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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8014248" data-attributes="member: 42582">So much this! It's why I'm a bad OSR-type referee.In my Prince Valiant game, the PCs found themselves defending a castle in Bordeaux that they had taken with the help of a peasant uprising. The Count of Toulouse arrived leading a force coming to try and relieve the castle. Ahead of him was riding his beautiful and unhappy wife, hoping to use this chance to escape from her marriage. As written up in the scenario I was adapting, she had a special ability to incite affection in one person.In classic D&D this would be analagous to a dryad's charm ability. That essentially creates a challenge - of potentially robbing the party of one of its members, perhaps even pitting that member against the others - and because a dryad is not evil it can oblige the players to try and resolve the challenge without an excess of violence.In Prince Valiant the context is entirely different. One of the PCs was in a marriage that he didn't really want to be in - he had been talked into it by his wife and her father - and so naturally I fastened on him as the one in whom affection was incited. It's not a challenge to be dealt with - its me poking and prodding at the player and his character, and because Prince Valiant is at its core pretty light-hearted it produces some rom-com style hijinks - occasinally rising to the level of melodrama - involving this PC, his wife, and the "other woman". What makes it amusing and interesting as a component of play is that it's not neutral. It's targetted, deliberate and provocative.</blockquote>

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