Month: February 2009

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RPG Tools: A PDF Reader

Since so many RPG products now come in the form of a PDF, wouldn’t it be nice to have a PDF reader that wasn’t a pig?  PDF X-Change Viewer is a free Windows app that is lightning fast compared to Adobe’s reader.  The Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition PDF opens nearly instantly and pages refresh in a flash.  Not only that, but you can annotate it, so the House Rules I was talking about earlier are now recorded in my copy of the PDF.  When you install it by default it makes itself the system PDF reader and replaces the Firefox plugin;  I really appreciate how much faster it loads a PDF there.  There’s also a portable version, suitable for carrying around and running from a USB flash drive.

PDF Viewer – Software To Open A PDF File – PDF Editing Software

Those wishing to view PDF files on their Windows PC’s now have a choice when it comes to Viewing PDF files – the PDF-XChange Viewer is smaller, faster and more feature rich than the Adobe Reader which has until now been the Reader of choice for PDF files – we think that’s about to change !

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Shields and Spears in Savage Worlds

I’ve finally decided to add some house rules to Savage Worlds.  Up until now I’ve been adding setting-specific stuff (various Edges, Races, and so forth), but I’ve been pretty careful not to override any of the core rules because I wanted to have a solid grasp on them before I tinkered.  One of the first pieces of advice the folks on the Savage Worlds forum give is resist the urge to tinker with stuff until you’ve played it enough to see how it works; there are a bunch of things that are slightly different in Savage Worlds than people are used to, and it’s not always clear to a new player how the pieces interact.

I think I’ve gotten beyond that now, and have a decent grasp of the system and philosophy, even if I can’t count myself as an expert, and there are a couple things that I don’t think Savage Worlds handles well even on its own terms.  Chief among these are its treatment of shields and spears.

In Savage Worlds, Shields grant +1-3 to the character’s Parry score (melee defense), but only to the front and right side of the character.  That’s intuitive enough, until you realize that it’s the only place in all the rules that facing matters.  In Savage Worlds there’s no bonus for attacking from behind or the side.  Even if you’re partially surrounded, while the attackers gain a Gang Up bonus (+1 for every attacker over 1, to a maximum of +4), no particular attacker has any extra advantage based on your facing.  In every other case, SW abstracts away facing.  It’s built on the assumption that combatants are naturally moving around, spinning, jockeying for position, even circling each other during combat and that turns are long enough (6 seconds) that there’s no one single way that you’re facing during the turn.  This is even mentioned explicitly in the rules that deal with firing into melee: you stand a chance of hitting a friendly character because even though they may be visibly just standing there in separate squares on the battle mat in the game-world they’re presumed to be moving around erratically.  Even bearing that in mind, it might be worth breaking the abstraction in cases where it’s really likely to matter, and to increase the tactical possibilities…except that every other weapon that grants a Parry bonus (such as Rapier or Spear) does so all around.  There’s no more reason that a fellow armed with a Rapier can defend himself better against attacks from the rear than someone with a Shield, but that’s how the rules have it.

So, first House Rule:

Shields apply their bonus regardless of facing, just like other weapons.  The Gang Up bonus is what represents being flanked or attacked in such a way that you cannot defend as effectively in all directions.

Spears in Savage Worlds are also a bit odd.  They are universally a Two-Handed weapon, that grants +1 Parry and Reach. Reach means they can attack foes up to 2 yards away (1″ game scale).  There’s nothing particularly wrong about that, but historically many if not most spears were 1-handed weapons used in conjunction with a shield.  I’m also not entirely sure why the +1 Parry, unless it’s just the extra length of the weapon making it harder to press home an attack.  Most settings, including pulp settings with primitive tribesmen, are going to need a 1-Handed version of a spear.  You could say that such a weapon has no extra Reach, while retaining the +1 Parry, but that doesn’t really match up with how they were regarded historically (and would ruin the Greek hoplite tactic of being able to have the second rank or even third rank of soldiers able to attack foes that close with the front of the phalanx). The Core Rules 2-Handed Spear is also capable of being thrown, which is silly.  Here’s a nice set of pictures of guys with spears and shields, including both one-handed and two-handed spears.

So, the second House Rule:

Spear (1-Handed) STR+d6  Weight 3  Cost 50  Reach 1  Range 3/6/12  ROF 1  Min STR d6

Spear (2-Handed) STR+d6 Weight 5 Cost 100 Reach 1, Parry +1, two hands, may not be thrown.

Sling Shield –   Weight 12  Cost 50  +2 Armor to ranged shots that hit, +1 Armor to non-ranged attacks if and only if fighting in phalanx (defenders to either side, attackers only on one side), can be slung from the shoulder so that it can be used in conjunction with 2-handed spears (as was the practice of Macedonian phalanx)

Finally, there’s the interaction of Reach weapons and Close Combat in Savage Worlds.  According to the rule “Withdrawing from Close Combat”, if you leave melee then adjacent characters get a free attack on you.  This is a pretty standard kind of “parting shot” rule to keep turn-based movement from having odd effects that allow a character to run up, attack, and run away while the defender just stands there helpless.  Unfortunately, while the rule is about “Withdrawing from Close Combat” technically the body of the rule refers to “leaving melee”–the rules lawyers have seized upon this to argue (successfully as far as the official interpretation) that if you have a Reach weapon and stop being adjacent you are still in melee and don’t attract a free attack.  But if you move more than the reach of your weapon away, then you have left melee, and even though you’re no longer adjacent, the opponent gets the free attack.  This results in people armed with spears, or worse, pikes, having more options about where they can move during a battle than anybody else.  This seems to run directly counter to spears and pikes in history and fiction, and promotes unusual tactics like having your double row of spear men close with the enemy (both rows getting their attacks in because of Reach) and then disengaging and stepping 2 yards back (nobody suffering a free attack, because the front row is still in Reach and the back row was never adjacent) so that if any of them have First Strike they get another set of attacks when the opponents close in again.  Clint, the official rules guy, says that yeah, they can do that, but they won’t be able to do it in battle twice, because who would close with them, so why worry?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe because the spear phalanx can serve as a screen for archers?

Anyway, before I start frothing about the kind of Talmudic pilpul that sometimes goes on around the Fast! Furious! Fun! rules of Savage Worlds, here’s my third house rule:

Withdrawing from Close Combat means withdrawing from Close Combat.  As soon as you are no longer adjacent to an unshaken opponent that you were fighting, the opponent gets a free attack even if you’re still within the reach of your own weapon.  You are counted as fighting an opponent (and not just dashing past) if either a) you make any kind of attack in passing so as to attract his attention, or b) the opponent is otherwise unengaged and not surprised.

The last bit is to cover whether you can run past an entire line of foes without any consequences just because it’s your initiative.  There are those who maintain that as long as you didn’t make a Fighting roll against one of the foes, you weren’t technically in combat with them, so you can charge through without any problem.  There are times, particularly for Pulp adventure, where that even makes sense.  Certainly if they’re busy fighting someone else, they may not have attention to spare.  On the other hand, if you were fighting them, no matter how many other foes they are engaged with, they always have time and attention to spare to get a free attack.  That’s because it’s part of the abstraction that you’re not accounting for every blow, and even though it may not be their initiative they’re not standing there like logs while you do whatever you wish.  So in my opinion, running a gauntlet of armed opponents is not something you should attempt unless they’re distracted.  If you want a good chance of trying this, try tricking them first, or wait for them to be fighting somebody else.  And don’t try to tell me that by throwing something or shooting one of them with a pistol as you pass you’re not fighting them because it wasn’t a “Fighting” roll.

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Listen Now!

Since all the cool kids are doing it (see below), and I actually have a blind friend who might someday stumble across this blog even though he’s not much of a roleplayer, I’ve added Odiogo’s text-to-speech reader to the blog.

Stargazer’s World » Listen to this blog!

Odiogo is a service that provides an audio version of your regular feed. The text-to-speech technology used is quite decent, so it turns your RSS feed almost into a podcast. You can also subscribe to this podcast using iTunes, so your readers can listen to your posts while commuting to work for example.

I’m still not jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.  No sir.

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Awesome!:The Storytelling Game

This is my attempt at a (possibly) playable game in a single blog post.

Awesome!: The Storytelling Game

Awesome! is a game of telling a story about just how awesome your characters are, and how they kick ass and take names accomplishing mighty feats of derring-do, blockbuster action movie style!  For Awesome! characters, the question is not whether they succeed, only how awesome their success is.  Players take turns narrating the awesome exploits of their characters, ceding control of the narrative only when they’ve run out of their current supply of Awesome! (or when they’ve failed to live up to their awesome potential and delivered some lame narration).

Beginning The Game

The players choose one player to be the Director for the upcoming scene.  For the first scene, they can choose randomly, or simply pick the most awesome player in the room.  Subsequent scenes will be Directed by whichever player whose turn it was when the scene ended.  It is the Directors job to set the scene, and to control all the antagonists and provide the challenges that the characters must surmount.  It is not the Director’s job to thwart the characters or make them look silly, but to help them to achieve the highest levels of awesomeness they can.  The Director briefly describes the scenario for the players (“You are all martial artists gathered on a remote island to determine the Best of the Best” or “You are super-spies working for a mysterious agency.”) so they can create their characters.

Creating Characters

Starting with the player to the Director’s left and going clockwise, each player briefly describes their character in a sentence or two.  (“Chow Yang is the son of the disgraced former master of the Tiger Fist Dojo, determined to clear his father’s name and restore his style to prominence.”  “Rhode Island Red is a mountain of a man, and the roughest, toughest, biker in the world.” etc).  Then the player to that player’s right adds one detail that makes the character particularly awesome (e.g. “Chow Yang is master of The Roaring Tiger move.” or “Red’s Hog, Betty-Lou, can drive straight through a brick wall without slowing down.”).  Next the player to the left adds one Weakness.  (“Red can’t resist a drink.”  “Agent X always helps a lady in distress, even if he knows it’s a trap.”)  Continue around the table until everyone has a character, including the Director, who will need a character if there are subsequent scenes.

Characters have only one Stat, called Awesome!  Each player starts the game with Awesome! of 20.

Turn Order

Play begins with the Director setting the scene in more detail.  Every scene should be devised around a set-piece action sequence.  It needn’t be a combat, though most of the time it probably will be, but it has to be something that provides scope for death-defying stunts, hair-raising escapades, and, if possible, explosions.  Big ones.  Investigation, travel, preparation and the like should all be handled in passing by the Director or inserted as a parenthetical aside by a Player…Players should never have to take an action or make a decision simply to advance the plot to the next action sequence.  Once the Director has set the scene, the player to the Director’s left begins her turn.  When her turn ends, the Director gets another turn to update the scene, detail the antagonists’ responses, up the stakes, and so forth.  When the Director is finished, the next Player moving clockwise takes her turn.  Play proceeds in this fashion, alternating between the Director and the next clockwise Player until the scene ends.

Taking A Turn

In Awesome! the character’s action always succeeds–that’s what it means to be awesome.  The only thing in question is just how much awesome you can cram into one turn. The player describes the awesome action that the character takes, including (if appropriate) what happens to any non-player characters as a result. The other players (excluding the Director) may, if they wish, vote whether the action is Awesome! or Lame!   They need not wait until the action is over, but they may not vote on the same action twice.  “Red punches the thug so hard he lands in the rolling chair and rolls back all the way across the room where the chair tips him out the window and he falls into the dumpster below.”  “Agent X jumps onto the back of the shark and using his spear-gun as a spur, rides the shark like a surf-board all the way back to the beach.”

Awesome!

If another player is particularly impressed, she can say “Awesome!” or give a thumbs up after a player takes an action.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go up by one.

Totally Awesome!

If every other player voted Awesome! the player whose turn it was goes again immediately.

Lame!

If another player thinks that the action described was pedestrian or boring, she can say “Lame!” or hold their hand up in the shape of an L on their forehead.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go down by 1.

Totally Lame

If every other player voted Lame! then the player’s turn ends immediately.

Abstention

Players do not have to vote one way or the other, and should probably reserve their kudos or jeers for particularly noteworthy actions.

No Consensus

Typically there will be no consensus, either because there were abstentions or because there was disagreement on the Awesomeness/Lameness of the character’s action.  The player then rolls a d20, and this becomes the character’s new Awesome! score.  If the roll is higher than the character’s current Awesome! score (after having been adjusted by the votes of the other players), then the player’s turn ends, and the narration moves on, first to the director, then to the next player clockwise.  If the roll is less than or equal to the character’s current Awesome! score, the player continues with the narration.

Signature Shtick

If the player incorporates the character’s signature shtick (as defined by the other player at during character creation) in the action, the player rolls 2d20 and keeps the one she prefers (generally the highest one that isn’t over the current Awesome! score, or simply the highest if they both would cause the turn to end, but if she wanted to end the turn for some other reason without tagging out or succumbing to weakness, it’s up to her).

Voluntarily Ending Your Turn

Players may voluntarily end their turns by either Tagging Out or Succumbing to Weakness

Tagging Out

A player may tag out to another player to continue the narration by describing a set-up for that player’s character (“I toss Maxie the gun.”) and indicating that player should continue (either verbally or by tapping their palm or the table in front of them).  In this case the Director does not get a turn before the next player.  A player may not tag another player if the Director has not had a turn since that player’s last turn (because that player tagged away): the Director must always be allowed a turn before a player can go again.  The character’s current Awesome! score remains in effect.

Succumbing to Weakness

A player may voluntarily narrate the character succumbing to the Weakness defined during character creation.  The player’s turn ends, and the character’s Awesome! score is reset to 20.

When to Roll

Players are encouraged to describe their actions elaborately and with panache, and it’s quite possible that one “action” can encompass a whole series of maneuvers, as in “Jackie grabs the mop and back-flips over the ninja behind him, then sweeps the mop handle around in a gigantic circle, knocking all six ninjas into the shelves, where they fall in a heap with the cans of paint falling on them and covering them head-to-foot in all the colors of the rainbow.”  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, the action should end when it’s logical and narratively satisfying to do so, usually after both an action by the character and a reaction by the antagonists.  Remember, every time an action ends there’s a chance that the player’s turn will end then and there, either by vote of the other players or by the roll of the die.  A player can have a sense of whether a follow-up action is likely, based on the current Awesome! score, but it’s never certain.  You probably don’t want to end with the mop handle sweeping the ninja’s legs out from under them, but not knowing whether they fall, flip and save themselves, or what.  On the other hand, if you’re going on and on, hogging the spotlight and preventing anybody else from displaying the awesomeness of their character, they may vote that it’s Lame! just to get you to stop.

Third Person Vs. First Person Narration

Third person narration is more in the spirit of the game, but first person narration is perhaps more like a role-playing game and may be easier for players accustomed to RPGs.  On the other hand, narrating over-the-top awesomeness may strike some players as being unpleasantly like “power gaming”  if done in the first person. It’s more a matter of aesthetics than anything else.

The Director’s Turn

During the Director’s turn, the Director narrates any unfinished results from the players’ turns and the actions taken by the antagonists.  The Director is free to introduce new antagonists or complications to the situation, and is expected to do so to keep things exciting.  The Director does not have an Awesome! score, and may continue as long as necessary in order to provide fodder for the players’ next turns, but should bear in mind that the point of the game is for the players’ characters to be awesome, not for the Director to tell a story.  During the Director’s turn it is legitimate for the Director to incapacitate, sideline, or “kill” any character except for that of the player whose turn is about to commence, with the understanding that it will never actually result in the elimination of a PC unless the player has indicated that is acceptable or she has to leave the game; whatever the Director does to a PC has to be reversible by the time its that player’s turn again, up to and including the apparent death of the character; if the PC has not been restored to action by another player by that time, the player gets a free action (not requiring voting or a die roll) to restore the character to action.

The Bogus Rule

If all the players vote that a particular action by the Director is Bogus (by shouting Bogus or holding their noses), then the Director is obliged to retract that piece of narration and replace it with something more to the players’ taste.  If the players vote Bogus three times during the Director’s same turn, the game ends and everybody loses.

Player vs. Player

It may sometimes happen that PCs end up fighting each other because of the logic of the scenario (e.g. a martial arts contest) or because of one player’s narration (say, proposing an archery contest).  To keep the flow of the narrative, so that the players dueling don’t have to wait for their turn to come around again each time, resolution changes in the following way:  the first player announces a duel, and if the other player(s) accepts, each takes turns narrating a single action (the character’s action and the opposing character’s reaction).  Voting takes place as normal, and the first character whose turn ends (either because of rolling higher than the current Awesome! score or by votes of Lame!) loses the duel.   The winner of the duel gets one more (free) action to narrate the victory, and play passes to the Director, and then to the next clockwise player from the initiator of the duel who was not involved in the duel.  The Director does not get turns in between the actions of the dueling players.  It is the responsibility of the players to ensure that even as they are narrating their character (potentially) winning the duel, they don’t make the opposing player’s character seem weak; attempts to do so (e.g. by announcing their character one-punches the opponent) should be immediately voted Lame! by the other players.

Ending the Scene

The scene ends when a character has achieved the goal for the scenario, explicit or implicit, or defeated the last antagonist present, and the players all high-five each other.  If the conditions for ending a scene have been achieved, but one or more players withholds the high-five, then the current player’s turn ends (and the Awesome! score remains unchanged) and it becomes the Director’s turn immediately.  It is then up to the Director to introduce new antagonists or complications so the players can try to achieve a more satisfactory outcome.

Starting a New Scene

If the players wish to continue, the Directorship passes to whichever player whose turn it was when the prior scene ended.  It is up to this new Director to continue the story, using the same characters and basic set-up, but possibly taking it in a new direction.  It is also up to the new Director to narrate the introduction of the previous Director’s character (or re-introduction if the game has gone on that long) as well as possibly the sidelining of the new Director’s character.  Play proceeds clockwise from the new Director.

Ending the Game

The game ends by mutual agreement whenever the players are satisfied.

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Adventures in Arithmetic

Or: Why D&D 3.5 is no fun.

I love my friend Russell like a brother, and I’ll gladly play any game that he wants to GM, but I’m so looking forward to him switching systems some time in the near future as he’s planning to do.  As long as we’re not in combat, the game and setting are entertaining as all get-out, but as soon as we roll init…ugh.  There’s just no part of “You rolled a 13, plus 11 for your Attack Bonus, plus 1 for the prayer, minus 5 for the Combat Expertise, minus 5 for it being your second attack is 15…you hit!” that’s exciting.  It’s possible that if we played every week, instead of about once a month for half a year, that we’d get so used to the system–or learn to take notes that pre-figure all the standard options we usually choose in battle–that it would be mercifully quick.   But it still wouldn’t be very exciting, in my opinion.  It has all the panache and tension of doing SAT practice problems.  Continue that sort of thing for a half-hour or more, and I’d honestly rather that we went system-less.

That’s not to say that my current favorite system, Savage Worlds, is without flaw in this regard.  I think that on the whole modifiers are a bit less common and tend to be applied more homogeneously (e.g. the penalty for multiple actions in a round applies to every action in the round, so at least you only have to figure it once at the beginning), and there is an actual requirement that certain kinds of maneuvers (e.g. Tricks) get a description to justify them rather than a bare announcement of the attempt, but on the flip side the die-rolling has the possibility of being more complex with the open-ended rolls and I could see it falling into a similar if shallower rut of “let’s all do some arithmetic now!”  At least in Savage Worlds, I think I see how to speed things along in combat and making the combat more dynamic and descriptive; with D&D 3e, I honestly think that the more dynamic the combat gets in terms of options for the players, terrain, facing, environmental conditions, spells, maneuvers and abilities, the worse it becomes in terms of arithmetic as the bonuses and penalties come and go and fewer things can be pre-calculated.  I don’t really see much of a way to improve that without stripping player options; stacking mods on a roll of a d20 is pretty much the essence of the system.

The bottom line is that with 3e, I end up hoping that we don’t get into any combats, so that we can continue to have a fun time.   That’s probably less than optimal for D&D.

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Tiddle Your Mind… With TiddlyWiki!

Since Freemind and other such mind-mapping tools are getting some RPG Blogosphere loving (such as FreeMind Tips for Game Masters, and Free Your Mind…With Free Mind), I figured I’d give another plug for my favorite light-weight GM note-taking and campaign planning software tool: TiddlyWiki.  I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again, since not everybody who reads this blog assiduously combs the archives looking for the pearls of wisdom that might lie buried there.  Plus I think it was posted before I joined the RPG Bloggers Network.

I’ve tried mind-mapping software before… heck I used TheBrain back when it was a DOS program…  but I’ve never found it a great fit for the way I like to do campaign planning and notes.  Basically I tend to think in “bags”, rather than “graphs.”  I have a bunch of thoughts and notes all related to each other over here, and then another bunch of thoughts and notes related to each other over there.  They’re all in heterogeneous clumps of things like all the PCs, NPCs, rooms, traps, setting, clues, for one particular location or adventure.  They’re not naturally organized into parents, children, and siblings, at least by my notion of natural.  If I try to draw all the lines that might make sense to me, it becomes a mass of little islands with everything in one island directly connected to everything else in that island and then another island of stuff with no bridge in between unless I deliberately add one just to keep my mind map connected.  What can I say, my thoughts are very clumpy.  It’s not that I can’t get anything done with mind mapping software, it’s more that I feel like I waste a lot of time deciding where something goes in the web or moving it around, while not finding a lot of added value in setting up those vertices or using the software to follow them.  I end up clicking too much and writing too little.

Wikis are much more my style.  Lots of text, and just drill down on whatever terms you like to elaborate on, ad infinitum.  But wikis can be a pain to set up, particularly if you want to be able to use it while you’re not connected to the web.  Enter TiddlyWiki.

The implementation is a wiki, but it’s a wiki that requires no back-end or host.  It’s just a single HTML page with javascript that lets it update itself dynamically; all you need to use it is a place to store it (such as a thumb drive or your hard drive) and any modern browser.  You want a new TiddlyWiki?  Copy the HTML file and rename it and you’re good to go.  Change the contents of a couple of pre-defined entries and you can personalize the title, subtitle, and so forth.

TiddlyWiki bills itself as a “reusable personal web notebook” , but conceptually it’s more like a stack of virtual 3 x 5 cards,  3 x5 cards that can wiki link to each other or to anything on the web  and be tagged arbitrarily, much like blog posts, and text searched.  You want a new 3 x 5 card, either click on a link in an existing card, or click on the New Tiddler button (for no real reason, they call a card a “Tiddler”), and start editing.  You can hide or display multiple cards at once, search the wiki for terms that occur anywhere in a card, add or delete tags on a card, and so forth.  Like with blog posts, there’s no real organization or hierarchy other than things being tagged with keywords.  It’s that simple.  Other than learning the specific wiki markup, there’s almost no learning curve unless you get into customization.

Speaking of which, it’s possible to customize TiddlyWiki quite extensively, from redesigning the whole graphical look of it, to adding plugins for new functionality, to writing macros, or even writing your own plugins.   For instance, Berin Kinsman, of the Uncle Bear RPG blog, has two TiddlyWikis available for download, specifically customized for use in RPGS: Worldbuilding 101, and TenFoot Wiki.  The Worldbuilding101 TiddlyWiki is a great way to think about a new setting, and is worth looking at even if you’re going to use mind mapping software or even (gasp) paper and pencil.

I really like TiddlyWiki quite a lot, and have been using it extensively for my games.  Many of the posts you see here about Elves & Espers started their life as Tiddlers in the TiddlyWiki I carry on my keychain, and I’ve been fiddling around with writing a plugin, which I’ll talk about some other time if and when I finally get it done enough to share.

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Just in Time for Valentine’s

Over at Exchange of Realities, Ravyn writes about the dangers of “Designated Love Interests”… that is, NPCs that are designed to become the love interest of one of the PCs.

  • The Dangers of Designated Love Interests – Exchange of Realities

    • People will do amazing things for the ones they love; as a result, such love can be a motivator for story characters and game characters alike. So it’s often tempting to create a character specifically for the purpose of creating a romantic attachment: a Designated Love Interest, or DLI.

      That’s when the trouble starts.

      Limyaael has a lot to say about the Designated Love Interest in novel format, mostly having to do with the fact that said DLI isn’t really human, strains internal consistency by how her romances begin, and is generally cliché and undercharacterized. And yet, despite these flaws, a story with a bad DLI can reach its predetermined end; it just requires the writer to completely overwrite the characters. (The fact that this is bad fictional practice is another matter entirely.)

The problem with a lot of advice along the lines of Limyaael’s is that people read fiction for a lot of different reasons, and I can point to a huge selection of literature that demonstrates that Limyaael’s preferences are not shared by readers looking for romance in their fiction in the first place.  Readers want what they want, and not what some PhD LitCrit candidate thinks they should want.  Contrariwise, PhD LitCrit candidates want what they want, and are under no obligation to enjoy pot-boiler romances just because the masses do.  But people looking for writing advice are well-advised to carefully consider which audience they’re writing for.  My sister Elizabeth is a published romance novelist, with a half-dozen novels to her credit, and one of the first things she had to learn was there really is a tight limit to how much tweaking the conventions readers will put up with before they’re dissatisfied by the fact that whatever its other merits, the book is no longer what they want when they pick up a romance.

What’s more, RPGs aren’t simply a form of fiction, and there are a lot of players who play so that they can revel in the cliches.   They want their good to be good, their bad to be bad, and their fated lovers to be damn well singled out by fate in no uncertain terms. You’re not doing those kind of players a favor by creating a subtle, nuanced portrayal of a realistic sort of person that their character plausibly might or might not  fall in love with if this were a work of fiction where the author controlled both sides of the interest as well as everything that happens to them.

The point is that you have to know your audience.  There isn’t a good way and a bad way to do romantic interests in a game; there are a bunch of ways, and different players may want different ones, or the same player may want different ones at different times depending on the genre or how they see their character.  The real danger in a Love Interest is not that the character won’t bite and that will spoil your plot, it’s that you’ll choose a way that isn’t what the player wants, and even if the plot moves along its rails the game time will be wasted if not spoiled.

Generally speaking, I think the best way to avoid that is to solicit player input.  You want a character that the player’s PC will fall in love with?  Have the player help design the character and the general outline of how they’ll interact.  One huge advantage to this is that if the player isn’t interested in having that sort of thing happen in game, for whatever reason, you find out then and there and can drop the whole matter.  You also get explicit guidance from the player on what the character will find attractive (which is by no means what the player personally would find attractive), as well as just how genre-iffic, and how detailed or abstract, the whole approach to romance should be.  I find that even players who care deeply about playing In-Character are really open to out-of-game discussions about how they as player would like the game to go and the psychology of their character.

The down-side to this approach is that you lose the spontaneity.  There is something particularly satisfying about relationships with NPCs, of any sort, that arise dynamically out of play and not because the GM or the GM and player together contrived it in advance.  After all it’s precisely the actual real-time play of the game that’s the reason we play out the game in the first place instead of sitting around the table collaborating on a novel or a play.  To the extent that important things are moved from game play and into game planning, we risk diminishing the game.

Still, with all the ways that in-game romances are fraught with peril–not just for your preferred plot, but for the cohesion of the game group as a whole–I think the wisest course is not by creating a really attractive character and crossing your fingers and hoping, but by knowing your audience, which includes knowing whether they want in-game romance at all.  And the best, quickest, and most reliable way to know your audience is to openly ask them.