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Message: <blockquote data-quote="balterkn" data-source="post: 3882176" data-attributes="member: 46546">The best romances in-character in groups I've DM'ed have been those in which the Players brought the focus to the table.In one case, the party Cleric/Mage (2e) had saved an NPC and her son in an early adventure.  During an overland trek, he ended up being the PC that most often took care of her (in reality, he was the Player that remembered she was there).  A few sessions (3 or so) and 4-ish game months later, he asked about the relationship with the NPC.  Very little spotlight was given to the romance, other than what he would occasionally give (e.g. when PCs were asked what they were doing for an evening, he incorporated the NPC into the plan - "at the theater", "at dinner", or "walking the romantic bridge" mentioned in the town description).  Ultimately, the characters married.  The PC continued to develop the NPC (2e style, no class, but skill progression out to be one of the craft guildmasters of a city).  No kids before the campaign ended (about 18 months, bi-weekly; we had one female player, and 3 male players - only the one romance, the rest were more typical treasure hunters).Another case, the party cleric (2e) took on one of the NPCs in the party (2 player group, the players recruited NPCs to handle the 6-8 character expectation in many 1/2e adventures) to manage her for better game flow.  Although this was typically the "PC runs them in battle and the DM does the role-play", he was adept at having two different personalities.  Eventually, he maneuvered them to be dating and then married.  Similar to the previous case, very little spotlight was given to the relationship - most of it was given as background dressing - "oh, we're out doing some freebase climbing" or "for the state dinner, we coordinate our outfits and come as an obvious couple".  The PC ended up being a ruler of a small nation, and thus did end up having kids.  The other player wasn't interested in romancing the NPCs, but didn't have a problem with the in game romances.  We were all male players.  This campaign was about 24 months of weekly play.In both cases, talking outside the game session, the players expressed far greater detail about the relationship of the characters than what happened in session.  I was all for letting them have their rich fantasy life, so long as I didn't need to play directly in it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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