Bad Sex

We played Bad Sex, the roleplaying game. I was very nervous about this, going in! Bad Sex is about roleplaying explicit, but bad, sex scenes, with the goal of driving maximum discomfort, embarrassment, and bleed – the characters’ frustration, shame, and awkwardness transferring to the players.

This works because the player characters all want to have consensual sex, but circumstances (and largely themselves) prevent the sex from being good. You play to find out how bad it can get when everyone involved is incapable of communicating what they want or need, nor stopping, even when the situation is clearly unsalvageable.

It is indeed explicit. You shouldn’t play this game if you’re not ready to discuss bodily fluids and reproductive organs at the table with your friends. A big part of the experience is imagining small things going wrong during sex, adding up past the point where no one is having a good time, but not letting that stop them. This doesn’t work unless you’re quite detailed, thinking about temperature, angles, friction, surfaces, motion, aches, and so on.

Out of all the roleplaying games I’ve played, this one necessitates the most trust among the players. You might think the game unfolds like, well, roleplay: imagining sex between friends, and getting off on that. That’s just not the goal at all. You’re playing to explore shame, awkwardness, discomfort, and embarrassment, going for maximum cringe, and beyond. You can’t do that without friends you trust.

I won’t say there’s nothing sexy about the play, but that’s likely to be a fleeting thing, as the situation goes off the rails, into absurd, likely physical comedy territory.

How we did it

We played with a group of three. I wanted more than two players, thinking that with three there’d be more room to adjust the level of intensity and intimacy in a scene, and with four it sounded likely to become two games of one on one. This worked well in my opinion – often the third player was a third wheel in the situation, and that helped with the goal of the game: remember, we’re not looking for actually hot times, just the intention of hot times that goes wrong.

While conceptually Bad Sex feels like a big step over a limit we never cross in our other games where sex is a fade to black in the narrative, in practice it just wasn’t such a big deal.

We’ve played enough Monsterhearts and Thirsty Sword Lesbians (here’s an actual play report from our game) where sex is part of the game, and we’ve included sex in most other games, too, if not in the mechanics, that going one step further… wasn’t very special. Thus we went right over the expected big threshold of including explicit sex, and were left with chasing the game’s intended awkwardness. Which isn’t a bad thing! But it was surprising to me, how small of a development this was for us.

Tools getting in the way, and not in the intended way

As this is a roleplaying game product, the book includes tools beyond the guidelines discussed above. You’re encouraged to use one of the supplied scenarios, or the random tables (or deck of cards, like we did), to come up with the situations where bad sex will happen. I expected this would allow us to come up with situations that both would surprise us and also allow a degree of separation between the players and the characters, making it easier to cope with what I expected to be a formidable mental barrier we’d need to get over.

I found that the random elements introduced an unwelcome degree of separation that made it harder to take the situations seriously. The setups read too much like porn movie concepts. And while the game in practice can feel like a cringe-worthy comedy, it does not work unless the players are taking it seriously and, crucially, personally.

While it may sound dangerous to inject more of yourself into a game like this, I feel it may be an important component. You can’t have bleed unless you feel things, and the cartoony setups make that harder to achieve.

It feels a little odd to criticize a product for being a product, but in this case, perhaps the game would be better off with fewer game like elements. I’d like to play again, and this time get as close to real life as possible. Dare I say: be more naked. I believe we’d get closer to the intended experience that way.