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Warming up to the Romance Trilogy: A Review
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7771952" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Romance is a very difficult topic to handle in a table top RPG, owing to the intimacy of the setting and the subject intersecting in some uncomfortable manners. An obvious example of the problem comes to mind when contemplating the difference the term 'role-playing' connotes when isolated to the separate spheres. It's also really easy to blur the lines between reality and game if romance becomes the focus of it rather than something implied but not explored. I've never had a game that didn't feature some sort of attachment between sexual partners, or just simply sex (off stage). But at best such play seemed to explore infatuation rather than anything like romance, in part because it's impossible to make an NPC real enough of a person to serve as an object of any higher emotion than infatuation. And I've never seen two PC's want to explore romance as a topic between them, and all the cases I've heard of involved actual romantic feelings between the two players.</p><p></p><p>I can't imagine playing 'Breaking the Ice' with someone I wasn't at least potentially romantically involved with, for example, and I have hard time imagining playing it as a character that wasn't a self-surrogate. And while I can imagine making a game of flirtation I'm not sure that such a game offers some experience diverse enough from actual flirtation to make me want to pursue it as a separate activity.</p><p></p><p>Is anyone who has played these sort of games able to address these concerns?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7771952, member: 4937"] Romance is a very difficult topic to handle in a table top RPG, owing to the intimacy of the setting and the subject intersecting in some uncomfortable manners. An obvious example of the problem comes to mind when contemplating the difference the term 'role-playing' connotes when isolated to the separate spheres. It's also really easy to blur the lines between reality and game if romance becomes the focus of it rather than something implied but not explored. I've never had a game that didn't feature some sort of attachment between sexual partners, or just simply sex (off stage). But at best such play seemed to explore infatuation rather than anything like romance, in part because it's impossible to make an NPC real enough of a person to serve as an object of any higher emotion than infatuation. And I've never seen two PC's want to explore romance as a topic between them, and all the cases I've heard of involved actual romantic feelings between the two players. I can't imagine playing 'Breaking the Ice' with someone I wasn't at least potentially romantically involved with, for example, and I have hard time imagining playing it as a character that wasn't a self-surrogate. And while I can imagine making a game of flirtation I'm not sure that such a game offers some experience diverse enough from actual flirtation to make me want to pursue it as a separate activity. Is anyone who has played these sort of games able to address these concerns? [/QUOTE]
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