Sex and the single character
Ginger has the latest WISH challenge up. This time it’s about romance: one success and one failure.
You know what? I can’t answer this one directly. All the romances I’ve seen in gaming were failures. (Well, okay, except for Anis’s marriage to a simurgh in the Al-Qadim campaign, which so far is working out fine—but that is a decidedly weird story. Plus Anis is probably the least PC-ish of my PCs; she is a bit of a nonentity, unfortunately.)
I threatened to post about sex and romance in gaming. So rather than trying to fake an answer to the challenge, I’ll follow up on my threat.
Not a few of the in-game romances I have seen were incursions from an out-of-game romance. In one case, when the OOG romance went sour, so did the IG romance. Decidedly uncomfortable situation for the other gamers; in hindsight, the game I am thinking of probably should have broken up along with the romance.
<seinfeld>Not that there’s anything wrong with that.</seinfeld> I would be a fine one to issue blanket condemnations of real-life incursions into games, wouldn’t I? I do think it’s possible for a sour real-life romance to work out acceptably in game terms, if everyone involved offers heaping helpings of trust, understanding, and honesty both in and out of game. It isn’t decent or fair to use a game, especially one with innocent bystanders, to revenge yourself on your ex.
Aside from personal nastiness, however, there is an additional risk: when some players conflate in-game and out-of-game romance, it makes in-game romance ambiguous for everyone. Okay, so her rogue likes my fighter. Does that mean…? Well, does it?
This is tough. I’m wrestling with it now in a currently-on-hiatus Temple of Elemental Evil (yes, that old chestnut—none of our group except the person who’s DMing it has played it before) campaign. Poor little Afletana has gone and fallen for the party leader. Fallen hard. He has thus far been oblivious, and I am not sure how much of that is in-game (which it could well be), how much is the other player not catching on, and how much is the other player’s out-of-game discomfort with the whole idea. The other player is married. So am I, obviously, and the other player is somebody else’s husband, not mine.
Suffice to say this is completely an in-game thing on my part—but how can the other player be sure? And how do I bring the question up out-of-game without either ruining the surprise (if it is a surprise), embarrassing the other player unacceptably, or (heaven forfend!) causing the other player problems with his wife, who is not a gamer?
I am comfortable with any in-game result. If Afletana’s overdeveloped sense of propriety (not to mention the temporary vow of silence, which has turned out to be rather less temporary than I had hoped) is keeping her from making her feelings sufficiently clear, that’s no one’s fault but hers. If she gets turned down, that’s life. If not, I am as much a sucker for a Happy Ending as anyone else.
(Though who’s to say the ending will be happy? Afletana is nearing the end of her rope; she may not survive much longer. The ToEE is a cruel place, and the party just picked up a golden skull that is proving to be the cruelest part of it. I don’t want to see her die, but I don’t want to traduce her character by giving her unlimited endurance, either. The other characters can keep her going—if they try.)
I am not comfortable with making another player uncomfortable. I don’t know that I am in this case. I hope not.
Anyway, this ambiguity contributes to the oft-noted shallowness of many in-game “romances,” even in games that otherwise defy the socially-challenged-geek stereotype. It’s just plain safer not to beg this particular question.
So we get the one-night stands. And the booty-chasers. I hate those last; I really do. Their players are invariably male, and invariably they are one-note characters, existing solely to screw NPCs and any PCs they can get hold of. This kind of behavior is not what I game for; it’s partly what I game to escape. One of these days, I’ll end up DMing a game with such a character, and I will delight in giving him/her (some booty-chasing characters are female, though as I said the players are always male) syphilis. Make that Fortitude save. DC 40.
Fortunately, I have only run into one die-hard booty-chaser whose player seemed unwilling to pay attention to my discomfort with the practice. I was, I admit, instrumental in not inviting the player into our group. Booty-chasers beware: you may poison your reputation as a gamer. If you must chase booty, at least don’t do it with your first character in a particular party, as the player I am thinking of did. I can live with booty-chasing—reluctantly—as long as I understand right to my bones it’s not the only thing I will ever see from a particular player.
I would like to see more relationships of long standing in gaming, which tends to suffer from the characters-meet-in-the-local-bar style of relation formation. Certainly romantic relationships should be part of this, as should the classic character friendship-till-death relationship. I like to see characters who understand each other’s reactions, cover for each other, care about each other, pray together, talk to each other about things other than the best way to skin a dragon or the really hot bartender in the last town.
(I should mention that I have a significant bias against disposable characters. If you don’t want to play a character for a good while, why go through all the number-crunching bother of creating one? I know that not all gamers share this bias, however, and even with me it’s not universal; I happily play one-offs in which I’ve min-maxed my character as much as anyone else at table.)
The thing is, though, romance and friendship aren’t the only long-standing relationships we have in life. Why should our characters be any different? Mentoring and teacher-student relationships, for example, I don’t see nearly enough of. Shams and Rahim had wonderful long talks as she tried to civilize him. Rat is the other side of that coin; she all but worships another character in that campaign, with no question whatever of sex. (She is a halfling and he is a lizardman—it would only lead to grief, I’m sure. Anyway, Rat has… issues when it comes to sex; and it may, if another player chooses to foreground his halfling NPC.)
So as important as questions of romance and sex are for serious gamers, I prefer to regard them as one aspect of the larger question of establishing and developing long-standing relationships among characters.
I’m not as anti-romance as I suspect I’m coming across. Juskinah and Shams just embarked on a romantic relationship that I hope will prove long-term. Anything can happen, though, in games as in life, so I could always be wrong about their prospects for a Happy Ending.
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