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Message: <blockquote data-quote="demiurge1138" data-source="post: 2718992" data-attributes="member: 7451">Love in D&D. This sounds like time to share a few anecdotes. The problem with love in D&D is that it's a sensitive subject, especially when it comes to players. A DM, after all, can just say that the rescued princess falls in love with the knight who rescued her, and the players can accept this fairly easily. After all, the DM wears all the hats at the table and plays all of the PCs - they know he doesn't really want to kill them when he's playing the villains, so they know likewise he doesn't really love them when he's playing a romantic interest. But a player only plays one role - his or her character. The emotions of the character and the player can easily become blurred.This is what happened in my longest brush with romance as a player - lines were crossed between in character and out of character. What happened was, a game had started up, and one of the players, by the second session, had convinced his girlfriend to join the group (she had wanted to play anyway - he really more encouraged her than anything else). He was playing a halfling druid named Samwise (yes, yes, it gets worse), so her character was a halfling bard named Rosie (I told you it got worse). She was introduced to the party, and their characters began flirting. It was obvious at this point that an in game romance was going to blossom as well as an out of game one.I, however, was determined to not let it get off that easy. Maybe I was annoyed with how Samwise's player was acting (really over-the-top, very distracting from the game), maybe I wanted to get them to actually think about roleplaying this more than "of course they should get together! They're both halflings, and we're dating!". So my character, Thanatos the warlock, takes Sam aside and mentions that he's taking things a bit fast. Back off, spend more time wooing and less on animal passions, ask her father for permission to wed, that sort of thing. And the wooing was better, and the DM began rambling maliciously about inbred cannibal halfling fathers or whatever. That would have been fun.But then real life intervened. The people playing Sam and Rosie broke up. And Sam and Rosie themselves drifted apart. Never mind the fact that the characters were fairly close already, and mentions of their engagement and the proper gifts for such were muttered by Sam and Thanatos when the rest of the party wasn't paying attention. Rosie was all of a sudden more interested in spending time with Thanatos. Never mind the fact that he was twice her size. The two of them grew close. What worried me was that after a game, she thanked me for helping her through her rough breakup. D&D is many things, but therapy? It was starting to get a bit uncomfortable for me.What made it worse, though, was another of our players. He rarely attended sessions, due to the constant demands of his own overbearing girlfriend, but it was all for the best, because he was overbearing and obnoxious. He was also a constant flirt, and decided to take the opportunity to hit on the emotionally vulnerable Rosie. And her player. Simultaneously. Creepy, "Phantom of the Opera"-esque mentor sort of thing Needless to say, both I and Thanatos put our feet down on that one. That is to say, my character put his foot down to stop his leering advances, since he was clearly only interested in her sexually (I know not whether to say "character" for either of their cases, sadly enough), which is just wrong for a half-elf and a halfling.Fortunately for my sanity and comfort levels, he stopped attending sessions with any regularity shortly after that. And once the overbearing lout was gone, the closeness resumed - still rather uncomfortable, but I could handle it. By the time that game ended, it was an unspoken understanding between the two of us that our characters had reached something not unlike love. Which worked, because a purely platonic relationship was firmly established out of game. The boundaries between the real world and the game world were affirmed and all was well, despite some thinning of the fourth wall along the way.Unfortunate coda to that story is that the overbearing jackass is now currently involved with poor Rosie's player, and I just know that he manipulated her emotionally, just like he did in game. Leaves me feeling icky. Very icky.Demiurge outPS: I still am fond of EN Bestiaries.</blockquote>

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