Why aren’t there enough tabletop roleplaying games about love, sex, and everything in between? It’s a question worth asking, and as tends to happen with the best, most intellectually stimulating conversations, it’s also causing a bit of a ruckus on Twitter this week.
On Tuesday, Dicebreaker’s Alex Meehan penned a short opinion piece called “Roleplaying is the perfect medium for stories of sex and romance – so why is the genre so underserved on the tabletop?” The article looked at the TTRPG genre’s potential for romantic and sexual game design, and how games “solely dedicated to allowing players to immerse themselves in fictional romantic and/or sexual storylines” remain “far too rare” within the market.
A tabletop roleplaying design dilemma
While tabletop shows and podcasts allow for roleplayed entanglements, and certain games like queer TTRPG Thirsty Sword Lesbians offer intimate encounters as a central feature, Meehan stressed that these TTRPG experiences tend to focus on integrating sexual and romantic experiences within a larger narrative. Certainly, Meehan wrote, there should be more games like Star Crossed, where players explore mounting tension between two characters attracted to each other, all while shifting Jenga blocks on top of a tower destined to fall. But Star Crossed just isn’t common in the larger industry, and publishers are letting players down as a result.
“Romance and/or sexual stories can enable us to explore some incredibly deep topics like personal tragedy or identity, but they can also just be a trashy, yet highly entertaining way to smash together some characters, sexual and/or romantic tension and a heavily splash of melodrama within a story,” Meehan wrote. “[A]s long as every player is comfortable with the experience and safety tools are being rigorously employed, it’s about time for more tabletop RPGs purely centered on sex and romance — whether destined for happiness or despair.”
Unfortunately, the larger tabletop community hasn’t taken kindly to Meehan’s writing. One critic argued that if the players acting out a romantic or sexual encounter aren’t dating, roleplaying intimate encounters “can be uncomfortably personal.” Another warned the TTRPG community is “strongly known for socially awkward folks” and that it “takes a lot of trust to do that sorta stuff.” Others came to Meehan’s support by stressing that the TTRPG genre opens itself up to modification and allows players to institute romantic and sexual encounters with any game and any system, any time they please, if they have the right mindset.
“In my experience every RPG can be about sex and romance,” writer and TTRPG content creator Dr. Ashley Nova said.
The ‘uncomfortably personal’ TTRPG
I don’t disagree with Meehan at all, but as someone who created her own mini tarot TTRPG about an intimate encounter with a deity, I’ve found it’s really difficult to engineer your own tabletop game focused on sex and romance.
Certainly, there’s a growling list of indie TTRPGs out there that accomplish this task, as Twitter users have pointed out over the past week, but a small niche is just that: an outlier. The larger industry isn’t exactly creating games about intimate flings between two more or players. There is no single, major inspiration to analyze and study, like Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or Dungeons & Dragons. Creating your own intimacy TTRPG involves studying an eclectic mix of wildly different TTRPGs and building your own mechanics and systems from what you learn. This results in a strange Catch-22—it’s hard to create a TTRPG about sex and romance, so there are very few on the market. Meanwhile, there are very few intimacy RPGs, so it’s hard to figure out what they should look like.
Unfortunately, the criticism Meehan’s piece has received reveals another larger issue plaguing the entire tabletop community, as well. Tabletop games are only as safe, enjoyable, and playable as the people participating in them. Every TTRPG fan knows of the “Nice Guy,” who feels sexually entitled to women both in and out of roleplay and carries deeply patriarchal values with him into gaming spaces. Sadly, this kind of man is still highly prevalent in tabletop, which understandably causes many tabletop fans to feel nervous about introducing romance, sexuality, or some blend of the two in their tabletop campaigns.
Some anxiety around sex and love in tabletop is understandable, in other words, when the larger, straight side of the community has issues with these topics. But not all of this anxiety is understandable.
Even among progressive and respectful tabletop players, the sexual anxiety around roleplaying love and sex speaks to larger, heteronormative assumptions hiding under the surface about non-normative intimacy’s destabilizing power. In their eyes, too much love and sex at a table is just “uncomfortably personal” because it presents play as a space that subverts monogamy and straightness.
Remember when You star Penn Badgley rejected sex scenes because he was concerned about his “fidelity” to his wife? Remember how many Twitter users cheered on Badgley for, essentially, arguing that acting out sex was equivalent to cheating on his partner? Badgley certainly has a right to reject sex scenes if he so chooses, but his actions speak to the belief that monogamy is so fragile that it must be preserved from any and all perceived threats. That includes playing out artistic depictions of sexual encounters between two people, even in a space that’s confined, controlled, and fictional play.
Similar animating principles apply in TTRPG when people claim romance and sex between players’ characters is simply too “personal” or too “awkward.” Like Badgley, it reveals that players are nervous about maintaining the boundaries between play and reality. The possibility of love and sex in a roleplay environment threatens monogamy’s fixation on a sole partner that satisfies all sexual and romantic desires. And for men playing with other men, or women playing with other women, it speaks to homophobia. Is it gay for a man to roleplay a romantic fling with another man’s character? If a woman’s paladin and her girl friend’s warrior hook up, does that reflect anything about their real-life relationship? Probably not, but the boundaries for straight players feel far less malleable, and far more anxiety-inducing, because the presence of queerness threatens straightness.
There are plenty of players who play games like Star Crossed or implement sex and romance into their TTRPGs. Many of these players are queer, sex workers, sexually open-minded, and/or some combination of all three. These TTRPG fans are much more likely to be good at boundaries, great at consent, and eager to interrogate the values they have around romance and sex. As great as that is, these traits just aren’t common in your average cisgender straight TTRPG player, or your average cisgender straight tabletop community.
Luckily, those queer and sex-friendly TTRPG players can still work with the small niche available, or rig up sexual and romantic encounters through the games and systems already available. But don’t expect change to come without a complete overhaul to the larger TTRPG community’s values. Meehan is right to point out that there aren’t enough games out there like Star Crossed, but that’s partly a reflection of the straight people playing TTRPGs, and their relationship with love and sex. Until those people change, we’re stuck with an industry that largely sweeps its indie creators’ transgressive work under the rug.
(featured image: Evil Hat Productions)
