BioWare's Patrick Weekes Likes Romance
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I've been involved in romances in tabletop games, both from behind the GM screen and in front of it. The short version of what I've learned is that it varies from group to group and from person to person within any one group, but that doesn't attract legions of commenters arguing that I'm full of it, so. here, yell at these:
Implication
In my longest-running campaign, I had a guy who was actively interested in an in-game relationship, a few players who liked the idea of their character having a significant other but weren't comfortable with the idea of having to roleplay falling in love with a pasty bearded white guy (me), and others who were not only uninterested but actively thought that it was a stupid idea to waste time on someone else's love scene when everyone was really here to eat pizza, roll dice, and hit monsters.
To balance these varying levels of interest and comfort, I kept most of the interested guy's love story in e-mails exchanged between sessions. (This avoided the (two straight guys trying to roleplay a romance between a man and a woman) bit, and it also let us refer to those events in game without explicitly playing out the whole romance.) The camera moved in and out (or panned to the lamp) as was comfortable for us in those e-mails, and in-game, the two characters were an established couple talking with easy familiarity.
The players who thought that their character ought to be with somebody but didn't want to roleplay it could just describe, in extremely vague detail, what was going on. Their characters got both the advantages and disadvantages of being in a relationship: the cleric in love with the captain of the guard could get classified information about the state of an important diplomatic matter, while the wizard had to watch as an attack aimed at her hit her boyfriend instead, killing him and leaving her grief stricken. Their relationships were just as valid in-game as the one with more detail we just left the specifics up to implication and inference.
