If you're in a group of people who want to do a funny sex thing, and your game is entirely made of funny sex things, I feel like that's going to be an excellent game for that group. It sounds insufferable to me, but then so does golf and apparently a bunch of people like that shit, too.
Puppy Time, July 26, 2020, 04:35:20 pm
I think where I struggle to understand this isn't so much that I don't get what these people are trying to achieve, it's that their methods of achieving it make no sense?
Over the course of the F Plus we've seen that a lot of fetishes end up taking on a community-like structure. For the people involved, being part of a group of like-minded people is just as important as getting off to sexy feet. So I can understand the motivation that some people would have to start up an RPG group with other members of the fetish community they belong to, and maybe integrate their common fetish into the game. "I want to play D&D with my friends in this community and, since we're all into eight-dicked macro-equitaurs, I want the game to support that."
In a case like that, that group would probably get the experience they're looking for by just adding their common fetish into an existing game system, and just make it a side-detail to what the overall goal of the game is: "We're playing a D&D game where we're all eight-dicked macro-equitaurs who go into dungeons and fight monsters, often using our many dicks as weapons". That's certainly a weird situation to an outside observer, but if that's what that particular group is into, I can understand why they're doing it.
The tricky part is that FAPP bases the entire game and all its mechanics around fucking in the same way D&D bases all its mechanics around fighting dragons in dungeons. Which leads to the question: "If the goal of the game is 100% about the fucking, why not just do a free-form sex RP?".
See, in game design I feel like one of the most important questions to ask isn't "What can the characters succeed at?", but "What can the characters fail at?". In an action-oriented game like D&D, one of the major focuses is on combat so it's very important that player characters have a chance to fail at fighting so there is a sense of stakes, drama and action. But in a game like this where it's all about the fucking, what does a chance of failure add to the experience? Like, what happens if you fail a sex roll in FAPP? How does not being able to sex good all the time serve the experience of the players?
That's why sex and RPG mechanics don't mix very well: If the goal of the players is to get their fuckon, all that pass/fail mechanics are doing is preventing them from doing so, and I don't feel like that adds to the experience in the same way that losing a fight in D&D does.
There was actually a (3rd party) supplement for 3rd Edition D&D called "The Book of Erotic Fantasy" that tried to add mechanics for sex stuff. Getting past the overt weirdness of the concept, it made a pretty earnest and good-faith attempt towards it goals, but the problem was that it never really provided a solution as to why giving characters mechanical attributes for their sexual ability was better than a player just saying "Hey, I hook up with that buxom tavern wench giving me the bedroom eyes" and letting the players do that since how well they were able to fuck that wench has no bearing on the game as a whole.
The only time adding sex with mechanics to a game really works is if those mechanics are more about defining the narrative consequences of people fucking, rather than trying to set up a "Roll 1d20+[Sex Mod] to sex good". Apocalypse World, for instance, features characters who all have a "sex move" which is a condition or mechanical effect that comes into play when their character has sex with another character in the game, but these moves are ones whose mechanics reinforce the role that particular player plays outside of sex scenes: For instance, the character class "The Brainer" has a sex move that allows them to automatically use the move "Deep Brain Scan" on the other person. That's weird and could easily have uncomfortable implications, but it's at least a mechanic that reinforces the experience of the player.
Basically I'm saying that the people playing this game would be better served either importing their fetishes into another system where the goal of the game is something other than sex (And if they have enough people to play this damned thing, they have enough people to get together their own group to play Fuck D&D without inflicting it on the unwitting) or just doing freeform sex RP.
