Romance Rules

[Gorgon Zee]

The way it handles romance is yet one more reason why Pendragon is easily one of the best and most interesting ROLE playing games ever made.

So, true story time. I am running the Great Pendragon Campaign, and used the rules for the three fatal beauties with Guenever, so on beholding her for the first time, you have to roll to see how deeply you fall for her. Hywel the Cruel one of my player knights, rolled a critical success and followed up with a 17 on 3d6 to end with an amor (Guenever) of 27. Which means we will automatically succeed on a passion check for her, and has a 40% chance of a critical success.

Lancellot, when he first meets Gwen, only has a 19.

So the campaign took a bit of a turn there. The player had not even slightly thought of romance as an option at that point, but leaned into it and it has been a ton of fun filling this through.

Another player carefully wooed their beloved over a period of ten years until finally marrying.

And a third did some strong questing and excellent romancing to become the "Knight of Love"

My final knight fell in love with a different player character knight, and the target of their affection retired from serious knightly activities to manage the house and bring up their kids.

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Virtually all my games have some form of romance in them. It's a staple of both the genre and of life itself! For me, it's exciting when a system has rules for it, but if not, then it's pretty easy for a GM to make up some sort of challenges or ar actions to support it. Pendragon is a great system for romance because the genre and the rules unite to make it a vital part of any campaign, and the system requires players buy in to the notion that sometimes they may not be 100% in control of what their characters want to do.

 

[Bill Zebub]

The way it handles romance is yet one more reason why Pendragon is easily one of the best and most interesting ROLE playing games ever made.

I’m missing something here. Why is “role” capitalized? Is it an acronym?

 

[GrimCo]

Quick narration and fade to black. I don't wanna role play seduction or romance scenes with my friends.

 

[Belen]

Quick narration and fade to black. I don't wanna role play seduction or romance scenes with my friends.

Yep.

This is fine but I had to kick a player once who got really involved and decided to share way too personal of details with me and my wife.

It was too freaky.

 

[GrimCo]

Yeah, narration parts are kept pretty pg 13 and details light. Romance, love and sex isn't something i, or my group, really do in our games. Even in old angst fueled teen days playing V:tM, romance part was pretty sparse and rarely if ever did we went into any kind of details or any significant role play. There were few role play scenes and they were cringe, specially since Storyteller and player had something going on IRL, so it kind of translated to NPC PC romance at the table.

 

[Blue]

For the characters whose relationships are just as indeterminate, making the determinations is one of the most popular plot points in movies. And novels. So why not RPGs? Where is D&D's romance system? Does Daggerheart include one?

This is for GMs and PCs:

• GMs, if you include romances in your games, do you use rules for it, just wing it, or something in between? What do those rules look like?
• PCs, when do you decide that your character is sweet on another? Do you have a rubric to follow?

Oh man, for me this so varies by group.

The extended group that I logged the most hours with, well over a decade of weekly D&D (AD&D then AD&D 2nd) and Champions on different nights a week, plus monthly for another decade, were soap opera. Romance, love triangles, rivalries, exes, everything. Lots of courtship and marriage, both PC+PC and PC+NPC. This was in the 80s and 90s, so it was "rules? we don't need no stinkin' rules" for anything social.

Compare with a current group, where romance just isn't on the table. Closest we've gotten in a decade of various campaigns is a current PF2r game based in a France analog with lots of intrigue where my black-sheep only-son noble has been long engaged in an arranged marriage with an NPC, and over the course of the campaign she came to respect my character, but there was never a spark of love in it. It's amusing, because at various points that group has been 100% married, and for part of that two couples were playing four of the PCs. There was a satyr in one of the campaigns who had not-on-screen relations with NPC dryads and other nature spirits, but that was all light, consensual, and temporary -- no romance plots or even more than a sentence of how they are spending an evening or some downtime.

Compared to some PbtA games that have mechanics for connections between characters, such as Threads used by Monsterhearts and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Or even Smallville with it's Session 0 connection mapping if you want to go back to older Cortex.

 

[zarionofarabel]

I’m missing something here. Why is “role” capitalized? Is it an acronym?

No. I just did it to highlight the fact that Pendragon, in my experience, is the most ROLE focused TTRPG I have encountered. There may be (and probably is) others that I have not encountered. But Pendragon has a particular focus that I do not find in any of the other systems I am familiar with. Pendragon is purpose built for the players to embody the role of a chivalrous (or pious, or romantic) knight. The mechanics really help focus the game on the role portrayal aspect of the game, with PCs being encouraged and rewarded for portraying the role of an Arthurian knight. In some ways players are even punished for not doing so. That's all I really meant. Other games feature role portrayal as well, but because the roles can vary widely, the role portrayal aspect is rarely as robustly reinforced as it is in Pendragon. Basically, if you are playing Pendragon and you are not trying to be the best Arthurian knight you can be, you really are "doing it wrong" and the mechanics back that up.

If you haven't tried Pendragon you really should! It is, IMHO, easily one of the best (probably the best) TTRPG ever made. If you want to see it in action I recommend the YT channel "tickingtimebob" who has dozens (hundreds?) of sessions of recorded Actual Plays that you can watch, and he and his players do a bloody fantastic job!

 

[pemerton]

@zarionofarabel Have you ever played Prince Valiant. I think it is Greg Stafford's true masterpiece, although I know most people put Pendragon into that box.

 

[zarionofarabel]

@zarionofarabel Have you ever played Prince Valiant. I think it is Greg Stafford's true masterpiece, although I know most people put Pendragon into that box.

I have heard of it, here, there, and everywhere. However I have never played it nor read the rules.

 

[pemerton]

I have heard of it, here, there, and everywhere. However I have never played it nor read the rules.

It's looser in campaign structure, but tighter in resolution framework, than Pendragon. As you may have gathered, I love it!

When my group plays, the general vibe is Burning Wheel-lite. (And mechanically that is much lighter.)