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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5296317" data-attributes="member: 42582">This fits with my experience. In the longest running 2nd ed AD&D campaign I played in, most of the interest for me was in the personal relationships between PCs in the party - my PC's romance with one of them, and his fellow warrior friendship with another, and our shared annoyance at yet another, who was the "prophesied one" in the GM's story.A good part of what drove this was that PC interactions and interrelationships were a place where we, as players, could have control over the game, whereas as far as the NPCs and external environment went it was pretty railroady.In Rolemaster games that I've GMed romances and flirtation have been pretty common, but always between PCs and NPCs rather than between PCs. Because Rolemaster (at least in its more full-blown forms) takes a "totality" approach to character building, in the sense that the character sheet is a total description of the PC, it has a range of social skills including Etiquette, Seduction etc from which one can get a pretty good picture of a PC's personality (for example, a PC whose only social skills are Duping and Lie Perception is probably not a very appealing person to hang out with - those skill and nothing more strongly suggest a manipulative user). So when romance and fliration come up, there is a bit of a mechanical peg on which to hang the resolution. And in one game, a player had his PC develop skill ranks in Seduction in order to try and consolidate a budding romance (Rolemaster has a type of siloing aspect to skill development, so that this sort of thing doesn't purge the adventuring effectiveness of the PC).I'm therefore very comfortable to say that one can be roleplaying romance, or other social dynamics, and still be playing Rolemaster. But Rolemaster is not so different in this respect form D&D that I'd say if you're doing it in D&D you're no longer playing D&D. This is especially so when it is going on between party members, as in the 2nd ed game I mentioned above - because traditionally social interactions between party members in D&D have never been governed by action resolution mechanics unless magic has been used.This isn't true when it comes to PCs interrelationships - the rule is that (absent Charm Person spells or Philtres of Love) players are free to specify how their PCs feel about one another.And even when it comes to PCs interacting with NPCs, there is Charisma, reaction rolls etc (as Barastrondo, I think, noted upthread).Where the outcome of the romance constituted the result of an encounter (rather than simply something in respect of which the GM should say "yes") - let's say an attempt to woo an NPC who is on the rival team, but whom the PC is persuaded has a spark of good in him/her just waiting to be rekindled - then a skill challenge would be the obvious way to handle it.I don't think the DMG or DMG2 give examples of this sort for skill challenges, but it could be pretty easily extrapolated. And Robin Laws gives an example of courtship as an extended challenge in the original Hero Wars game - a D&D GM who drew on that to run the romance skill challenge in a 4e game would still be playing 4e, I think (especially given that Robin Laws has incorporated big chunks of HeroWars/Quest into D&D via his chapters in the DMG2).</blockquote>

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