Gameplay, Gender, and Gumption, A Mature Discussion Options

[Ancient History]

Many games, and gamers, at some point address the relatively mature issues that exist in game worlds, such as prostitution, sex, and rape (murder is too easy and common, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Now then, could anyone please give us the benefit of their reflections on how these matters should, should not, and are handled by various players, and if gender is a serious factor in this.

I'd appreciate it if everyone would avoid belittling others or the impact of sexual harassment/assault on others, no matter what gender.

You can still make jokes about trolls and dwarves though. That's funny.

"Toss me another elf Sargent, this one's split!"--Grunts, by Mary Gentle

[Wounded Ronin]

I remember reading a KODT issue where the male players were forced to run female PCs.

The result was that they used seduction to a frenzied unrealistic degree and then always stabbed the guy they were seducing to get EXPs and gold.

[Moon-Hawk]

It's important that the entire group be "on the same page" about what level of detail will be gone into regarding any "mature" content. This includes pretty much anything related to sex, violence (even in a SR game), and naughty language. If the entire group is comfortable dealing with such issues, then go wild. But no one, not even the GM, has the right to make anyother player feel uncomfortable at the gaming table (no matter how uncomfortable it is for their dwarf character to spend time with their troll-friend).
Boundries should be set, agreed upon, and followed by a group, but I will make no judgements about where any of those boundaries should be set. It's your game, keep me out of it.

Personally, my group sets the "that's just wrong" level pretty high. Different characters will react in different ways, but we haven't really had problems with players making other players mad. Well, not for those reasons, anyway.

[DocMortand]

The closest me and my group have come to this issue is one run where we tracked down a kidnapped daughter to a bunraku brothel. They did some *cough* unique methods to ID the daughter, then burned down the place afterward.

The whole idea of bunraku turned my stomach, personally...which means I probably would not allow sex crimes to go on in my games.

[Moon-Hawk]

Were you GM or player?

[nezumi]

Kinda unrelated...

A few years back my family was watching Attack of the Killer Tomatos (classic 80's horror). There's the scene where the tomatos are destroying a city and the narrator says how they burnt, pillaged and raped. My four year old sister asked what 'rape' means and my parents give that 'uh oh' kinda silence. I respond that she misheard, the tomatos GRAPED the people. Apparently that made perfect sense to her, as she didn't ask for clarification.

Since then, if I've wanted to keep the the adult content down, unfortunate women who are attacked by lust filled men return home and report how they were graped (to which their family tells them to stop their wining).

Hmm... maybe very unrelated...

[Shanshu Freeman]

In our game wrong stuff comes up kinda often. We usually aren't squeemish about it.

The topic was raised and smacked down again when someone asked if a severely localised manaball could be used as contraception.

[DocMortand]

[RedmondLarry]

While going for cinema-like violence (increased since "Saving Private Ryan") in my games, I tread gingerly on topics of violence against people of a personal nature. Since role-playing can have such a strong psychological effect on people (enough so that it is often used in psychological treatment), and since I don't know the abuse history, if any, of my players, I am hesitant to go there even in a long-running (4 year) home campaign. I will absolutely avoid it in any game open to the public, such as at a game store or convention.

Prostitution and drugs are part of street and organized crime. I never give them cinema-like glamor. The prostitute as Cinderella and wealthy John as Prince Charming on a white horse to sweep her off to happiness never happens in my games. There is no place for this in a dystopia like Shadowrun. (If you don't know 'dystopia', compare dystopia with it's opposite, utopia. It's a good word.)

/Edit: added --
Gender and sexual orientation are fair game for roleplaying in our home campaigns. Over the last 8 years, among the 20 or so male and female players in various long-running campaigns I've been a part of, every one of them has run a character of the opposite sex at some point. The three players that I've known to be homosexual have often run characters that appear to be heterosexual. Sexual themes and behavior are rare in our games, so choice of gender or sexual orientation for a character rarely has an impact on play. It has never made an impact on level of competence, skill, or gumption.

[winterhawk11]

I once ran a game where it turned out that the upstanding citizen the team was looking for was a pedophile leading a double life. He was dead by the time they found him so they didn't get to do anything to him, but I remember they (players and characters) were pretty uneasy when they found his alter ego's apartment and his rather sizable stash of kiddie porn.

I'll go pretty far as a GM (and as a writer) but for whatever reason I draw the line at overt sexual themes. They just don't come up in my games, and usually not in the games the others run, either. No rape or other sexual assault (or if they happen, they happen off camera). My group is all male (except for me, and I always play male characters), older (we range from early to late 30s) and generally a pretty mellow bunch. Other than the sex thing, we don't shy away from mature themes.

[GaiasWrath8]

[DocMortand]

Basically sex puppets. It's a yakuza invention. Install neural shunts in unwitting girls, and the customer asks for a personality - the girl's real persona is trapped, and replaced by whatever persona the customer asks for.

You can just imagine - girl kidnapped, and can't escape because she doesn't have any control over her body.

I suppose it's equal opportunity - it goes the other way as well, I would think.

*shudder* Read pg. 19, Underworld Sourcebook.

[GaiasWrath8]

So is the real person or personality still aware and some program or AI is running her body? Damn that just gave me afew ideas for a game (non-sexual)

[LinaInverse]

Here's what went down on that game Gaias.

http://www.theghostsofdallas.com/viewtopic....php?t=335#3416

[GaiasWrath8]

Very interesting. So as this might be a little off topic could you use this same tech to create "sex pupets" on a street sam or corp worker to infletrait a group?

[Kanada Ten]

[DocMortand]

Still...does give a bad aftertaste if you can imagine being captured by the yakuza and made into one of the puppets. "Have sex with a Shadowrunner" might be a sick draw.

Meh.

[Kanada Ten]

[Crimson Jack]

I too ran a game once like Winterhawk's (with the pedophile). I included this, as I do with other serious tones in my games, to keep my gamers on their toes. Including serious subject matter is a great tool for keeping one's group of players never fully knowing what to expect on any given run. In this case, it turned out that the Johnson was in the child slavery market, not too mention his flair for keeping several of them locked up in his residence. The team decided to break into his condo to check out a lead and found the kids chained up in one of the Johnson's rooms. Now, the run had nothing to do with child slavery. The runners weren't transporting live cargo of any type, nor were they being paid to do anything revolving around the Johnson's sick tastes. However, when they found out what the guy was up to, they all decided to forego any type of final payment from him (walking away with only the fee upfront) and set out to capture, torture, and eventually kill the Johnson.

Would shadowrunners do something like this in reality? Hell, I don't know. Maybe. I want to think every human has a bit of soul left in them, no matter how criminal the acts they commit are. I felt more of the group's reaction was due to their real player-based feelings on the subject. It was interesting to see how they acted. I wasn't really surprised.

As for prostitution and drugs, I tend to paint these kinds of things for what they are. I'm not pro or against any of it, truth be told. Its not my place to pass judgement on anyone for what they do for a living or recreation. Having lived in a very urban area for quite some time though, I've seen a lot of the problems these two types of activities can cause. I'm pretty fair about how I describe these elements, keeping in mind that there are both high and low-society angles to view both of these story elements by. For instance, street hookers are definitely a lot scarier than escort girls. Crack houses are nastier than executive coke parties. Both have their repercussions.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

I'm pretty comfortable playing characters of different sexes (haven't really gone into other gender identities), but that's because I play with people who are also comfortable with it. Since I game online, I find myself around people who just do it, and generally do it pretty damn well. Of course, the incentive is that doing it well reflects a good writing ability, while doing it badly reflects not just the opposite, but will also draw the ire of people who aren't the least bit hesitant to call dogshit, "dogshit."

Hubert Selby, Jr. once told a journalist, "“When you write about somebody you hate, write about them with love . . .” I have taken that strongly to heart. I have three major characters right now, and I hate two of them. I hate them to their very core for various reasons, most notably of which is that the three all reflect different aspects of myself, and those two reflect the worst parts of myself. It took me nine months just to create them, to write their backgrounds before I ever posted with them. I went through Hell and back with them, played out their successes and failures, their loves and losses. But it was their sex and sexuality that has played an important part of my creation of them. I didn't need to read Sprawl Survival Guide to guess how it's been articulated in canon. And I didn't need to screw with their sexuality to make a point, but I did it because it is an articulation of my own desire to be a good writer and at the time it became something I couldn't resist doing. It matters if a character is a homosexual, but I am fortunate to RP where substance matters, and I never have to worry about shadowpr0n--other people's or my own. It's just not done, mainly because it's just unnecessary. Just to make a point on the level of intensity I have put into these characters, I became so caught up agonizing over the question of character sexuality that I started questioning my own sexuality. But then again, it's been a rough last six months.

On the other side, one of the three characters is a woman. God, I love writing about women characters. It's funny, though, given the proclivity some of my writing has had in treating many of them very, very badly. But of the three, I put the most love into writing about her, writing her dialogue and comments. Ironically, she's the one who's the one who has suffered the most on the face of her background and what I've RPed so far. But at the same time, she is the hardest of the three; the most professional; most powerful. Of course, she has to be. She's based on a couple of women I know, and it would be an insult to them if I didn't ensure that I make every effort to write about her with the love I have for the character out of respect for them, too.

It's a shame that most of what I write I do in notebooks, or on my computer to file. I burn through PCs rather frequently. Few people have read what I write, and those that have I don't keep in touch with. I say that only because I've mentioned it before, but I can't show you the best thing I've ever written. It was a short story I wrote about Nadja Daviar set sometime in 2058. You know, I do respect Jak Koke. As I've gotten older, I've found myself disappointed parts of the DHS, though not all of it. But he was the one who wrote the novelization of Nadja. My favorite piece of fiction, not by far the longest (I once wrote a short story in longhand that was over 40 pages long), but the one I did with the most love. I love that character--the one I wrote about. It's funny how something that was supposed to be completely banal (and political) became a piece of reflection of her life and existence based on what I had to go by from the canon, and the loss of Dunkelzahn from her life.

And yet when I RP, I almost exclusively play male human gunbunnies, or make them just to keep me sharp on my ability to whip up stats. Although I've been toying with physads and mages, and more elves recently. Anyway, I thought I'd share since I can't really concentrate on work right now.

[Kanada Ten]

[CoalHeart]

As for a question on Adult content in the games I have been involved in. I have to say I'm very open to whatever anyone wants to play out with their character.

I did notice however since I'm playing with 2 seperate groups is that the male group tends to lean towards the more action pacted, ultra macho, tough guy stuff. Any references to sex are mostly done like so ' I call up my girlfriend after the hard run, and fuck her brains out ' Sometimes they humorously elaborate example ' I bend her over and slap that ass and ride her like a tenspeed' , I guess it's slightly embarrasing so they make it non serious and humorous.

The Face character tends to be the smooth guy, hitting on ladies whenever appropriate or inappropriate to varying degrees of success and usefulness. Like hitting on the woman at the front desk might open up the opportunity to get a look at the computer terminal she's working on. Sexing up the crimeboss's secretary will get you his schedule for the next day. He treats it as part of his job.

The Face works his leads. The sams bang their girlfriends. The shaman treats his wife well, and they go to the ballet.


The predominantly female group is a strange lot. They talk about it fairly openly their rl experiences with boyfriends and girlfriends, and are more sensual about it. I think they do it to tease me and the one other guy in the group to see the look on our faces. (Evil evil bitches heh heh heh) None of their characters is attached to any boyfriends or husbands. Two of them are 'seeing' eachother. The two shamans, they're using it to make a magic group called the Sisterhood. It's not an every session thing that they talk about it, usually happens after some drinking and it gets later in the evening.
Occasionally they joke about summoning some powerful spirit and having a hentai tentacle orgy. I roll my eyes and shake my head. "There's no Chthulu in Shadowrun, but good try"

As for my runs that I GM when I do. Sex and adult themes are always around, it's part of life. One mean run I did to the male group was a large roving band of gay ork Gogangers, who rape and rampage and extort money from neighborhoods. They were called 'Invaders'. Luckily none of the players were caught, for their sanity. Gang was pretty well mashed up afterwards, only 3 barely living members. The Johnson was an undercover memeber of Lonestar trying to get clean up part of the city without putting his men or their pride on the line. Runners got paid well, and forever more fear the sounds of approaching motorcycles.


Hmm, hired runners to break up a child slavery ring, had child porn hinted at, but it's pretty taboo so no one goes into detail or asked for any. (thank god, *shudders*)

Ran that one run from the SR website with the Unicorn shaman lodge out in the woods, and everyones minds getting wiped of the location and seeing everyone turn into horses and mounting up. So I suppose that counts as beastiality? or does it count for shapechanged? I don't know, don't really care. Didn't go into detail on graphic descriptions.

Benruku Parlors are a common scene, prostitution, rape on occasion. Extreme violence, serial killers, stalkers, mass murderers. Torture fanatics, cults, drugs. A touching story of the team's Trog sam befrending a little girl who was being abused by her dad in a bad way. The dad had his legs and arms broken and he was tied around a tree, smeared in honey and left for the hungry bear at the zoo. The little girl was trained to defend herself with her new tazer and razorclaws.

Good way to introduce a new runner into a group after a character dies is to encourage the new guy to attempt to save some poor woman from a horrible fate at the same time as another member of the main group.



You can go anywhere your group is ok to go with, as long as you communicate it before hand with them. Ask them openly, Anyone have objections to X topic? No. Ok we might have a run dealing with that then.

[Vagabond]

I would like to throw in this disclaimer:

Be careful if you're playing with female PCs. Statistically speaking, 1 in 3 women in the US are victims of some form of rape. Believe me when I say they can hide it well, and if brought up in poor taste is highly offensive.

[GaiasWrath8]

Its almost funny how many horibal things are done to people each day in america (not to mention the world). Now a days, almost every one has some sort of termatic event in there life that makes other people walk on egg shells. Its really sad we cant live in a world were every one treats each other as they would like to be treated.

(Some one stop the planet, I want off!)