thread: 2005-03-11 : Love, Friendship, Romance, Sex
On 2005-03-11, TonyLB wrote:
I don't think you can get anywhere purely by adding a "friendship" score to a character sheet. If you want it at all (and I'd need to be convinced that you do) it should be to support a pattern of behavior through the rules.
Mountain Witch, for instance, doesn't stop at having an attribute called Trust. It delivers the goods by mimicking strong patterns of behavior: you only want to give those points to someone if you're pretty confident that they won't use them against you... you lose them very quickly but regain them slowly... and sometimes it makes the most sense just to give the points, even if you aren't sure they're merited.
Tim could have called the attribute Hatred or Endebtedness or Fish, and it would still have made the game be about trust.
So to make a game support and encourage friendship and love, you have to look at what those emotions make people do, and then make a structure that rewards those actions, rather than trying to simulate or stimulate the feeling itself.
If you ask me, the reason that RPG players have a hard time designing a game that will do love properly is because love means losing control of yourself. You wake up one morning and suddenly realize that you aren't a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care womanizser any more, and she is the reason.
I think one of the first questions that you have to deal with in a system with this goal is "Under what circumstances does Player A get to radically change the character played by Player B".
