thread: 2010-01-28 : Compiling
On 2010-02-02, Simon C wrote:
Yeah, those were the games I could think of as well.
Ben, I think you're essentially correct about Beneath the Honysuckle (pdf here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1164498/Beneath%20the%20Honeysuckle%200.1.pdf, if anyone's interested). I'm just sorta flailing in the direction of those kinds of rules. I'd like to think that there is substantial judgement of the fiction in that game though, it's just implicit, rather than explicit. How do you know if a Knight lost his honour? Who do you give Heart to? etc. I think it's an area of the game that needs work though.
What I was thinking about with Beneath the Honeysuckle is that roleplaying is a really intimate, intense, vulnerable act. It's kinda sexy, even. But for a lot of us we learnt to play, and most of our experiences of play are with groups of just men (or boys) often during adolescence, a time of incredible insecurity, messed up interpersonal relationships, and frequntly homophobia (and the attendant hatred of the feminine, and anything that makes you vulnerable). Basically, roleplaying is kinda gay, so we butch it up with swords and guns and fighting and shit.
I think we also inherit from that tradition a stringent divide between players and characters. I think a lot of games really strictly police that boundary, maintaining the fiction that it's just a game, that it's not personal.
So I guess I was trying to break down that barrier a bit, and that's what I'm getting at with all the "prettiest player goes first" and "if you're in a romantic relationship, your characters are bitter rivals" stuff, and with the thing where if you're playing in an all-male group, your characters are all gay.
