Play a game to win or you end up a loser, and where is the fun in that?
Roleplaying games have taught me that a whole session, like five or more hours, of a game can occur and there is no clear winner. Nobody ended up better off. Some of us may have enjoyed ourselves in the roleplaying session but no one actually won anything. No obvious achievement was had.
In fact, over time, I have come to conclude that people who like to win at things are often looking for achievements or results from a game session, so I like to make sure there is treasure or rewards for players who chase such things.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with chasing rewards, but a good gamemaster comes to realise that rewarding goal hungry players isn’t the true total worth of a games session. Winning or losing, getting the prized treasure, is not the only source of pleasure possible.
If you get caught up in a rewards, and by its nature a punishing lack of rewards, you begin to lose the colour and vibrancy of a game as it becomes simply black and white. It is either the good win in a blaze of white or the black despair of losing as you feel it has all been a wasted effort for hours for nothing.
Too much focus on rewards and winning can easily lead to a very reduced experience in a game. Someone wins, some people lose. In a roleplaying game this can be a trend where it becomes the player ‘versus’ the dungeonmaster. Fight hordes of monsters pitted ‘against’ you, overcome traps ‘put in your way’ as you search for treasure. This becomes the players experience. And this is how a BDSM session can be too.
Roleplaying game sessions have helped teach me that the experience of a session, and this goes for BDSM too, can be - entertaining, funny, deep and meaningful, sentimental enough to tug on my heart strings, revealing of character, providing insight into our moral human condition, and social pleasure as well - just to name a few. All without having a clear winner or loser. A result doesn’t have to be had to give the BDSM session worth or relevance.
Of course it can be easier to accept things you don’t expect when they aren’t really happening to you tangibly. Roleplaying games are distinct because they give us characters to inhabit, to portray someone else, to act and put your self at a remove so we don’t have to take something that happens in a game personally.
BDSM allows us to roleplay to a degree as well. It is helpful to see our roles or even character personas we inhabit and portray in BDSM, as enhancing the experience and giving our whole self some safety during the BDSM session.
When people play games to win or lose, the defeated are in fact losers. And it’s not good for a persons self esteem to be considered a ‘loser’. Regular defeat at a game usually means a player abandons playing it, avoiding that game in the future. When something similar happens in BDSM sessions our sexual expression and intimacy can take a devastating hit, our confidence at sex painfully damaged as the person feels like a continuous failure at BDSM. For this person, who tags themselves a ‘loser’, it is often easier to retreat and avoid intimacy altogether. To stay away from play at sex and BDSM.
So a good dungeon master can recognise when someone is playing to win and cater to their needs with some rewarding pleasure. But a session is never solely just devolved into winning or losing. This play session engages the imagination, our spirit of adventure, our empathy, our reason - a whole lots of what is in us, not just a basic urge to climax in a win.
Great fun is to be had when it is more interesting than winning or losing, reward or punishment, only dominance and submission.
That’s what the other dungeon games taught me.
stormborns
gummygunk
prguitarman
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
titsay
