Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5287034" data-attributes="member: 463">Players - ONLY if you would consider your PC having a romance with an NPC, what sort of NPC might you go for?In the thread about playing cross-gender, a female GM said she thought it was harder to provide suitable romantic-interest NPCs for players playing a character of the other gender, especially males playing female PCs.I replied:I think it depends a bit on the level of player-PC identification - I generally play PCs who, while they contain aspects of my personality, are very much 'not me', whether they're axe-wielding male barbarians* or dedicated female military officers.That said, I don't have much experience as a player of playing a romance with a female PC. I remember one time playing 'Midnight' with a female GM my very reserved female Ironborn Fighter PC Zana Than clumsily tried to court a young man she took a fancy to, giving him a gift of jewelry, but the GM didn't pick up on it - I think Zana was *too* reserved! The majority of my experience of romance subplots has been GMing female NPCs with male PCs played by male players, or in a few cases male NPCs with female players of female PCs. All have been heterosexual, I've never seen this "Male Player of Lesbian Stripper Ninja PC" thing, and I don't think I've ever seen or GM'd a Lesbian Stripper Ninja NPC either! Lemme think - for a straight male player of a female PC, with a female GM and male NPC romantic interest... I'm thinking one trick might be for the male NPC to be a "man's man", someone the male player will identify with. Think Clint Eastwood or Charlton Heston, craggy square-jawed types. Avoid the kind of Johnny Depp/Orlando Bloom type male leads who mostly appeal to women, or the Romance Novel male who is strong-but-sexy and goes all squishy for the female protagonist.That said, in the Midnight game the NPC my female PC was romantically interested in was a brave young squire of similar age to herself, and when I GM'd for female players in a Conan game they rapidly acquired downy-cheeked youths to swoon at the feet of their young female barbarian PCs, so that might be a possibility too. Also depends on how much of the romance is played out and how much is just abstracted.Thinking about it some more, I'm not sure if my first bit of advice - "Clint Eastwood or Charlton Heston, craggy square-jawed types" was right even with male players of female PCs.  I think that both male and female players of female PCs often seek to avoid romantic entanglements with an NPC perceived as more powerful than them, because they fear being deprotagonised/loss of power, like Queen Elizabeth I refusing to marry the King of Spain.  By contrast players of male PCs IME don't seem to worry much about linking up with a more powerful female NPC, perhaps because the typical fantasy world is vaguely patriarchal - the male PC typically sees it more as a potential power boost for themselves than a threat to their independence.So what I've actually seen in practice is: female PCs go for the "brave youth" type NPC, like a male Gabrielle to the PC's Xena.  Male PCs by contrast go for female NPCs accounted their equal or superior in power, like the Wizard PC IMC who romanced the higher-level female head of the Wizard's Guild.  And female LG Paladins are always very popular.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />So, I was wondering what other players' perspectives on this are - what kind of NPC would their PC consider romancing, more in terms of personality than looks, more in terms of longer term relationships, not one-night stands, and leaving aside romance purely for ulterior motives like theft from the NPC.  I'm particularly interested in what female PCs look for, whether the player is male or female.        If your response is "Ick, I would never have my PC engage in romance with anyone" then this is not your thread, thanks.  Please don't post in it.</blockquote>

Verification