An apology
Various RPG message boards host a string of opinions on the inclusion of sexual situations in pen-and-paper role-playing games. Some gamers contend that sex should take place behind the scenes. For instance, a GM might borrow from PG 13-rated films or television where, say, the protagonists kiss on screen, the picture fades to black, and the sexual situation is implied. If handled in such a manner, the argument goes, role-playing games do not need rules for sexuality or sexual situations.
Other gamers claim that rules for sexuality and seduction can only enhance game-play. There are rules for combat, rules for social interactions like gambling and drinking, and rules for emotional or mental trauma, after all. Why not contribute to the verisimilitude of life in RPGs with game mechanics for seduction?
Still others maintain that sexuality may, indeed, be a part of real life. However, in role-playing games, graphic depictions of sexual acts can be disturbing to other players in a gaming group. That is, while gamers are fully aware and capable of dealing with the fictitious acts of social interaction, violence, or misconduct in an RPG, some gamers may feel that open sexuality is still something that is outside the realm of role-playing games. Thus, gratuitous sex in RPGs is uncalled for and inappropriate.
In this review of Naughty & Dice, I do not wish to confront the appropriateness of sexual situations in RPGs. Rather, my objective is to review Sabledrake Enterprise's contribution to the RPG industry with minimum prejudice. That isn't to say that I do not see some validity to the various ideas behind allowing/disallowing sexual situations within the RPG paradigm. A discussion of this issue, however, is beyond the scope of this review.
Overview
Sabledrake Enterprise's Naughty & Dice attempts to bring the scandalous topic of sex into the role-playing game arena. This 108 page, perfect-bound supplement includes game mechanics, skills, magic, and sexually oriented character types alongside illustrations of half-nude elfin "babes," examples of sexually oriented plot in the form of gaming fiction, and a gaggle of witticisms on sex quoted from literature, pop culture icons, and historical figures. Naughty & Dice also features an impressive chapter on the history of sex as well as a few adventure ideas to aid timid GMs.
Presentation
Intially, Naughty & Dice may seem to be like one of those magazines that we might feel embarrassed to read in a crowded bookstore. Subtitled "An Adult Gamer's Guide to Sexual Situations," Naughty & Dice's cover is fashioned to resemble a plain, brown-paper wrapped book. A few "rips" in the faux-wrapping reveal the intended cover art: a smiling woman's face, a vampire chasing a damsel in distress, a naked elf perched on several six-sided dice, and a super-heroine balancing a basketball-sized d8 in her hand. The cover is further marked with kitschy lines like "Censored," "For Mature Eyes Only," and "Not For Sale in . . ." To further tarnish one's first impression, two eye-catching tags on the cover claim the book to be "The Most Exhaustively Playtested Sourcebook Ever!" [I'm guessing they don't mean as a table-top game] and goes on to contend that this supplement is "Putting the 'R' in RPG." Needless to say, the cover's suggestive nature is sure to make the more sensitive gamer blush.
Naughty & Dice's interior doesn't do much to detract from the suggestive lewdness of the book. The running header and footer are washed out, giving the otherwise perfectly acceptable text a "cheap" feel. Most of the illustrations throughout Naughty & Dice feature males and females of various fantastic species in a bevy of sexually suggestive postures and situations. Unsurprisingly, most of them cater to the predominantly male group of gamers in that the female figure is exploited throughout the book's illustrations.
Contents
Where Naughty & Dice's illustrations might be construed as bawdy, the text is anything but. The supplement claims to take "a serious though light-hearted" approach to sex in RPGs, but the language is much more sterile than the authors, Christine and Tim Morgan, would like us to believe. That is, the authors go out of there way to treat anatomical issues almost clinically. One will not find "dirty words" scattered throughout the book in lieu of uncommonly used, yet more appropriate terms. Even the gaming fiction before each chapter sacrifices verisimilitude of a gaming group by using proper language rather than the more common vulgar argot.
The sourcebook's layout is standard, as Naughty & Dice is essentially split into two sections: RPG mechanics and background. These two sections are comprised of fifteen chapters and two appendices. The first six chapters cover game mechanics like the Sexuality statistic, skills, turn-ons and turn-offs (i.e. advantages and disadvantages), and sex magic. Chapters seven through fifteen follow with background information (including a history of sex and genre-specific suggestions for sexual situations and adventures). The supplement ends with an appendix for game mechanics and background each. The first is an example of Naughty & Dice's rules as an OGL conversion. The second appendix is a notable bibliography of resources to support the sourcebook's claims on sexuality.
The Mechanics
Because Naughty & Dice was written to be used as a generic supplement for a variety of RPGs, the game mechanics within this sourcebook are intentionally vague. For instance, the authors suggest that a new character statistic that measures a combination of a character's sexual prowess, overall health, looks, and confidence be created to use the supplemental rules within Naughty & Dice. Unfortunately, this introductory mechanic is exactly where the supplemental rules are unclear. This new stat, appropriately labeled "Sexuality," should be derived from a couple pre-existing character stats equivalent to Health and Charisma. The problem is that not all role-playing games bother with Charisma, and Health is sometimes already derived from a pre-existing statistic. To complicate things further, the authors suggest that a character's Intelligence may also contribute to the sexuality score at the GMs discretion. In other words, just make it up.
The perplexing Sexuality stat is, fortunately, the worst of the game mechanics, and they smooth out a bit further in the text. For example, Naughty & Dice gives us an interesting list of sexually oriented advantages and disadvantages to build into character roles. The list includes turn-ons like Inner Beauty, Lucky in Love, and Status Symbol and turn-offs like Compulsive Flirting, Barren, and Eunuch, just to name a few. Interestingly, there are far more turn-offs than turn-ons leaving one to wonder if expressing sexuality in an RPG is worth the bother.
The sexual advantages and disadvantages are complemented by a variety of skills available during character creation. These run from the bland to the perverse, but all of them revolve around sexuality in some way. Take, for example, a player's ability to choose Kissing, Sex Appeal, and Undressing as skills along with lewder choices like Intercourse, Pornographer, and Phone-Sex Operator. The problem with these skills is that, aside from limited role-playing opportunity, the authors rely on the most popular game mechanics in the RPG industry. That is, skills are to be based off of a certain character statistic and then modifiers are added to the roll depending on that skill's level. In short, the skills mechanic will be most compatible with those role-playing games of the OGL variety. To be fair, Naughty & Dice urges gamers of other RPGs to logically convert these skills over to their respective system. But once again, the GM gets shafted with the "just make it up" clause.
Fortunately, the bias toward OGL mechanics found in the skills chapter does not apply to Naughty & Dice's Sex Magic chapter. Differentiating the complexity of each spell as either "simple," "regular," or "complex," GMs might assign a variety of game mechanics to them. For example, simple spells like Know Emotion and Know [Sexual] Orientation can be designated first level or given a low spell-point cost. Conversely, complex spells like Endless Love or Parthenogenesis are clearly higher ranking spells. It's too bad, then, that this chapter is rather sparsely comprised of a little less than two dozen spells.
The remainder of the first six chapters possesses a few more noteworthy characteristics. The chapter on Character Archetypes offers interesting classes like the Pimp, the Exotic Dancer, and the Voyeur. But one can't help but wonder if these classes can't merely be played as part of the character's background, parts of a skill, or even as advantages or disadvantages. Indeed, one of the skills is "pimp." Thus, the potential for a Pimp character without the "pimp" skill is possible, but illogical.
The sexually oriented items found in Chapter Five include all kinds of aphrodisiacs (counting Viagra™) and three price lists for these items in a Medieval, Victorian and Modern setting, respectively. The magical items within Chapter Six include things like Ale of Attractiveness, the Scarlet Letter, and the Jade Phallus. Depending on the gaming group, many of these items have the potential to either cause serious debauchery within a campaign or a series of hysterics among players.
The Background
This supplement's second partition is truly where Naughty & Dice shines as a valuable addition to any RPG library. While the depraved character (both PC and NPC) may use sex as a tool to shock, manipulate, or control, these later chapters go beyond these superficial uses for sex to show how this intimate act may play a rather mundane part in a PC's life. For instance, sex may lead to debilitating, possibly deadly, sexually transmitted diseases. Sex can also lead to *gasp* Pregnancy! True, the stalwart hero in a chain-mail bikini may find pregnancy to be a bit burdensome. Nevertheless, these later chapters go out of their way to show that this by-product of intercourse, along with love, companionship, wedlock, and a traditional family, may in fact be welcomed by characters.
Covering issues like courtship among disparate cultures and myths surrounding sexuality, Naughty & Dice transposes the fantasy, horror, and sci-fi genres over them to suggest how sex can play an innocuous role in gaming. What is most impressive about chapters seven through fifteen are the examples of various cultural beliefs that surround sex. Take, for instance, the ancient Egyptians' use of animal intestines as condoms, the folklore surrounding childbirth, the slew of lascivious gods in mythology, and the attitudes on divorce throughout the ages. These examples serve to support the usefulness of sexual situations in an RPG.
Especially within chapters seven through nine (Pregnancy & Conception, The Folklore of Sex, and The Mythology of Sex) and chapter fifteen (Sex in History), it quickly becomes evident that the authors are suggesting that sex and sexuality is simply a part of life. To play in an RPG where sex is nonexistent would be unrealistic. Not only that, but with the way sexuality is inexorably intertwined in society [as the authors imply in Chapter Fifteen: Sex in History], PCs need never play out the most intimate scenes of a sexual encounter in order to feel the repercussions.
That isn't to say that these final chapters are all stellar. The propositions for using sexual situations within the horror genre are slim and uninspiring, chiefly because they suffer from the trite stereotypes of popular culture. Vampires are the ultimate seducers; lonely ghosts need loving too; succubi and incubi visit undersexed individuals in their dreams--yawn! The same problem exists in the chapter on sex and fantasy races. Just as expected, elves are the most sexually unrepressed as they always find beauty in themselves; dwarves approach sex like mining a metal-rich mountain--either hard and fast or slow and painstaking; orcs are aggressive, brutish, and violent; etc., etc., etc. The take on sex in science fiction is only slightly more compelling, but no less original. Things like intercourse with anthropomorphic aliens, the use of pleasure dolls, and the availability of bio-genetically engineered sexual release drugs have already been conceived [pun intended] by a variety of popular sci-fi writers.
In fact, the only truly motivating genre-specific example is Christine Morgan's outline of her original clerics, The Talopeans. To be specific, the Talopeans subscribe to hedonism, a concept completely alien to most individuals in modern society. That is, the servants of Talopea overindulge in everything pleasurable, engage in tantric rituals on a regular basis, and essentially live a care-free life, yet they live on the fringes of society. Seen as immoral and base, no truly civilized nation wants to claim them. However, the Talopeans offer their invaluable healing services (among other things) to whomever would care to ask. While a religious sect like this might work best in a fantasy gameworld, it would be easy to incorporate a hedonistic group like the Talopeans in any given role-playing game campaign setting. In short, the author's have provided the perfect example of a sex-centric group who may seem immoral and anarchistic to society at large, yet still maintain a balanced order despite the negative stigmas of promiscuity.
Overall
When all is said and done, Naughty & Dice isn't quite as naughty as it could have been. In fact, with all the commotion Naughty & Dice and supplements like it have caused within the RPG community, it's almost a shame that this supplement isn't downright raunchy. Ironically, what may seem to be the driest portion of the text, the game mechanics, is also the portion that has the most exploitable components. That is, if players choose to focus on the incessant use of Naughty & Dice's mechanics like the Sexuality trait or sexually oriented skills or magic, campaigns have the potential to slip into orgiastic free-for-alls. It should also be noted that the rules presented within Naughty & Dice can lead to major events that should not be employed flippantly; nonconsensual impregnation via a magical spell, for instance. For this reason, I would recommend Naughty & Dice to mature audiences only. Even then, the gamers within that audience must understand that some situations resulting from Naughty & Dice's content may be disconcerting.
That being said, I'll also recommend Naughty & Dice to all gamers who have ever played a sexually motivated characters. Naughty & Dice is a sourcebook, after all. And like every other role-playing game sourcebook, Naughty & Dice provides quick access to concentrated amounts of info on one particular topic. Like the majority of sourcebooks, this is info that could have been researched anyway if we had really wanted to take the time and effort. In other words, as a sourcebook, Naughty & Dice succeeds. Considering the variety of sexually motivated archetypes showcased in RPGs (i.e. femme fatales, angst-ridden vampires, chaste paladins, anthropomorphic gun-bunnies), I'd say that Naughty & Dice is long overdue.
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