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  | Ones and Zeros |
| An irregularly updated journal of my Fair and Balanced thoughts, reactions, opinions, biases, outrages, strategies, victories, and commentary. Whatever it is, it's much too subtle to be considered a parody... |
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July 02, 2002
| Gaming |
Ginger's WISH for this week is about Romance in Games:
Describe two romantic relationships involving a PC you've seen in a game. One should be a romance that worked for the participants and the other should be one that failed, died, or came to an end. What was good and bad about these relationships from the point of view of plot and character development? How did the GM make the romance appealing to the players?
Alternatively, talk about a time when a PC in a game you were in turned down a romance and why. Was this a good or bad decision for plot purposes? Why was the romance unappealing to the player or character?
For Greg Morrow's Champions campaign Voyagers, I wanted a spy. David FitzAlan was, even before he was granted super powers, hiding in a secret identity. David lived in California, working for one of the other PCs as a computer security expert. In truth, he was the titular head of and sometime attempted kidnap victim of the Shambalan Security Services. Shambala was a rouge country on the Nepal/China/India border. David had an uneasy peace with his relatives. He didn't come to their attention and they didn't have him kidnapped to come home and work for the bad guys.
This was a problem, because Shambala was bound to find out about the super powered crime fighting and want to bring him back. While that would have been fine if the comic book was his solo book CyberMancer!, it didn't work well for The Voyagers!, what with it being a team effort. The solution to the problem was to have David fall head-over-heels for the team leader, The White Lioness (played by Ginger, actually). It tied David to the team and forced him to be heroic, because Lady Hawkwood wanted him to be.
It was a star-crossed romance, to be sure. David couldn't tell her how he felt, for starters. She was happily involved with an NPC lover. She had an adopted child whom David's presence might endanger. The team's patron and 'official leader' didn't like David. For the first half of the campaign, David didn't even tell the team about his real secret identity. This was because the rumor in Shambala was that some years ago, David's older brother had attempted to have his way with Lady Hawkwood and she had fled Shambala. David's brother was socially ruined, of course, but David certainly felt a certain amount of guilt.
One of my absolute favorite moments in the campaign came when David had to fly back to Shambala, get into his Air Group Commander uniform, and attempt to stop them from killing Lady Hawkwood's NPC lover, who had been investigating David's background. How we got to that point, nevermind, that's not a favorite moment... But the unveiling was, as we all expected, a shock to all.
That he kept his unrequited love a secret through that, when he faced a very angry Vivian, Lady Hawkwood, was a great success. That the two never became lovers is immaterial; TV shows that thrive on romantic tension always die within a season or two of them resolving the relationship.
On the negative side, I played a character in Kellie Patrick-Getty's Vampire, the Masquerade campaign who started with an NPC girlfriend. This was actually a character with a similar archetype. The child of a very wealthy "old crime" "old money" family, he was supposed to go to law school and become respectable and be either a legal or a business face for some of his family's more shady dealings. After he passed the bar, he said "forget it" and concentrated on being a painter. Well, family money helped. He'd also dealt a little, but mostly to help friends, not for a profit.
The girlfriend was supposed to be his tie, his regret, his connection to his humanity and who he'd been (or more to the point, who he'd never been but wanted to be). It didn't happen. It didn't click for Kellie and we never really spent that much time dealing with mortals. Possibly we were too interested in the world of the vampires. The campaign ended before I had a chance to implement my backup plan: my Toreador should have failed to pay attention to her through the passing of time and then gone to look for her and found either an old lady or a grave.
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| .:Posted by Michael on July 2, 2002 11:16 PM:.
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