Sex and Sorcery: Facts Feeding Fictions

[Judd]

"In the functional group, the interactions among the real people provide a charge to the creative interactions.  The emerging story has value to the people who create it, and real-life emotions among them provide both feedback and raw material for the process."

- Sex and Sorcery by Ron Edwards

This book is beginning to sink in and while I would like to at some point address the gay and lesbian issues that the book seems to absolutely ignore, that's not what I'm thinking about today.

T o quote the book's own metaphor, today I'm outside the pool, looking at the water.  Let's save the deep end for another day, a day when I've slept.

My best single GMed session was an Ars Magica prelude with two players.  They were playing apprentices on their final test to become Magi.  They awoke to find themselves in the midst of the Children's Crusade heading south to Marsielles and had to make their way to southern France with these holy children, so they could claim their Sigils and become men.

The players were Jevon and Mario.  Jevon was a schoolteacher who went to law school and a few years after that session would be the Assistant District Attorney often prosecuting crimes against children.  Mario was working in an after-school program at the time and is now, since that session a high school English teacher.

These were two gamers who became men, by looking after children, which is exactly what the adventure was all about.

When they had to part ways with the children, players knowing what became of those doomed kids, there were tears in the player's eyes.  Part of this was the fact that I drew up compelling N.P.C.'s but part of it was the way the game so perfectly fit the players.  I didn't know either of them that well, the glory of that game was a wonderfully happy accident.

They can still name kids who were on that journey south.

Last week I was doing character generation and the young lady wanted to make her character a Copy Editor, a career goal of her own.  I prodded her towards a psychiatrist, knowing from talks we had that her mom was a psychiatrist and that they had a tempestuous relationship.

She knew I knew and I knew she knew I knew.  There was trust and she loved the idea.  

Another player in a Sorcerer game I ran last week strangled her character's mother with her Demon when it shapechanged into a python.  Vicious.  I knew damn well the player had a rough relationship with her own mother (different player, different mother).  

I'm not saying that by playing these games we are making any tremendous statements about coping with these issues that we play out.  But we are staring them in the eyes a bit.  We are playing with them, rather than beside them, over them or worse yet, around them.

These little parts of us are in our characters already.  And I'm thinking that some of what Sex and Sorcery is about is acknowledging these parts and allowing them to make the gaming table a more charged, intense and dynamic place.

Cool.

[Judd]

I cross-posted this over at RPG.net because I'm often interested to see what happens when I throw a stone in that particular pond.

I reckon this thread would be a good place to post like-minded gaming antecdotes, thoughts and ideas about this issue.

Thanks for reading.

[jburneko]

Hello,

In my group there is a woman who, a) hates children and says she doesn't want any of her own, b) has serious power and control issues, c) almost always plays magic weilding characters as an expression of that need for power and control.

I ran a 7th Sea game and the group was pressuring this woman to play something OTHER than a magic weilding character.  So she instead built an Eisen warrior woman.  She took the "Orphaned" background and told me to run with it.  Here's what I did, I made her a lost decendant of a noble family who had possessed a form of sorcerery long thought dead in Theah.  She herself did not possess this sorcery but if she married properly her children might.  So, I had a very powerful Eisen warlord discover this and offer to arrange a mariage for her and made promisses that her children would surely "restore glory to Eisen."

I did this on purpose.  I deliberately tied her personal dislike for children to her fantasies about magic as a method for achieving power and control.  Interestingly enough she agreed to the aranged marriage but fought tooth and nail to get her and her betrothed out from under the control of the warlord.  The game ended with the birth of her son.

But what really surprised me was when, just recently, she virtually repeated the storyline on her own in my Eden Falls game.  In this game she's playing a warrior woman (again) with prophetic dreams.  I could tell that she was trying to use the prophetic dreams as a method of getting me, the gm, to tell her what to do, so I went out of my way to always have the dreams depict things that I knew she wouldn't WANT to do or have come to pass.

She was interpreting the dreams as instructions from her goddess.  So, I was basically throwing the question at her: "Okay, be a puppet of the gods or be your own woman.  Your choice."  So in one game I threw a vision of her having sex with this "bookshop pagan" (as one player came to call him) cult leader who I knew she had developed an aversion to from eariler scenes.  At the time I was thinking about smarmy cult leader using "initiation ceremonies" for sex.

But SHE, on her own, interpreted this to mean that her goddess wanted her to have a child.  At the ritual she tried to call on her goddess for guidance and failed so I had the god the cult was worshiping show up instead.  He tried to talk her OUT of having the child and instead taking a more direct violent aproach to the other problems she was facing.  She decided to try and pursued the god that her goddesses wishes were better.  She rolled, succeeded and took a monlogue of victory (we were using the pool) and promptly described herself having sex with the GOD while the dumbfounded and dejected cult leader looked on.

Here's an interesting point.  Between the 7th Sea game and the Eden Falls game she's entered into a pretty serious relationship.  The guy in question does now play with us.  From what I know this really is her first serious relationship with some not-very-serious flings in the past.  Another player commented to me later that she thinks that since this woman has now entered into a long term serious relationship that she's maybe rethinking the whole children issue.  Sadly the player in question is playing the denial game saying "I didn't have much of a choice, that's the character I was playing."

All of this goes back to a revelation I had while running the 7th Sea game.  That game started off on very rocky footing.  It wasn't going very well at all.  Then, one day, I was thinking about all the discussions we had here about "hooking the player, not the character."  I had always thought that just meant making sure that the players thought whatever we were doing was cool and exciting.  But it was deeper than that.

For a moment I threw out the characters entirely.  I pretended that the players were just themselves in the game.  What would I throw at them as a GM if they were just themselves in the game.  That's when I came up with the Orphaned background answer and few other elements.  And from there the game picked up and ran just fine.  Now I just look at characters as bounding boxes for subset versions of the players themselves.

I had that revelation just before Sex & Sorcery came out which is probably why I haven't commented much on the book.  That book was just formalizing something that I had come to understand on a gut level.

Hope that was useful/insightful.

Jesse

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Paka,

I think that's right on.

I remember a group I played with in Chicago. Smart guys, good guys. Ultimately not the people I needed to be with, but good guys.

One of them in particular was really hooked on this idea of Theme. He was really sparked when their was some central question -- something out of a lit class he could hook the "adventure" on.

Usually this meant we'd do some action adventure stuff, and then there'd be "The Discussion." Sometimes a lot of little discussions, but usually The Discussion. This is where we'd sort out the moral implications of whatever was at hand. He would usually sit back, as the GM, and really enjoy himself, listening to The Discussion. Everything was geared around getting to the discussion -- and when it arrived, he'd be happy. After The Discussion, we would have arrived, as a group, at the action to be taken. And then we'd finish off the advnture kicking someone ass, as determined by the outcome of The Discussion.

Here's the thing: I can fucking debate any issue. But I seldome cared about the moral dilema at hand. I certainly was seldom engaged emotionally -- as Paka's players clearly were. I did it, the way I rolled endless rolls of dice to whittle down oppositon in 45 minute fights... But only because it was expected, what you did when you roleplayed -- at least with this group.

Later on I worked as a freelancer for modules an games and settings. And the thing about published modules is you have no clue at all who the players are or what they care about. You provided generic actions set pieces, clues to the next cool encounter, puzzles, and so on. Even with the products I or other people worked on that had a bit of true zing (and people have done it), the point still remained: seldom did the actual players have an investment in what they actually, truly cared about in the "adventure."

Now, some would say, "Why does this matter? We're here to have fun." And I appreciate that point of view. It isn't mine, but I certainly won't call foul on someone who thinks differently than me on this.

But the key is this: I was also writing novels at the time.... And this eventually led to screenplay work. And what I noticed was, the more I wrote for RPGs, the *worse* my writing got. Until -- really -- my fiction brain just up and died.

I am absolutely convinced of a direct corrollation. I believe that writing generic "adventures" and source book background devoid of absolute respect for what mattered to me most became more and more a grotesque habit. (Not across the board.... I think the Virtual Realites novela I wrote for Shadowrun was pretty sweet, and there were some good things, good enough for a beginner, in my novels)... But it was the habit of thinking outside my own passions and needs that dried me up.

I tossed my game stuff and took a long break from writing. I let all the habits of what "story" meant in RPGs to bleed out of my brain.

When I bumped into games like Sorcerer and Hero Wars and others I thought -- "Oh, here we are." It's not that RPGs are inherently counterproductive to having a true story sense -- its that certain habits are. Now, this might not matter to *you.* And that's fine.

I'm writing again now, cautiously playing RPGs again. I'm writing a screenplay with a full head of steam -- a ridiculously expensive screenplay chock full of stuff I care passionately about. And I know that in part its because I bumped into these new wacky games that are all about playing out what matters to the players.

We can staple a "theme" onto an RPG session, but if I don't care about it with emotion and passion, it's just an exercise. Not the real flesh and blood of living -- which includes, for those of us with such temperaments, what we make. Everything we make.

And why not do that when gaming? I mean, really: Why not?

This, by the way, is why the Kickers and such matter for some of us. It's a Players chance to say, "I want to fucking explore this." And why Bangs are more than an encounter with some "extra weight." That extra weight is exactly what a Bang is all about. It's when a player has to really express, in public, to other people he's invested in some way, "I feel this about this, I'm saying this about this, I'm going to try this out and see how it feels." Is that any more ridiculous than being moved by a movie are a book? No.

There are books and movies that don't move us, of course. "Van Helsing" is a cinematic pile of shit. It is a series of spectacular incidents that misfires any half-assed attempt about being something. "Man on Fire" is great the first havf, and then becomes a horrific parody of a bad RPG session: get the clue, use intimidation, kill someone: repeat. By removing all choices before the character it becomes a damned bore -- like many RPG sessions I've played in. (I tell you this: if Creasy had found the girl shortly after the kidnapping and had to go on the run from the corrupt law, and had to decide if he was going to behave like an assissin while having to protect the little girl, the movie would have CRACKLED that last hour and the box office would have doubled.)

I bring this up because this stuff matters to me. Good moviemaking, good stories, good game sessions, good passions, unleashed, in public, where life is played out.

I have played good RPG sessions in years past. There were never about anything but some passion or emotion or moral issue I wanted to give vent to. I remember them clearly not because of the die rolls but because of what I was feeling at the time. I felt enaged. I felt like what I was taking the time to communicate mattered -- definitely to me, and always at least one other person at the table. (The GMs in question, at least, who seemed pleased as hell I had taken a smidgen of their lead and ran all the way with it.)

I'm writing all this not to convince anyone who doesn't want to really take the chance on hitting a vein during an RPG seesion. Nor to confirm behavior with those who already do.

As with almost all my posts, this one is for the peole who are thinking, "There must be something I'm missing." Maybe there is.

Games like Sorcerer, HeroQuest, Riddle of Steel (with SA's running full throttle) -- especially when retro-fitted with Kickers, Bangs, strong emotional ties and relationships, a commitment to open playing, a lack of investment in carrying out the "mission" or somebody else's plot, but a permission to the players to write their own plot with the PCs and reveal where the heart lies... All this might be what you're looking for.

I'm not saying everybody wants this. I'm not even saying you don't get this without using any of the techniques above. I'm saying, for those who are looking for more, this might be something to check out.

Christopher