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Message: <blockquote data-quote="phloog" data-source="post: 4561776" data-attributes="member: 59219">I've been DMing for just about 30 years - - you'll have to decide if that's 30 years of experience, or just one year thirty times, but here goes: Romance between NPC and PC: fine. Romance between PCs: At BEST neutral to the game, but far more likely to be disruptive or deadly to the campaign. Thoughts in no order: Even without romance, it's far too frequently a problem that one character or a pair of characters dominates the session. Romance storylines make it worse. The instant you allow a major or minor plot point to revolve around the romance between two characters, you do a disservice to all the other characters. Any game time spent on this romance is time when your game revolves around two players. In a rather freakish dynamic that probably doesn't help the reputation of gaming and gamers, PC to PC romances tend to follow the same course as real romances, and generally speaking one player will want it to end before the other does. In an equally freaky dynamic, often the in-game romance is a rather flaccid way for a shy or awkward gamer to 'have a relationship' with another person, and it's a player living vicariously through their character - messy and awful. Rather than asking in RL and risking rejection, it's seen (INCORRECTLY) as a stepping stone to something in RL. I would recommend that players not do this. If I were the DM and players felt strongly about it, then I would put the following rules in place (which, granted, might spoil much of the 'fun' of it, but it's how I feel): 1) The entire romance must be outlined in advance, with an established END point. You don't have to have the specific details, but you have to have agreement to something like "after XXXX Mallomar will be drawn into the arms of another, ending the relationship", where XXXX is measured in game sessions or some other fairly clear limit. 2) The romance cannot dominate a session. If it does, XXXX happens on an escalating timeline. 3) The DM needs to have a frank and private conversation with each player individually to make sure there are no RL motives for the call for in-game romance. Even with #3, if you end up not reading your people right as DM, you risk losing one or both players when it explodes. Last point: Romance is definitely the stuff of fantasy literature, which is why I have no problem with PC/NPC involvement...but all of us are quite capable of finding love in the real world...we can't slay dragons in the real world.</blockquote>

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