Bliss Stage (all versions, feedback needed)

The tabletop game was previously voted to cut on the basis of the Level-Up at Intimacy 5 mechanic that forms the core of the game, as well as the fact that the characters are explicitly 13-17.

When talking about the upcoming visual novel (unreleased, but the developers have said they're planning to use Sexy Discretion Shot and Fade to Black), it was pointed out that as a tabletop game, the explicitness is completely up to the players. And you're probably not going to detail a sex scene in front of a few of your close friends.

So I'd like to get some more detail about these from people who have actually played the game and are following the VN's progress.

edited 15th Jul '12 5:41:00 PM by Discar

The age range 13-17.

Pen and paper games rule book:

http://www.scribd.com/zvarnon/d/39367343-Bliss-Stage-Bliss-State-Interim-Stage

edited 15th Jul '12 6:47:57 PM by shadis

There's also here.

This is an official link from the game's creator, incidentally. (More information here.)

"So... the time has come for you to meet your demise..."

I haven't played the game myself, but reading through the rule book offers this little tid bit:

''Intimacy measures the amount of physical and emotional closeness in the relationship. Intimacy varies from 1 to 5. The intimacy value of a relationship gives the pilot power in mission actions, and is gained during some interlude actions. Intimacy never goes down, it only goes up. When it reaches five, it can’t increase any more. A relationship’s intimacy implies that the characters have done a certain amount of intimate actions, but a low intimacy does not imply that they have not. The required actions are a minimum, not a maximum.

Phoebe: So, for example, there could be two characters who have had sex, but still only have a one intimacy. Perhaps they just met somewhere and hooked up, and have no other relationship.''

Reading through, it looks like the table top game was really not intended to be a huge medium for sexual exploits, and instead is, like... I'm not even sure how to put it. All the adults fall over, comatose, in some sort of psychic euphoric daze. The kids all run around crazy for 7 years, struggling to survive, and finally manage to weaponize the power of love to fight back against the aliens responsible for the attack.

Sex can represent a deep trust and level of intimacy with a partner, or it doesn't. Going out and fucking someone off hand doesn't grant a great deal of power, and so... yeah. It's a game based around relationships. To ignore the fact that sex exists would be a disservice to relationships, but it's not a central mechanic.

I've seen the way the game's set up described as being like NGE, in a few places.

We Are Our Avatars Forever (Now on Discord by invitation, PM)

I have not played ether but to my inner munchkin Lots of high trust low intimacy relationships sounds like the way to break the system.

emotionally damaged teenagers piloting giant robots from what I gather.

It's not all about sex, yes. I've not played it, but that's my understanding.

HOWEVER. From what I can gather, these discussions tend to be more safe than sorry. As much as I like Bliss Stage as a concept, and wish it could stay, there's a chance someone at Google could take offense? I don't know.

At it's worst, Bliss Stage would have a sexual encounter between 13 and 17 year olds and it's rather guaranteed to be offscreened (unless it's an RP group that would just as well have drawn out sex scenes while playing absolutely any other RP system).

However, these sexual encounters are not mandatory. This age gap isn't mandatory. It is possible to play the game with only 17-on-17*

or without having any sex at all even offscreen.

The pedo content is purely up to players to create and if there are players that would have it in Bliss Stage, they could have it with any other RP system just as successfully.

edited 16th Jul '12 1:11:12 AM by Adannor

Having actually played the game a couple of times, the idea that that it's pornographic in some way is...kind of odd to me. I have a group that's long since stopped doing more than raise an eyebrow at sexual content in our Rifts games or a room of lovingly described Slaaneshi cultists in one of the 40k RPGs, but we came at this and seemed pretty much determined to make it as unsexual as possible.

It worked. The game was still playable, and still enjoyable. So the game is exactly as sexual as the players want it to be. And unlike FATAL, which was brought back under a lock, the rulebook isn't made of weaponized awful.

edited 16th Jul '12 2:55:16 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

(Apologies if this seems out of place, I'm responding both to posts in here and in the CV discussions thread.)

We did have discussion on the Bliss Stage tabletop game, and the simple fact of the matter (at least, as it was presented to us at the time) is that the rules are set up in a way that encourages players to have their 13 year old characters have sex with each other.

It's true to say that such a thing could happen in any RPG, but the comparison falls flat when the game in question actually has a game mechanic reward system for doing so. If a characters power is based on intimacy, and the top level of intimacy involves sex, then there's no way of getting around that the game mechanics themselves are encouraging you to do it.

With that in mind, I don't know that I would change my cut vote unless it turns out that we were given misinformation. The visual novel is another animal, and I don't think I'm comfortable voting on it either way since it's a "work in progress".

edited 16th Jul '12 6:27:09 AM by Meeble

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I don't know. It's not like it really encourages you to have 13-year-olds having sex. Not anymore than it encourages you to have 17-year-old having sex.

It would be different if the game didn't have such a specific age range for P Cs. A game that didn't mention character ages and had rules on intimacy levels or something like that probably wouldn't raise any eyebrows.

It's the combination of the "you have this very specific 5 year age range to choose from, starting with 13" and "by the way, your character is most powerful when they have a loving sexual relationship with another character" rules that sets off my "skeevy" alarm.

edited 16th Jul '12 5:52:00 AM by Meeble

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To have 13 year olds have sex players must first go and make their characters 13 years old, then plan for them to reach that level of intimacy with somebody.

It is a game based on relationships and sex was not excluded. It is still a players decision to create characters of the problematic age.

This is simply a game with mature content generated by players.
On account of it being porn - it is not, the sex part is just a non explicit passing moment.
On account of pedobait, I think it is getting greatly overblown. There is merely a possibility for players to create a kid character and play them.

"It's the combination of the "you have this very specific 5 year age range to choose from, starting with 13" and "by the way, your character is most powerful when they have a loving sexual relationship with another character" rules that sets off my "skeevy" alarm. "

The upper limit is there for drama.
With lower it could be that the author tried to cut off the pedo with that age gap, but set standards lower than we do.\\

edited 16th Jul '12 5:56:59 AM by Adannor

I would disagree with that assessment of the game:

Claiming that the game is set up for you to make your 13 year olds have sex with one another is about as accurate as saying that Twilight broke exciting new literary ground with vampires. You could argue that it's true, but when you get right down to it, that's strawman-ing.

The benefits of higher levels of intimacy are, in the core rules, relatively small. For every relationship you tie into the ANI Ma, you roll that Relationship's Intimacy score as part of a dice pool. Mechanically speaking, having a level 5 intimacy is actually incredibly risky because of the Bliss meter. While you can have more dice rolled, an excess of 'Positive' rolls leads into a very rapid pick up of Bliss.

Having your character run around having sex with everything to max out your Intimacy leads to a very rapid 'death' for the character, and barring GM fiat, having that character die inflicts serious harm to the group as a whole. Moreover, the 13 year old archtype is explicitly called out as "Innocent" and mechanically is a very 'safe' archtype, with no Intimacy above 3, and lots of Trust (in fact, the 13 year old has the highest starting Trust stat in a relationship).

Looking, I actually have trouble seeing how a sustainable party would be formed, but as I already said saying that the mechanics encourage your character to have sex is blatantly wrong. High intimacy is a high risk, high reward gameplay decision, but it isn't the only way to play the game, and is arguably a bad way to play it.

EDIT: As a random aside, I may actually steal the core mechanics of the system and run a game using it with the names scraped off and a different setting. This sort of thing is exactly the sort of number manipulation and resource handling that I find to be enjoyable.

edited 16th Jul '12 6:26:40 AM by NineThePuma

Could you go more in-depth into the risks and rewards for high intimacy, and explain more about the 13 year old archetype being capped at an intimacy of 3?

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It's not capped as in "a 13 year old can never have a higher intimacy" but by default a 13 year old does not have an intimacy higher than 3. This does, however, assume that you're going with the suggestions in the book, and players aren't setting up their characters however they like.

But, just to rapidly cover the basics:

Your ANI Ma is made of of components formed out of your relationships. When you add a Relationship to your ANI Ma, you receive a number of dice for your "dice pool" equal to that relationship's Intimacy score. Every die you roll (and you roll d6) has an equal chance of being "positive" "neutral" and "negative". There are 2 + X categories for you to put dice from your pool toward (after rolling), where X is the number of relationships you put into your ANI Ma. Excess dice, which you don't have categories to assign to, add to your bliss meter (which mechanically is a 95 point scale; your bliss meter cannot be lowered, and measures your character's life expectancy) based on their result, with "Positives" increasing bliss three times more rapidly than 'negative' results.

There are additional aspects, but it ultimately comes down to the fact that the higher your intimacy and the more you put into your ANI Ma, the more likely you're going to have have excess dice that add to your bliss meter, which affects the long term sustainability of your party. If, say, your character has three Intimacy 5 relationships, they're rolling 15 dice for 5 categories. Chances are they're going to come out of the mission perfectly fine, except for the additional Bliss that they have, which impacts not just their long term sustainability, but the sustainability of everyone that their character forms a relationship with, as when a character's Bliss meter maxes, EVERYONE has their relationships with that character broken adding 3 times their intimacy to their bliss meter.

I feel like I'm no longer speaking in a comprehensible manner, so I'll stop here.

No, you're fine. This is the kind of info we need, I think.

So if I understand correctly, if you have a character with only one relationship which is at Intimacy level of "5", then you get 5 dice to roll, three of which you assign amongst three categories (base 2 + 1 relationship), the remaining two dice roll results getting added to your bliss meter. Is that right?

I think I understand the potential negative effects of having higher level relationships. But can you explain a bit more how it benefits a character to improve their intimacy?

edited 16th Jul '12 7:10:59 AM by Meeble

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Even a 'neutral' roll in 'Relationship Safety' or 'Pilot Safety' adds to the 'short term' damage to the pilot or the specific relationship. If the 'short term' damage ever exceeds the health/long-term-damage (Trust/Trauma, in mechanical terms) of the relationship/pilot, it decreases/increases the Trust/Trauma.

A negative roll for Relationship Safety will remove that relationship from the current mission scene (and thus remove its dice from your pool), adds one 'short term' damage (this is called stress) to the relationship, and reduces the relationship's Trust by one.

A negative roll for Pilot Safety inflicts one each of short term damage (Called 'Terror') and Trauma, as well as handing the GM an It Got Worse card they are to play immediately.

If a relationship's Trust is reduced to zero, that relationship "breaks" and it inflicts a chunk of Bliss on them. For every point of Trauma the Pilot has, one of their higher value dice is effectively removed from play.

While the rules don't cover this (I believe it's intended that if you can't meet the demands placed onto your dice pool, you're expected to add another relationship to your pool immediately.), I would think that any 'empty' slots for your dice would automatically be treated as Negative results.

Having more dice to roll reduces the chances of having to suffer damage to your relationships/pilot.

The only category you can really afford to shove a negative into at any point is your 'Mission Success' where a Negative result is merely a "you can't succeed in your next roll either"

EDIT: I'm going to go to sleep for approximately 8 hours. I hope that when I return I can answer any more questions you might have.

edited 16th Jul '12 7:46:52 AM by NineThePuma

So I'm trying to work through the rules above and my eyes are kinda glazing over.

Unless someone really gets off on numbers and dice rolls, I'm having a hard time imagining that anyone, even a pedophile, would find the game mechanics particularly arousing.

From my understanding of the rules If you want to be a munchkin you don't bother trying to get to 5 and just start introducing your self to everyone in town that gets you lots of intimacy 1 trust 1 relationships allowing you to call up just as many as you need in dice rather then going way over it also reduces the amount of bliss you take from broken relationships.

I was under the impression that relationships had to be with characters played by actual players, meaning that behavior has certain limitations.

While I haven't played the game myself (I'm pretty much just a collector of interesting sounding p&p RP Gs) and don't quite understand all the mechanics, it seems pretty definite to me that increasing intimacy is a double-edged sword.

It seems to me like, given the nature of the setting and the way the mechanics focus on relationships, they couldn't really leave sex out of it. It'd be a bizarre and obvious gap. But nothing I've seen in the rules *pushes* even older characters towards having sex, let alone younger ones. It just tells you what happens if they do.

As for the visual novel, trying to judge the content of an unreleased game of which some critical aspects seem to still be in flux... It strikes me as a complete waste of time. Aren't you supposed to rate things by content that actually exists, and not just might-bes?

"So... the time has come for you to meet your demise..."

The way it works is when a scene (no not that kind) is called the player who called it plays there pilot the other characters involved are played by other players and who ever is appropriate(usually the gm unless the authority figure is involved)judges the outcome and when the scene ends.

Also I think the vn will get judged when it comes out when ever that is.

I'm the creator of the Bliss Stage page and the head writer of the Visual Novel.

I have played and run the tabletop game. In my experience, sex in that game is rare, important, and NEVER explicit. As a GM, I do not want people R Ping out explicit sex scenes. We aren't playing for amateur erotica hour; we're playing for emotional drama and a game that hits some of the same emotional notes as Evangelion and Macross.

The visual novel isn't out yet; we will have something public as soon as we can. I can say, though, that all of the romantic relationships in the game are between characters who are at least 13, that none of them have more than a two year age gap, and that all sex is offscreen. There are a couple of characters who act like teenagers when they talk about it, but we were never intending for the game to be pornographic.

She's sun and rain. She's fire and ice. A little crazy, but it's nice.

Thanks for coming. If you could explain to me what the various intimacy levels entail, and whether you feel that sex between the characters is something that is encouraged by the game mechanics, it would be helpful in making my decision.

The impression I got from the information given to us previously was that the game was designed in a way that encouraged characters to have sex with each other, which can be problematic given their age range and our site policies against content that is either pornographic or panders to pedophiles. Your thoughts on why this isn't the case for your game and visual novel would be appreciated.

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