thread: 2005-03-11 : Love, Friendship, Romance, Sex
On 2005-03-11, Eric wrote:
The thing I've been trying to get a handle on is how to manage the downsides of love and affection.
We all agree that we'd like to see a game mechanically handle love & friendships. "Mechanically handle" can mean a lot of things; it can be a kind of stakes, a means of resolution, a factor in resolution/reward (a stat or score), lots of things. The thing is, because we're looking at making it come up in our games, we tend to reward it. And in doing so, we run into some pitfalls.
It may be that it is harder to model frustration, ennui, curiosity outside the pair, and so forth... than to model affection itself. And without these, we get a one-sided situation which doesn't do anybody any good.
It happened to me. In 1st ed. Pendragon, there's a roll on your Love score to get a significant bonus on acts associated with that passion. It's like an early version of SAs. Quite costly/difficult to increase. My PC was a lovestruck fool, and I made those sacrifices and eventually by the time we wrapped up had, if I recall correctly, a score of nineteen - twenty-one when you included a magical gift from her. Which was huge, insane, ridiculous for a roll-under on d20 system. As a young knight I challenged Lancelot to a joust in the hopes of proving that Milady was fairer than Guenevere... that sort of thing. I was devoted beyond belief.
And you know what? It was stale. Happily, it was part of the character's mores that one can and must love where the heart finds it, so I also had as many secondary Love scores on my sheet as the rest of the group put together, and about thirty bastards all over Britain. And that - that was fun. Conflicted, not always friendly, and a blast.
The problem was that I had, statistically, put so much into the primary relationship between Arylle and Katrina that the GM running Katrina (my wife) felt seriously constrained in terms of what she could do with her. Kill Katrina and a PC drops to literally half the man his compatriots are. Threaten her and he becomes halfway to invincible in her defense. Quarrel with him and he moves heaven and earth to re-earn her favour - and invariably succeeds, cf. killing her.
Frankly, Katrina was a dull character. She was cardboard, too constrained to be much fun to interact with. The relationship itself was a good seed (get landed and lauded so her father will look at you twice, etc) but the character itself was deformed by expectations.
One lesson from this, for me, is that those rules included no way to prompt us for permission and expectation on the downsides of love. There was no downside to loving with all one's force. (Well, a failed passion roll had a lovely "run into the woods and be melancholy" consequence, but it was awkward to use and not hugely game-relevant even when invoked.) There was a mechanism for love... but none for ennui, cabin fever, crossed wires. Partly this is genre, of course - but there was no mechanism for the tension of sexual frustration in courtly love, either.
I'm finding the same sort of thing in working on the space opera game mentioned above. What's the downside to a happily devoted amour-fou between pilot and engineer? If having their relationship run smoothly gets him bonuses in his fight, then how to prevent Arylle and Katrina from cropping up over and over?
Having said that, of course, at least one solution is obvious. Don't give bonuses for a smooth-running love. Give it for snarks, fury, jealousy, and even cheating. Give it for the burn, not the toasty warmth. Balance that against the emergent benefits of things running smoothly between the one who flies the ship and the one who keeps it flying; neither solution "wins", both are rewarded. Yum. Because it's a heroic game, give the same bonus for valour when it's really called on, the beloved is in direct danger and so on... but make it somehow mechanically clear that "same old" gets you nothing.
Sorry for the length, here. Hope that helps you guys, as well as me.
- Eric
