Was anybody able to DM a romance ingame without it becoming awkward?

[Kafana]

I had two groups, one with 5 players, three of which were girls and all of them were "light" players (didn't care much for the story, just wanted to throw some dice around and build up their characters), and with this group I was able to incorporate some "flings", misc encounters the PCs had with some NPCs, that didn't result in more than a few short short sex acts or brief romances.

That being said, I'll be running a group of 4 people (3 male, 1 female), and while I don't think that group is mature enough to appreciate such aspects of DnD, I'd still like to try.

The question, than, is, was anybody here able to incorporate a true romance subplot, and if so could you share your experience as well as give a brief overview of the story.

[Brookshw]

Not in detail no, after maybe some initial conversation its always been something a bit passive.

[Norfire]

Yeah I had a dm make it happen (I mean that. We were not willing at first). It started as a one night stand but then one failed save later and i'm starting to have feelings. We had an awesome romance though and I loved playing the overprotective male. One of my favorite scenes was beating the crap out of a guy for trying to claim her in front of me. O and then getting in trouble for claiming her like an object. Her character yelling at me was so damn real I was dying laughing at the table. It just added to the experiences of the character.

As for plot it was more along the lines of politically affecting me. Her character was one race and I was another so I had a harder time interacting with certain groups of my people as they frowned upon me. I also had a hard time in battles. I was the heavy damage dealer and she was aoe. I would risk battles by running up and killing minions that attacked her instead of taking down the larger enemies like I should have been. Her character was taking care of them anyways and would have been fine but for rp sake I protected her and took the extra beating for it. It also let other players shine and take down big enemies without me.

It was done well and I think it's less the DM and more about the players involved.
We were both confident in who we were as people and we were just playing our characters for fun. The only thing that got awkward was a bad player who got jealous (bullied his way into the game and the dm was too nice). We just ignored him because of the fun though. Everyone else had fun with it too. They were constantly messing with our characters in game and ultimately it added to the overall role play of our characters and most of the other characters as well.

We avoided detailed sex scenes and just went for simple join in bed or humped like rabbits at most. Then we would roll a percentile to see if life was going to get ridiculous in 9 to 10 months.

[jjcrpntr]

I've dm'd a bromance does that count? :smile:

I think if i had a female player I'd try it. But all of my players are dudes and it would feel weird flirting with them as the npc and them flirting with the npc. Ya i just think with my group it would get weird.

[Kazudo]

I have actually done so relatively easy due to the maturity of my group.

The key point is to remember that it ISN'T a romance between you and another player, it's a romance between an NPC and your player's PC.

The big problem that comes up is that most players' PCs are actually aspects of their personalities, and that most DMs play NPCs based on their own previous experiences which, without getting to far into psychology, end up being roughly the same: an aspect of their personality. Which causes some issues when the pair believe that it's them flirting with each other, not some disembodied personality quirk somewhere in the ether flirting with another disembodied personality quirk.

There are a few ways of dealing with this:

A. Don't make it the primary focus. I have run games where the central plot was based on a romance between an NPC who was prominent in society and a Ranger/Scout who didn't realize they were married. Their actual romance rarely showed up "on-screen", but it was implied and roleplayed when convenient.

B. Don't go too far into detail. I would recommend against having any play-by-play scenes unless they are directly plot important or completely necessary to have in the plot, and even then the exact amount of tongue involved could probably be eschewed in favor of "They engage you in a deep, passionate kiss while beginning to..." etc. (don't want to get too graphic on the forums) Now, sometimes a good hefty and detailed romantic episode is necessary to make an NPC important to the PCs or remind them how important they are to the PC(s) involved in the romance.

C. Don't be afraid of it and relax. This is supposed to be a game. Romance is a very valid plot motive, can be an amazing plot hook when done right (not simply "You've been in love with the princess your whole life and she's been kidnapped", which can suffice for an excuse plot if you need one but isn't exactly a romance), and let's face it, it's a very good way to progress the plot organically, since a character in a romance has not one but two sets of goals that they have to keep in mind: the ones they have, and the ones they need to keep the romantic interest involved. It's also a GREAT way to get a player, new or old, interested in the game. An audience LOVES a good love interest. It can also provide lots of emotional dissonance later should it be necessary. Amusingly enough, romances are best in conflicts of Law vs. Chaos, if the romance is "forbidden" or is completely legitimate, but your competition is a perfectly good upstanding, law-abiding citizen and you're a cunning, dashing rogue.

D. Last but certainly not least, don't get too far into it. Talk the romance like you'd talk to your friend. Don't try to do voices, don't try to be funny with it (unless it IS funny), be as serious about a romantic plot/interest as you would be with a murder plot/interest in which you're attempting to get the players to be serious. If it's the kind of game where jokes are made freely and easily, joke about it in the same way. Don't treat the romantic plot as much different than the rest and you'll be fine.

It's only really an option for mature groups, but it can be a good one.

[pwykersotz]

Not I. I even avoid romance in game when my girlfriend and I are playing together. I break it down for myself like this

Me + Random dude - Even though we're roleplaying, still 2 dudes sweet talking each other. Prognosis: Awkward.

Me + Random girl - Even though we're roleplaying, still sweet talking a girl other than my GF. If I wasn't in a relationship, maybe doable, but still... Also, at my table, odds are the girl is married. Prognosis: Awkward.

Me + Girlfriend - Legitimate and believable affection, but other players are possibly weirded out by PDA, as everything that happens in game gets characterized onto us IRL. Prognosis: Awkward.

Me as GM facilitating anything - Sure, if players agree ahead of time they want to do it. I'm certainly not going to push anything, but I will facilitate as long as we're being adults about it. Prognosis: Maybe.

So yeah, not me. I support the idea, but the practice just doesn't work for me. This works well, as most of my gaming table is married and they're playing to escape thinking about relationships for a little while. :smalltongue:

[jaydubs]

1. Make sure the player/character is interested in such an interaction. Let him/her take the initiative, or at most just drop a line like "this NPC winks in your direction." Do not steer a player into it if they don't want to engage with things like will or diplomacy checks.

2. Don't go into detail, any more than you would with other interactions. For instance, real plans to attack strongholds probably take days or at least hours to set up. In game, they usually take a few minutes. Similarly, you don't have to engage in in-character flirting unless both you and the player are up for it.

3. Keep it in the background unless it's to drive the plot. Romantic activities can be boiled down to "you have a nice dinner, and after a romantic walk spend the night." "You receive a letter from your sweetheart while on the road to Fort Adworth. She misses you, and sends a pouch of herbal tea." Even major events like marriages can be glossed over, unless something important is going to happen during it. Then suddenly you have a map drawn up.

Basically, the purpose of such things is to flesh out a character's motivations and interactions with the world, and to provide plot hooks when needed. It's the same way most games don't track food and water, until the party is suddenly lost in the wilderness and then you're ticking off every ration.

[Captnq]

Yes. I always make the relationships cartoonish and hackney.

The foolish girl who chases after the hero and keeps getting in danger and needing to be rescued.

The Slimeball who macs so hard he could haul freight.

The king who attempts to arrange a marriage for political reasons.

That sort of thing. If anyone tries to be romantic I do something like, The girl wrote you a love poem. She rolled a 17. No Profession (poet) skill? Okay, just roll charisma. Whatever you get, you think the poem is good.

Had someone roll a 0 once writing a poem (dwarf with negative charisma) The player wrote it out. I wrote it down somewhere... ah. Here it is:

Hello lovely lady.
When I think of you I go nuts
You have a nice beard
And a really great butt

(PS, your rack ain't bad, either)

-Bryndis

Did I mention he was hitting on a human waitress?

[NichG]

The last campaign I ran was themed heavily off of various anime tropes, and it followed the characters as they went through what amounted to 'Magical Guild College'. So in line with the tropes the game was based on, romance subplots were inevitable. What I ended up doing was to just try to make it as awkward and absurd as I could right off the bat, as it often is in such shows, which worked out reasonably well in the end. I think it kept players in the mindset of 'yeah, this is THAT episode' rather than 'uh, is the DM hitting on me?'

[Knaight]

I've done it, it worked. I've also seen it work between PCs, which is nice. That said, these were both IRC games.

[Angelalex242]

Romance actually works GREAT online. It works terribly face to face.

Such is my experience. If the Internet's between you and the GM, all you see in your mind is that hot picture he found off google or deviantart or whatever, and you hear her voice, without the person of the GM getting in the way.

[Kazudo]

Romance actually works GREAT online. It works terribly face to face.

Such is my experience. If the Internet's between you and the GM, all you see in your mind is that hot picture he found off google or deviantart or whatever, and you hear her voice, without the person of the GM getting in the way.

Unless he can't type for crud, at which point you see the same person albeit with lower intelligence.

[Angelalex242]

Well, can't fix stupid.

Assuming reasonable intelligence, however, it works well enough.

[Sir Chuckles]

I can't say I have. It starts off with a base that there's never been any romance relationships in any campaign I've played in. It's partly because, when I DM, I try not to write those in. I have five players, all male, all with varying degrees of awkwardness toward relationships. Only one has ever been in a relationship for more than a few weeks.

There has been a grand total of three sexual encounters. All three were played for laughs, and only one was between two players.

[molten_dragon]

Only between me and my wife, but the one time we tried that I think the other players got a bit uncomfortable.

[Jeff the Green]

Romance actually works GREAT online. It works terribly face to face.

Such is my experience. If the Internet's between you and the GM, all you see in your mind is that hot picture he found off google or deviantart or whatever, and you hear her voice, without the person of the GM getting in the way.

Agreed. We're slowly building one between a paladin PC and a paladin NPC in the game I'm DMing, and in a game I'm in one PC is getting thrust into a relationship with an NPC, which is fun because he (the PC, not the player) is socially awkward and has no experience.

The other thing that helps is that you're doing it in writing rather than speaking. As I learned in middle school, it's a lot easier to write a romance scene than act it out with someone, particularly someone you may like but not be attracted to. (Actually, i suppose it could be just as awkward if you are attracted to them.)

[Kafana]

The other thing that helps is that you're doing it in writing rather than speaking. As I learned in middle school, it's a lot easier to write a romance scene than act it out with someone, particularly someone you may like but not be attracted to. (Actually, i suppose it could be just as awkward if you are attracted to them.)

Hmm, this might be something I could incorporate far more easily. Print out several pages of short romance scenes, cut up the paper into paragraphs and also color print the image of the romance. Whenever a romance point comes up I hand the paragraph with the image, wait for the player to read it, note his response (and answer if it had a question) and hand him the "outcome paragraph" based on his response.

Whenever I need to have an actual dialogue it won't need to be actually romance related, but rather "could you do this for me" or something.

[Angelalex242]

...Sure, copy videogames, why not?

She says she loves spending time with you.

Do you A:Take her to dinner?
B:Take her for a walk in the moonlight?
C:Take her to bed?

[BWR]

Hell yeah.
I've played in several games where romance has played large parts. Happy romances, tragic romances, bitter romances, romances turned so bad they are mortal enemies (still working on that one, but it's coming). PC/NPC, PC/PC, NPC/NPC: it's all been done and usually fun.
They have not been the main focus of the game, except in one case, but have often had far-reaching consequences for the campaign.

Romance hasn't happened in all games, and not all games or players are appropriate for it. Sometimes you just want to kill some monsters, steal some loot, get drunk and screw the barmaid and leave. Some people can't take it seriously enough or get really uncomfortable, and in those cases it's best to just drop it.
Still, romantic elements have always made the game more fun when it has been introduced in the games I've played/run.

[sideswipe]

I've dm'd a bromance does that count? :smile:

I think if i had a female player I'd try it. But all of my players are dudes and it would feel weird flirting with them as the npc and them flirting with the npc. Ya i just think with my group it would get weird.

funny im currently running a d20 zelda universe homebrew. and on many occasions the players have spoken to the gerudo's. who are a race of women. and love making them uncomfortable by flirting with them when they do (their tactic from getting info from men).

[super dark33]

...Sure, copy videogames, why not?

She says she loves spending time with you.

Do you A:Take her to dinner?
B:Take her for a walk in the moonlight?
C:Take her to bed?

A bit of morton's fork there. :smallbiggrin:

[Phelix-Mu]

There were two of note, both between my (the DM's) npcs and a pc run by one of my male players.

One was a half-crazed, much troubled and tormented soulknife/corrupt avenger/impure prince-ish guy, who had been rebuilt from a sorcerer, who was actually a wilder that had been mindraped into thinking he was a sorcerer. Player had major issues sticking with a character concept, but eventually settled on a Cha-focused soulknife with a focus on Leadership.

So, in my games, I present players with 2-4 candidates for cohorts, usually set up along guidelines/builds/class concepts that the player requests. They approach the leader character in-game, usually as fanboys/girls or admirers of the person's legend or prestige or whatever.

So the soulknife selects the female psion (seer) from one of the psionic houses in Complete Psion. She has some mystical backstory involving an unusual house relationship for her younger brother (he was a shaper from the seer house, unusual). Anyway, two psionic characters, and this player had a thing for psionics at the time.

Lo and behold, despite the guy irl being a bit twisted and inhumane (he liked elder god over-plots and psychological horror), his character actually fell pretty hard for his cohort. This was a relatively low-op campaign (though we were blissfully unaware of this at the time), and I think part of the appeal was that his cohort was really powerful compared to the character himself.

Eventually, they got involved romantically. I am a mature DM, and as the player was into it, and everyone was generally good friends and familiar with each other (multi-year campaign), so he went for it. I had her be a bit hard to get, but his character was oozing Charisma and Alpha Male appeal, and he also happened to be part of this over-plot that involved the party saving the world, so there was tons of drama that added intensity to the relationship.

After they were lovers for some time, he proposed to her, and she retired from being his cohort and was instead a key advisor/wife, making him look stupid with her god-like divination abilities. They both became tied to the over-plot, and their descendents actually became the first incarnum-users in my world (as a side effect of the over-plot involved releasing a being that was the source of incarnum energy, which I seriously refluffed).

The other relationship, same campaign, was between and Exalted, VoP spellscale cleric and a CN dryad that had sold her soul to a devil in order to be free of her tree, so that she could better pursuit her ambition to master the Seeker of the Song PrC (can't seek while being stuck next to your tree). Plus, she had been a rather paranoid dryad. Anyway, the character developed an interest in this girl (the character was a bit of a player in-game...let's just say he appreciated the women), and after a brief, spontaneous and mainly anatomical fling under the moonlight in a serene glade, the two developed a deeper relationship. He eventually worked to help her regain her soul, and she helped him to pursuit an important subplot in the Fey Realm (I came up with this before 4e even came out, I swear :smallmad: ). They never really married, but he eventually became a fey as part of his previously established build involving Rimefire Witch, so the two essentially moved more and more in the same circles as the campaign went on.

Anyway, both in-character and out-of-character, both romances made the game much more interesting, and I think they really stretched and expanded the role play abilities of the players involved. The one quasi-nutso soulknife discovered that there were actually things worth protecting, and the philandering easy-come, easy-go spellscale learned to settle down (albeit with one or two serious hiccups that weren't entirely his fault). All in all, a very good experience.

[Wayaha]

I have, over the last 15 years had romance as part of my games my players are all adults ( read 30ish ) and even when we were younger no one treated the romantic subplots of my games as a joke since i taught them that their characters were people too from a design perspective they lived and breathed in the gaming world and needed to act according to those ideas my games are also very dark when it comes to bad guys demons and devils and there have been times we needed to break for mental health, however Romance, sex, etc are all part of life and thus are parts of the lives and motivations of the players no one tries to RP out these events ( unless its funny as hell ) and we all handled it with maturity.

[Neli42]

I've dm'd a bromance does that count? :smile:

I think if i had a female player I'd try it. But all of my players are dudes and it would feel weird flirting with them as the npc and them flirting with the npc. Ya i just think with my group it would get weird.

One of the guys in our group is playing a female character, described as quite attractive. She and my character are the only females in the company, traveling with four males. We get flirted with and propositioned by NPC's quite regularly (our GM, also male, role-plays very well). The guy playing the female character had to get past feeling flustered and blushing, but now he's learned to flirt back and turn situations to his advantage. He says this was a role-playing stretch for him, but he appreciates the chance to develop as a player this way.