Bacchus owns me...

[hardcoremoose]

Read this quickly, breathlessly, or for better effect, do it out loud or have someone else read it to you (not at work though):


I awaken that morning in Puteoli to discover Grizelda - my foreign princess - missing.  Panicked and still naked, I rush downstairs, but find the common room empty.  The door stands open and in the streets beyond I can hear a rising clamour.  A figure bounds across my vision just then, standing for a moment in silhouette against the door.  His hair is wild and he waves me towards him with one hand.  Then he's gone, leaping out of sight.  I go to where he was just standing and can see for myself the commotion outside.

I spin back into the room and, leaning against the wall, begin to stroke my growing member.  That well known feeling is rising and I squeeze my eyes shut, bracing for it. At that moment someone touches my wrist and pulls my hand away.  This was no mean-spirited act though; their hand takes over for mine, and within moments they start using their mouth.  I do not open my eyes to see if my benefactor is man or woman.  I do reach out to touch the nape of their neck, and in so doing my forearm brushes something cold and hard about their brow.  I jerk my arm back but do not let my horror stand in the way of gratification.

With release comes a moment of clarity and I beg the satyr for information pertaining to my dear Grizelda.  He knows her name and tells me he will take me to her, then leads me on a merry chase through the streets and alleys of Purteoli, amid which I see sights I can barely describe. 

He leads me to a building, and in the building to a back room, and there, encircled by several naked handmaidens is my Grizelda.  I rush to her embrace and we kiss deeply.  It isn't until we take a breath that I realize my mistake.  This is not Grizelda, but a young man cleverly disquised as her.  Even the earrings are similar - no wait, they are the same earrings I brought her from Rome!  These people know where Grizelda is!  That will be for later though; for now the illusion is good enough.  I lay him down on a bed specially prepared for us; with pilows placed to hoist his hips in the air, he wraps his legs around my waist and we make love in what way we can.  When he doesn't perform exacty as a real woman would, the handmaidens are there to lend their gentle guidance.

That's a little taste of what playing Bacchanal is like.  I smoothed out the rough edges a bit, but otherwise it's pretty much the spoken narrative I concocted during our session a few weeks ago. 

Although not usually a reader of erotic fiction, and not particularly a fan of the Roman time period, this game session ranks as one of my top two or three of all time.  Why?

Because, like many people, I enjoy sex.  And this game is sex. 

The parallels are astounding.  To do it right, you have to start slow, tease a little.  You have to pace yourself - climaxing too soon can have serious consequences.  Most of all, you have to rely on the people you're doing it with - they'll let you know when you're doing something right.  It's more than a metaphor though; this game produced an actual physiological response in me not unlike having sex with a new partner for the first time.  While playing, I was nervous, giddy, excited, scared, and at times a little queasy.  Afterwards, I was exhausted but delighted.  Something about breaching taboos really gets the endorphins rushing.

I'm eagerly anticipating GenCon and other actual play reports*.  I think together we'll have an interesting conversation about the role of erotic storytelling among groups of people, and maybe about the line between erotica and depravity.

- Scott

*  Paul will kill me for this, but why wait for GenCon?  Go download it now from the Game Chef site and then play it.  I dare you!

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Bacchanal.php

[Larry L.]

!

!!

Good heavens, my virgin eyes! That's naughty stuff.

Um, could you describe what went on with the people at the session to create this?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Out of sheerest curiosity, was there any graphic het sex in the game?

Well, I lie. The reason for my asking is that we did a fine (if overly-sketchy) bathtub scene with two men in my recent experience with Polaris, and Ben pointed out that same-gender sex is very common in Polaris games - especially in a casual, comfortable sort of dialogue compared to its occurrence in other games he's played. Even more interesting when you consider that the text offers no direct support of this and in fact references only hetero romance.

Overall, I'm wondering whether same-gender sex scenes are further from or nearer to the Line for a given group such as yours whose individual preferences tend toward het.

Best,
Ron

[hardcoremoose]

I should invite Paul, Tom, Matt, and Danielle to bomb in here and share their memories of that session, but as I recall there was barely any hetero sex, except that which occurred as a by-product of describing orgies.  Maybe in Tom's...I'm having difficulty recalling what occurred in Tom's earliest scenes.  Guys, any help out there?

Which is not to say that the whole session was homoerotica.  Danielle was the only other player to incorporate graphic homoerotic content (a tender love story about two adolescents, with a brutally unhappy ending) into her narrative.  I'd kind of like her to talk about that, because I wonder if the gender divide doesn't do something to a person's comfort level when dealing with that kind of material.  And also, I wonder how she felt telling a story about children, because that's the part that seemed edgy and controversial to me.

Basically, being our first time, we were just learning how to play this game, and we skipped past one-on-one het sex in favor of something more outrageous and taboo, only to discover that less is more, you can't replace real intimacy, and that blowing your wad (!) too soon puts you in a serious bind.  For instance, while everyone else was describing orgies, I settled for a scene of simple masturbation, and the simplicity of it had a profound impact on at least some of the other players.  Their wanton enthusiasm guided the rest of my story, and I think if we were to play again we would see more early-game focus on familiar types of intimacy.

Which brings up another interesting point:  There is a "safe" way to play this game.  You can't really get around the sex, but you can certainly objectify it, make a cartoon out of it, thereby keeping it at a distance and preventing it from becoming too personal.  I lobbied Paul to tweak the rules to prevent this, but I wonder now if it's not a good design feature, a way for people to draw the veil on anything that might be hitting too close to home.  It'll be interesting to see how people play this game.

And Larry, congrats on winning the Half Meme Unplanned Contest.  I have a copy of the GenCon book in front of me, and it's nice.  And Ed, the cover artwork is fantastic.

- Scott

[hardcoremoose]

Whoops, sorry to post consecutively like this, but I wanted to address Larry's question more directly and I neglected it...

In Bacchanal the dice sort of take the place of a GM, and each individual player is on their own when interpreting those dice into narration.  For me personally, I was listening to everyone else's narration and trying to figure out what I could do to distinguish my story from their's.  That led to two things - I decided to go smaller (everyone else was doing orgies, so I went with masturbation), and I decided that I would bring every scene back around to the mystery of what happened to Grizelda (to give the scenes a thread of continuity).  My choices were met with resounding approval, so I kept the tone I started with - a sort of breathless, staccato rhythm - and just upped the weirdness of each successive scene.  I never lost my audience, so I never had to change gears or change direction.  It was an extremely gratifying experience.

- Scott

[Paul's Girl]

I'll respond to Scott's request. When I play, I tend to make my characters different from each other by gender, age, experience etc., to me it's experimenting being other people. I think back to what type of character I was before and it will direct my next character. For this one, the characters were very loose (no character sheet) and he didn't have background. He's a street punk, his companion is a male friend, they have just been accused of stealing from someone. One helps the other escape a solider, they runs and duck down an alley. I recall thinking, "Ok, what could happen there? They stumbled across a whorehouse? Or some sisters who have found themselves without their parents? Catch a couple involved with each other and they watch?" The play would have been completely different with one of those choices.

I honestly thought about the intimacy of Scott's scene and thought, these two young men just escaped the law (probably one of many times), they are exhilarated, adrenaline is high, they've shared something between them and then BAM the 'scent' of the Bacchanal overwhelms them. I wish I could have articulated better words in play then I did. I said, 'they start to kiss', and I wish I had described hesitation and naiveté in understanding what they were feeling.  Would it have been different if it was a hetero couple? Well, it could have been a logical conclusion, but maybe not one that would be as interesting.

What is interesting to be about this game is the fact that unlike so many games where there are expectations of violence, Paul wrote the game to escalate a situation, however it might occur. Matt read his die during his roles and had violence occur (kicking a dog, tying a solider up to be whipped), in a few scenes. In one scene (Matt's or Tom's), a bathtub filled with wine and naked people on a balcony crashed onto a porch, killing someone below. Decadent? Violent? An escalation?  Well, yes to all three.

How many people do you know who have committed a horrible crime? In jail or worse? I believe not many people could say yes to that. But, think about how many people you know who have cheated on a lover or has been involved in a multiple partner situation. Or someone caught up in a love triangle or unrequited love or a one night stand? I bet we could all think of lots of people who have been in this type of situation and maybe that is why Bacchanal is difficult to play. It could, well theoretically, happen. People do cheat and chase and have sex, and we (and by 'we' I could say 'I') couldn't talk about what happened in such intimate details. Yeah, this is a difficult game to play. It's a testiment to our game group that we felt comfortable with each other enough to explore the game as we did.

[Larry L.]

Oh! The temptation to go look at the PDF is so strong!

But I'm saving myself for the hard copy, lest I spoil my enjoyment of it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

Danielle, I agree with you very strongly. Your points remind me of my exchange with Jesse from a thread a while ago, Zero at the Bone. He wrote,

I wracked my brains running over my history trying to think of the WORST thing anyone I've ever known has ever done. Here's what I came up with

1) Cheated on a significant other.
2) Took credit for someone elses work.

In the second case I didn't even really KNOW the person. I just had a few classes with them and by an odd twist of fate had to testify at their academic dishonesty hearing.

How milk-toast.

And I'm affraid that in a circle of friends like I have you'd just get three or four copies of these.

I responded,

Milquetoast? I don't think so. I make judgments about these things. Whole novels and films are based on judgments about these things. I've had many opportunities to do both of the things you mention and had to make decisions about them. One of them seems quite heinous to me and the other seems, if grubby, not morally reprehensible (no, I'm not telling which one).

If I were playing Zero at the Bone and two of the other characters had these Wrongdoings, I think the information would greatly affect my helping and hindering choices throughout a series of flashpoints. That information would be further modified by the way the player chose to demonstrate them through the characters' actions, which would convey to me the character's sense of responsibility for them.

You are wholly underestimating yourself and others in terms of judgment, and the use of that judgment as a motor for effective and fun role-playing.

It's an inflation-issue, I expect. Years of overwhelming emphasis on alien invasions, Elder Gods awakening, slinky cat-chicks in thigh-high boots and no panties, unravelling the very fabric of space and time, slavering serial killers who amputate their victims' limbs before slaying them and then have sex with the torsos, robots with flashing LEDs stalking through the flaming ruins of big cities, elaborate plots involving highly symbolic cryptography ...

... shit, is any of that important? Bluntly, it's tripe. One remorseful accidental shooting in a suburban home beats the crap out of any ten post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer flicks.

Anyway, when I started to reply and started to repeat all that, I figured I'd do best just to 'port it over.

Best,
Ron

[John Harper]

Whoa. This game is... well, it has me thinking. Moose says it's like sex. Me, I don't want my games to be like sex. I have actual sex for that. But clearly something interesting is going on here. What is it? Is it like a kind of titilating, imaginary orgy with people that you don't want to have an actual orgy with? That's what it looks like to me, from the outside. Like this group is having a lot of fun teasing each other with erotic images and situations, without ever having to deliver "for real" as it were.

Am I way off base? Anyone who actually played care to comment? What was your goal, as a player? -- assuming you're willing and able to share that in this forum.

[Paul Czege]

Hey John,

Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. And with the caveat that you should never trust an author's interpretation of his own work, here's what I think is going on:

It becomes immediately apparent in play that Bacchanal is an endeavor of audience management. It's Fortune-at-the-Beginning: you roll, everyone sees the result, probably some suggestions are offered, but the buck stops with you, and you narrate. And Bacchanal flips roleplaying's traditional sex/violence ratio, putting you into dramatically less familiar narrative circumstances. As roleplayers, we have a pretty well developed understanding of how to orchestrate the drama of violence, but we don't hardly know a damn thing about the drama of sex. So, in part, the game is compelling because it offers the player a chance to learn something worth learning: audience management using less familiar subject matter. But the game is also thrilling. (There's a correlation between self-revelation and audience interest, because someone showing us their soul commands our attention.) Have you read any of Robert Browning's poetry? The poems of his first volume were very revealing of his most private emotions. And when they were rather savaged by the critics, he took it very hard. So in his later poems he developed a style that protected his emotions; he wrote them from the perspective of invented characters. And they're awesome. They suggest the author, they expose him, but indirectly. Browning's poetry went from utter vulnerability to more powerful veiled vulnerability. Bacchanal, I think, takes the roleplayer into that space from the opposite direction, from entirely opaque to veiled vulnerability. The overwhelming feel of play, for me, was not unlike a somewhat risky game of Truth-or-Dare (fun in a true and voyeuristic way) fused with the satisfaction of meaningful creative activity.

Paul

[Larry L.]

As roleplayers, we have a pretty well developed understanding of how to orchestrate the drama of violence, but we don't hardly know a damn thing about the drama of sex. So, in part, the game is compelling because it offers the player a chance to learn something worth learning: audience management using less familiar subject matter.

Paul, this sentiment pleases me greatly. I'm never really sure why every game on my bookshelf contains a detailed murder simulator.

Oh yeah, Rebecca, thanks for revealing some discomfort. Scott's post sounded way too comfortable.

[John Harper]

Paul,

That makes sense to me. Thanks a lot for sharing your perspective both as author and as player.

[Joshua Patterson]

It occurs to me through reading this thread that Bacchus could easily be used to tell a story somewhat similar to de Sade's Justine and Juliette.  Any thoughts from players that are familar with the stories or should we split from this thread and head off to Half-Meme?

[Sifolis]

wow..jesus.

im no prude, in-fact im a whore...

im not saint..in-fact im a dealer of sin.

but i have no idea how i would build a player group here..i have gay friends, i have female friends, i have goth, sado, sick and twisted friends...but i still dont see 5-8 of us sitting around saying

"hey, you wanna role play me pokeing you in the shitter while we discribe the thickness of my sperm on your face?"

holy shit...im both disgusted and honored to read about your game...though i have no idea who to gather a playing group for such a weird idea of play....alls i know is this is one hell of a nitch-game.

but yeah...i guess im old-fashioned.