thread: 2005-03-11 : Love, Friendship, Romance, Sex
On 2005-12-23, Metal Fatigue wrote:
This is (1) long, and (2) posted to a thread that's been dead for eight months. I wonder whether anyone will ever read it?
Anyway. (to coin a phrase)
Quoth Eric, way back when:
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.*ping!*
Thinking about this sparked a mental model of relationships that leads to (what I think is) a neat mechanic, which I will share with you now:
Assume everyone has a resource that can be spent more or less freely to improve their effectiveness in conflicts. I can't think of a good name for it right this second, so call it X. It needs to be finely granular.
Flirting with someone new gives you a little X. If you flirt with the same character again, you only gain X if the flirtation gets more intense (presumably determined by the other players). Obviously, there's a limit to how intense a flirtation can get, so you can't gain points forever this way.
Getting physical with someone gives you X, too. The more flirting you've done first, the more X you get. However, every subsequent time you do it with the same character, the payout diminishes, to a minimum of zero.
On the other hand! One of the ways you can spend X points is to invest them in another character. Any time you have a scene with the object of your investment that significantly develops your relationship with them, you get some X, awarded by vote/consensus/whatever of the other players. Note that a relationship, in the sense of this paragraph, doesn't have to be romantic or sexual! If it is, though, the payouts stack.
X gain from interactions with other PCs is doubled, but the player of the other PC doesn't get to participate in determining how much X to give out for relationship development—only the audience. Note that one side can be invested when the other one isn't! Unrequited love, what fun!
When acting to help/protect or harm the object of an investment, you gain X equal to your investment and increase your investment by one point (up to some limit). Every time the object of your investment helps or protects you, increase your investment by a point (again, up to a limit); every time the object harms or betrays you, decrease it by a point and lose X equal to your investment.
If someone in whom you have no investment helps or protects you significantly, you may optionally create a 1-point investment in them for free. Once you have an investment in someone, you may choose to spend an X point to increase it at the end of any scene in which you interact with them.
NPCs probably don't have their own X. Too much work to track it. This might be one of those games where players roll dice and NPCs just have target numbers for the players' rolls.
Whaddaya think?
