scale than just a single role-playing group. The equivalent for Simulationist play is already apparent: thematic or genre-based conventions, where everyone dresses up and has a real good time dancing to (say) Cthulhu-based lyrics dubbed on top of "Burning Down the House." The equivalent for Gamist play is easy to see in tournament versions of role-playing, especially those with cash prizes involved.

Has the Narrativist "guts" extension found expression at that social scope yet? Nope.

Not yet.

Best,
Ron