Bad Sex: The Roleplaying Game by Juhana Pettersson will be released on Friday 24.7. The subject of the tabletop roleplaying game is bad sex: Participants invent and play through sex scenes where their characters try to have consensual good sex but fail.
“Bad Sex is sometimes funny, other times serious,” Pettersson says. “There was a lot of laughter in playtesting but the game also allowed the players to deal with experiences of bad sex in their own lives.”
Bad Sex: The Roleplaying Game differs in subject matter from some of the best known roleplaying games out there such as Dungeons & Dragons. It deals with a more quotidian experience in which ordinary people try to have sex with disastrous consequences.
“The game works best if the characters and events are familiar to the players. This is cringe comedy and relatability helps a great deal. Because of this, playing the game requires bravery and you don’t want to do it with people you’re not comfortable with,” Pettersson says.
Bad Sex: The Roleplaying Game is not meant for teaching or therapy. Nevertheless, in playtesting there were post-game discussions in which participants talked about the problems they had with their sex lives. Many of these conversations were quite open and constructive in a way that the participants found useful.
“Bad sex is a global phenomenon. Where there’s sex, there’s also bad sex. This is why it’s a great subject for a roleplaying game,” Pettersson says.
Juhana Pettersson is a novelist, game designer and a former journalist and TV producer. He was one of the lead writers of Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. His last roleplaying game is Maa, a postapocalyptic game created together with the sculptor Matthew Day Jackson and the writer Tom Morton.
As a Nordic larp designer, his best known works are the Palestinian-Finnish co-production Halat hisar and Parliament of Shadows, a larp played in Brussels inside the European Parliament. His latest novel is Kuparihärkä, and deals with climate change and issues of social class.
