thread: 2005-03-11 : Love, Friendship, Romance, Sex
On 2005-03-11, Charles wrote:
Within the freeform games that I play, love, sex and friendship tend to be well handled as resources, but not very well handled as stakes. Among our various characters, Barry and I are currently playing a married couple who figured significantly in the last game session and, while no sex occurred in play, their interactions with each other and with others were strongly influenced by that existing relationship (which is what I think of as the sign of resource use in freeform play).
Freeform also seems to support development of friendships within play, and supports friendship as stakes reasonably well (questions of "do our characters become friends", and "do our characters remain friends" are well handled by freeform systems). On the other hand, truly deep friendships developing in play are also very rare.
Within our group, freeform is not used to develop love or sex as stakes. Two characters who are not created as a romantic/sexual couple pretty much never become a romantic-sexual couple, unless there is bleed-over from a player-player relationship.
One interesting thing is that online written RPGs seem to handle development of romantic and sexual relationships with gusto. I suspect that this may be because a written game allows for a much clearer character-player divide than face to face games do. Face to face games rely much more on the actorly aspect of play, particularly to convey the more subtle aspects of interaction that are key to initiating romantic or sexual interaction. So if my character hits on Barry's character, for it to be satisfying in game, it will need to involve some degree of me acting out hitting on Barry. If we never step into IC, or if we stepped into IC but completely restrained the actorly component, then the scene (from my perspective at least) would be very likely to be unsatisfying. However, I think very few players who are not sexual partners are comfortable acting out hitting on a player. The potential for bleed-over from the acting out of character interactions to the players themselves seems like more of a problem for romantic or sexual aspects of play than for hostile aspects of play. Possibly this is because most players are more certain that they are friends with their fellow players than they are that their fellow players are not sexually interested in them? This would also explain why good hostile PC-PC interactions require a stronger friendship between the players than companionable PC-PC interactions?
On the formal mechanics side, I also totally agree with TonyLB that the most important feature of a good mechanic is that the structure of the mechanic needs to promote the sort of play that the mechanic handles. This is the appeal (to me) of both Otherkin dice and the DitV system as well as the MW Trust sytem (with which I am even less familiar).
The problem with the system in Pendragon that Eric describes doesn't seem so much like it was a problem of it being a broken resource system (although it sounds like it was that too), but instead that the system for having a character who was utterly in love with an NPC in no way supported the player doing things with the character that actually related to experiencing that love with the NPC, but only supported doing things with people other than the object of affection. So while his character was rewarded for public displays of the importance of the love object (challenging other knights, etc), actually interacting with the love object was completely unsupported, and the process of creating the love object doesn't sound like it was even designed to produce an interesting character.
If the love object is going to be an NPC, then the system for creating the love object needs to specifically support creating a love object who will interact interestingly with the PC.
In the case of Eric's love struck knight, it seems to me that the rules should have made very clear how she felt about his philandering, and her feelings towards him should have influenced the effects of his love-struck characteristic. This would have led to Eric choosing to spend have his character spend a significant amount of effort patching things up and making up to Katrina. Of course, the mechanics would also need to support this process being interesting, rather than a book keeping excercise, but at the very least, the mechanics need to point the player in the right direction.
I guess another way of describing that would be to say that a good rule system needs to use the players' desire for effective play to coax the players in the direction of interesting play, and perhaps even meaningful play.
