D&D Love Stories (Valentine's Day 2016)

[GnomishPride]

Happy Valentine's Day, all (who celebrate it)!
In the spirit of this lovey-dovey day, I'm inviting the GitP community to share their favorite RPG love stories - both in game and around the table.

Have fun!

[GrayDeath]

Ah yes, the "being Single Awareness Day". ^^


Since I only ever experienced one "Love Story" in an RPG Game (everything else was either brought into the game from real life or short term) its easy.

2 Players, who at that time were not (yet) dating irl, but liked each other.

The male one played a Variant Psywarrior/Gish (attempting to put it in easily understandeable D&Dish terms, it was a homebrew), the female a Changelingesque (only 3 forms, including an animal one)-scout.
Both started of quite nicely...everything sunshine and fluffy bunnies and such.
Until the Changeling was hit by a curse that attacked a characters greatest strengths first (hers was her massively tuned up sight), becoming blind, followed by eyeless quickly thereafter.
The PsyWarrior made a bargain with a rather dangerous chaotic force to first stop the progress, and then attempted (for sessions) to remove the curse.
An act of futility (no easy remove curse spells in that setting), then they decided together to tempt fate and simply asked said force of chaos to "solve the problem" for them (they only knew it would not ill her AND remove the curse, nothing else, cause CHAOS^^).

She ended up a Succubus (not evil per se in the setting, just ... very unhealthy to be with and aging if they dont ...you know ^^).

In the end he accepted shortening his (considerable) Lifespan to be with her.
THat is until he died (of other causes)....

[Jay R]

Several years ago, in a 2E game, my character was Ornrandir, a male elven mage/thief, given the title of the Earl of Devon by the king. He was an outcast orphan who had only recently formed any attachments to anybody. I had played him as emotionally undeveloped but brilliant. My wife was playing Rowena, a female human wizard, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had been in an ivory tower (literally) studying magic since she was a child. She played her as an extreme nerd. The royalty had started leaning on us to make political marriages, which is to say that the DM wanted to do some political intrigue. We decided to trump the whole romantic process and sent the following email to the entire gaming group.

A situation has occurred. It will affect the party to some extent, so I guess you should all hear about it. The two of us decided to explain it to you in character, so here it is.

(You may ignore which account this email came from; it was written by the two of us together.)
-----------------------

Rowena has been traveling to Devon Manor regularly to do magical research stuff and help set up the schools there, make scrolls, etc. The next time she visits after a Certain Conversation with the Queen, once she and Ornrandir are alone in the study where they work together on magic, she initiates the following conversation:

Rowena: The Queen tells me I really ought to give some thought to perpetuating magical bloodlines and recommends I consider marrying you.

Ornrandir: I’ve heard similar rumblings. Countess Elanor told me I have to find someone to marry, too. Something about an heir for the county.

Rowena: It is a rational idea. It is just that I have never really considered it before. I have been rather busy learning magic; all that physical stuff seemed so…worldly.

Ornrandir: I certainly know little about it. I’ve never had any family, and I've been an outcast all my life, except for those occasions when the only female I’ve traveled with was Lorelei, the paladin.

Rowena: The gaggle of giggling girls I must spend time with these days seems so focused on the idea.

Ornrandir: I know. Everyone but you is so stupid.

Rowena: I am already spending a lot of time here anyway.

Ornrandir: My servants wouldn’t have to prepare separate rooms for you each time. That would be convenient. And we seem able to get along.

Rowena: After all, we worked well together blasting hundreds of goblins with lightning bolts.

Ornrandir: I enjoyed casting coordinated lightning bolts with you. I’ve never felt so connected to another person before.

Rowena: After that, how difficult could this marriage thing be?

Ornrandir: Love is one of the strongest and most mysterious forces of the universe. Of course, controlling arcane cosmic forces is what wizards do. Maybe we should research a spell for it?

Rowena: As a mage, I will not age as quickly as normals; being elven, you of course will not age at all, so I really do not see why we need to be in a big hurry. And why should I care about being considered – how did she put it? Oh, yes – an "old maid".

Ornrandir: That seems like a meaningless phrase. Everybody becomes old, and an unmarried woman is of course a maid.

Rowena: On the other hand, your life expectancy, given your penchant for getting into trouble, isn’t exactly eternal. [looks him up and down appraisingly] At least if I marry you, you won’t keep getting ripped off by the tailors. You paid far too much for that rag you’re wearing.

Ornrandir: Fine by me. I’d be happy not to have to think about clothes any more.

Rowena: You thought about … that?

Ornrandir: Of course. It has a fleece collar, so I always have the material component for Phantasmal Force, feathers as decorations so I can fly, and several pockets worked into it here for other components. It has two internal pockets for scrolls, this hidden pocket for a dagger, and Lorelei will never figure out where the thieves’ tools are. It's green, for easy concealment in the trees. See? I carefully considered every relevant sartorial issue.

Rowena: I see. Yes, I believe I should take over those decisions. [Pause.] I would prefer to avoid that spectacle that Aduphus went through to marry Lady Stanley. The collective intelligence of her Majesty’s ladies dropped like a stone the instant someone said, “wedding”, and all they could talk about for weeks was fripperies and lace. Why do you think I spent so much time here writing out scrolls?

Ornrandir: Believe me, I understand. Since I developed the gold and mithril mines, all the nobles have been throwing their daughters at me. A year earlier they were offended that I was allowed to carry a weapon, and now they want me to sheathe one in their daughters.

Rowena: So how quickly can we get this over with?

Ornrandir: Well, when they assigned us to go fetch the Prince, we started out on the task immediately. Is the priest available today?

Rowena: I suppose we need to tell the Queen first. She might have an opinion about how it is done. So we are fully agreed about the marriage?

Ornrandir: It does seem like the logical thing to do [says the pointy-eared member of the couple].

Rowena: I’m glad we were able to work this out rationally, without the usual tawdry, emotional mess.

Ornrandir: Of course. We may be the two most intelligent people on the planet. We won’t let maudlin sentimentality distract us from rational analysis.

Rowena: Well, I am glad that that is settled. Now back to important matters - about that scroll we were discussing…

For the record, since a couple of people in the gaming group asked, she and I had never heard of The Big Bang Theory when we wrote this.

[Dimers]

In the Sword Coast expansion of the original Baldur's Gate, I (kinda) fell in love with a character in the werewolf island plotline. The inevitability of the parting and the sense of loss upon return to the mainland actually made me cry a few tears -- something I rarely do other than when I'm horribly frustrated and angry by something threatening my real-life wellbeing. I really wish they'd had some way to take on that brief love-interest character as a party NPC. :smallfrown:

My wife and I role-play sometime ... but that's not what you're asking :smallwink:

[BWR]

I met my girlfriend of 11 years through gaming. It was her first game apart from a pbp and she started in the deep end of the pool with Kult. I was a sort of co-GM for the primary GM, taking parts of various NPCs and suchlike. Lemme tell you, there's nothing like seeing three girls huddled in the sofa looking at you in fear and horror as you play a rather demented character.
I leant her my meager stash of Rokugan books, consisting of the dual stat version, when I found out she was a big fan of Japanese culture and history (granted it isn't terribly similar to the Heian period, but it was fun enough), and she was hooked. After playing together for a year or so, Ars Magica, V:tM, Dragonstar, 1-on-1 Oriental Adventures, we hooked up just before Christmas so I have a standard cheesy response I give her mother when asked what I want for Christmas: "you already gave me the best one possible". She came to visit me for a few days that summer and never went home. Despite my worst efforts she has stayed with me. Insert trite but true clichés about the best thing that ever happened and her being too good for me and being grateful every day.

There have been several in-game romances but the most important one is between two characters my gf and I have been playing off and on for longer than we've been a couple. It's not really the sort of story that could be told in a short, or even a long post here, being the sort of thing that would need a proper novella to convey. Suffice to say they have been a couple with ups and downs over 50 years that include children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, wars, death, kidnappings, demonic invasions, divine avatars and reborn gods. And cats and falcons.

The second most memorable has to be the one between one cleric PC and a cleric NPC. They are clerics of rival Immortals (one of passion and romance and hot-headedness, the other of intellect and rationality and planning) and at one point the PC needed help and the NPC was the only one available. As a condition on the aid, he set that should a certain set of circumstances occur, the PC would extol the virtue's of the NPC's patron publically. Should the NPC lose the bet, he would do the same for the PC's patron. The PC lost and had to say how great being calm and logical is. She then proceeded to seduce the NPC cleric into a whirlwind romance at odds with his age and outlook. Neither Immortal can agree who won that exchange. The PC then got pregnant and things became more complicated with how to raise the kid (both sides want to be the one to 'win' the kid).

[goto124]

Not limited to DnD, I suppose?

In a free-form RP, I created my first character (a redhead barbarian with a fairly weird mindset) and tossed her into a tavern. A couple of player interactions later, she met another player's first character - a vampire cowboy with a penchant for knives. They just clicked, and quickly became a couple.

Later on, I introduced another character, a magic swordsmaster elf who was best friends with my barbarian, and later met the cowboy. I brought all three characters to a... ahem... night club. For some reason, the barbarian misinterpreted her boyfriend's request to smoke a cigar indoors, and revealed she would like an open relationship.

Guess the first person the cowboy hit on? The elf.

Several shenanigans later, they consummated their new three-way relationship not too far away :smallbiggrin:

This Valentine's day, they're going on another romantic adventure with a different character played by a different player. I can't wait!

[Jay R]

I once played a paladin in a convention game at a games convention - Lord Hastings, who was always bragging about the loyalty and devotion of his wife back home.

That same month, for an SCA dueling tourney, I ran a scenario based on "the unfortunate incident regarding the parentage of Lady Hastings's second son."

[AceOfFools]

Oh man.

I'm running an urban fantasy game where there were a bunch of faerie courts (Summer, Winter, Spiders, Masks...).

The FIRST NPC I made for that setting, before even deciding to ask about if anyone wanted to play in it, was the hipster king of the newly formed Internet Court that would be the PCs' frenemy. Being an avatar of the internet self, he has an actual ability called "Knows, Shares and Exemplifies your Fetish."

And then one of my players showed up to the character creation session with a closeted-gay, hipster techno-witch.

The Hipster King of the Internet seduced Hipster Techno Witch so hard; he got the techno-witch to come out of the closet, sell his soul...

The player ended up dumping their IRL boyfriend--in part--because they realized they cared way more about (and for) their fictional internet boyfriend than the real one.

[Parvum]

So the party is investigating missing scouts in an out of the way town surrounded by standing stones.
Theoretically we stop to investigate the mysterious appearance of a ghostly horseman that is harrassing the townsfolk. But the first stop we make is a farm with an old man and his daughter. The party blood mage has a one night stand with her.
Following that there's a discussion about human customs surrounding pregnancy, and whether or not he has hurt this girl's chances of getting off this clearly struggling farm. The party grell, who was raised among largely asexual flumph, is confused and starts to ask questions. The party (tries) to explain human concepts of virginity, romance, and, inevitably, marriage.
He falls in love with the idea, getting so excited that the rest of the party gets swept up in the notion of a (shotgun) wedding. The rest of the adventure becomes preparing for the wedding of the blood mage and the farm girl, with some incidental mystery solving on the side. Not an encounter goes by that we don't bring it up with each other or NPCs. We even get a blessing from an ancient local folk hero, now retired and unliving as a wight in a nearby cozy barrow.
Once the town's mystery is out of the way, all the townsfolk gathered by the farm to attend (turns out they were all secretly animals but that's not important). The service was held in an improvised chapel made of grell crystal fresh the previous day.
Afterward, the farm girl wished to be as close as possible to her new husband, but to keep her far from harm she lived on the Pirate Ship Home Base. Eventually the blood mage suffered one too many deaths and, rather than continue on a quest for an artifact of irreversible annihalation, retired with his honey to live out a life of domestic bliss.

[goto124]

... I was expecting some mention of the old man getting protective of his daughter. What happened to him? What did he do?

[Parvum]

... I was expecting some mention of the old man getting protective of his daughter. What happened to him? What did he do?

He desperately tried to get her married off to the least impoverished people he could find. During the conversations on human romantic conventions, he was actually in the room while we danced around outright saying, "Our friend slept with your daughter last night when you let us stay in your home." It had a kind of father-polishing-a-gun-while-talking-to-prospective-stepson moment, even though he was unarmed and we were adventurers loaded to the teeth.
He was pretty welcoming though. He had no problem with grell (which I appreciated) though he did express a contemptuous attitude toward elves, which is funny because the blood mage his daughter was interested was a half-elf hiding his heritage with a magic hat.
In the end he was eager to get his daughter somewhere with a future, and unlike the story archetype she was desperate to leave the family farm whose entire workforce now consisted of the man, her, and the skeleton of a cow that our dread necromancer had reanimated for them. Heh, skeleton crew.