thread: 2005-03-11 : Love, Friendship, Romance, Sex
On 2005-03-15, Charles wrote:
Time is definitely one of the critical ingredients for building a deep romantic relationship IC. Possibly the most impressive roleplaying I've ever seen was a romantic friendship that developed between Emily's character Stellan and another of our group (Jenn)'s character Rig (in the Isrillion campaign roughly a decade ago). The thing that made it so impressive was not that they developed a romantic friendship, but that they did it basically realtime over the course of what was probably 20 or 40 hours of play stretched over at least 2 dozen games. Whenever their characters weren't involved in anything else, they were talking with each other about their lives, their day, whatever, and it gradually grew into a deep and powerful bond. Part of what supported that was a game style in which players who weren't directly involved in the scene could drop back and play their own scenes on the side (and having a large group of players helped make that reliably possible). Of course, the other thing that helped was two players with very little gamer baggage (years of D&D so doesn't prepare you for romantic roleplaying).
Other times that I've seen romances develop much faster between characters, they have often been supported by side sessions involving just the romantically engaged characters.
While those side sessions are potentially even more problematic in terms of blurring player - character boundaries, they are a very powerful tool for adding long conversations to a game that does not otherwise support them. Formalizing the existance of such conversations (which might easily be conducted via email or chat for those for whom face-to-face wouldn't work) within a game might help to re-affirm the boundaries. Perhaps using the longer out-of-session conversations to develop a more focused scene in play (either a sort of summary, or a culmination scene).
I think a similar method is often used in written online roleplaying games, where scenes are explored in chat, and then the chat sessions are used as the basis for a written version, that may or may not follow the chat exactly.
Thinking about what a romance mechanic should look like, in very broad strokes, it seems to me that it would differ from most mechanics in that it is based around building something, rather than fighting over something. It should involve the characters having to put something of value at risk, or make themselves vulnerable to harm, in order to make it possible for the other characters to follow up by putting something at risk or make themselves vulnerable. Once the characters start on it, backing out should always be very expensive, but not backing out will put them even more at risk. Also, backing out will always be less expensive than having the other person back out. There would have to be some mechanism for temporarily stabilizing the structure, but it would constantly need to be revisited. It should also be possible for either character to draw off of the created structure in someway, forcing the other character to either accept the borrowing, or bring the whole thing crashing down. This would allow the relationships to go wrong in interesting ways, where neither character wants to call it quits and accept the loss, but both characters are getting twisted around by playing games with the structure of the relationship.
I wonder if anyone has been actively using PTA for romantic gaming. I have just been watching Six Feet Under, which is one of the series PTA cites as a model, and which is very heavily based around the development and collapse of romantic relationships, so it seems likely that it is within the range that the author's intended the game to cover.
