SEX!!!

Over at BX Blackrazor, JB has had a series of posts on Sex in D&D. He describes how sex and matters related to sex made his games better back when he was a kid, and how he feels something has been lost in later editions.

He asks the question:

Am I the only one that experienced campaigns like this? Somehow I doubt it. Perhaps it wasn’t as explored in as great o depth by other gamers, but SEX is present in AD&D for those with eyes to see it.

Reading through the posts, I gotta say that my old group (myself, my two best friends, my brother, and the occasional other friend or sibling) played fairly similarly to JB. Maybe not to quite the extent, but we did have romance in game (even though the only female player was my little sister occasionally joining us). Most of the romance, therefor, was Player-NPC. But it did happen.

We didn't play AD&D much, mostly BECM. But even in those books, it seemed obvious to us that characters, especially higher level ones who became rulers, were spawning offspring. We had quests to save the princess, assassins posing as prostitutes, ass-kicking female adventurer retainers (before Xena, and before I'd read any Fritz Leiber), and plenty of other opportunities for our characters to get it on.

And not just in D&D, but also in Star Frontiers or other games we played.

And like JB, since we were young and mostly inexperienced, we tended to just drop the curtain when that sort of thing happened.

But yes, just like in JB's games, our teenage gaming had quite a bit. Characters got it on, characters got married, sometimes divorced, etc. In one memorable adventure, my best friend Todd's character with a Charisma of 3 had been forced into marriage as the result of an adventure we went on. Later, he found out (through a scroll of communication or a two-way crystal ball or something) that Archduke Stephan Karamiekos was moving in on his wife while he was out saving the world again. This led to two things--the wife was also an adventurer, and when she bit the dust in a trap-filled dungeon, the 'bereaved' husband ended up using her corpse as a trap-finding method. "Just throw her against the door and see what happens."

Crude, but we thought it was hilarious at the time.

Later, also, that character ended up deposing Karamiekos and setting himself up as ruler. That ended up being pretty much the capper of that campaign, since I was in college by then, and we were only playing when I was home on breaks.

So sex did have an impact on my early gaming, and it also made things more fun for all of us involved.