How have you handled lovers for your characters? Were they other PC's, random NPC's that you met in a shadowrunner bar, joygirls/boys, or ally spirits?

Never had that happen with a character of mine, but it's something that I've always wondered about. No game I've played in has really dealt with that aspect. It might be interesting to explore - but ONLY if everyone's comfortable with it. Especially if it's with other PCs - some people might take an IC relationship the wrong way and transfer it to the real world, with uncomfortable results for both.

my main character has a wife (and kid). i play 'em.

IC romances with other PCs are rarely a good dea for the aforementioned reasons. It is very easy to take things the wrong way, especially if you're method roleplayers. Even IC romances between people who were originally in an OOC romance can cause problems. It is much easier to pull off over the internet due to the extra disconnection between players and characters that the medium provides.

NPCs are the second best choice to prevent things from getting wierd. Dead NPCs are the first.

My husband and I play in a gorup that includes one other married couple. The characters rarely interacted like that. Affairs with with NPC's. I think I gave him more grief IC than any other character.

I think we have a different definition of "weird."

"She'll always be there for me when I need her touch. Her cold, cold touch."

Sexy Losers, Shiunji's dad.

Me? I've had one character go on a date with another PC. Everything else has been in stories I wrote.

It is comforting to look back at the troll porn thread suddenly.

Look back on it? You mean it's dead?

Sexy.

~J

I've done some relationships with my players in my current campaign. Both original PC's ended up shacking up with what were at the time basically throwaway NPC's. It was all on their own initiative, and i only went along for the ride, really. One of these relationships is pretty much a mention-only at this point. the other provides a great deal more drama, though I've been trying to pull back from the relationship stuff on the whole (I've got a plot to finish).

Hehe.

Did I mention that said character is also currently in the middle of a campaign where she is being extracted by one former SO and chased by (among other) her college sweetheart?

One character in my last game (a bat shaman from Scotland) developed an interest in this one-shot NPC I threw into thier legwork, so I fleshed her out and started running her as one of his contacts. They eventually fell in love, there were some great (although somewhat cliche I suppose) "so what do you do for a living" scenes, etc. It actually turned into one of the more interesting parts of the campaign.

I've also had PC's develop relationships. It never really got "weird". Heck, one of them was a semi-secret (secret from the group) infatuation between two male characters, both played by two straight male players. No biggie. I definitely wouldn't recommend it for casual groups that don't know one another well though.

Romantic relationships are a regular part of the game in our group. We don't delve into it: "So you're out on a date with your girl, and at the end of the evening, when things are about to get heavy, your fixer calls with a job that needs to be done 'now!'"

It's more something to discuss than to portray, I guess.

In my sordid past, I had SO's in my group. Never really turned into an in-game thing. Thankfully.

I understand that romantic/sexual stuff between PCs and NPCs can make things kinda weird, as illustrated here.

BTW, Emo: why are you asking about this? Are you planning on implementing IC romance in our campaign?

Not really; I was just wondering how people handled stuff that could be REALLY REALLY awkward that seemed to be more prevalent than that awkwardness would suggest. i.e., sex with ally spirits.

Plus, I was wondering how in-depth people went into their characters. Did they invent a whole detailed life for them and their SO's? Who played their SO's? And so on.

*chuckles*

my GM loves using the "Fall in love with the NPC's" angle, with our group. One wouldnt fall for it and he lost what he had built up to a level 3 contact. Others went with it setting us up for "Queen Euphoria" and building contacts to a higher status through working with him. right now he's knocking off NPC's left and right to draw us into doing something rash and stupid, and we are somewhat allowing him to do so. I mean a frontal assault on a bug hive, thats supposed to be suicidal. on the other hand were doing things fairly smartly. I'm getting a pair of cestus weapon foci, low level but better than nothing and a couple thousand rounds of capsule rounds with insectacide and insecticide grenades as well.

The longest running campaign I was involved with featured a female PC falling in love with (and eventually pursuing a relationship with) the antagonist of the Mercurial module, Kyle Morgan. In the long run, the situation required a lot of tailoring on the part of the GM, but I rather like how the campaign turned out.

Aside from that I've seen my share of ambiguous relationships, including a freakishly strange one between one of my characters and Thunderwalker from WotC (that's Wake of the Comet for all you Magic/D&D3e+ fanboys) which mostly consisted of her, infused by the GM with plotlamium, sneaking up on him in his own house and inflicting cutscene damage ("you're not going to have me roll body?" "no, you're just unconcious") with sundry shock weapons upon his person. Oh, and then there was the fact that the character behaved as if she were bipolar. (I didn't like that GM very much...)

IC relationships aren't weird in any way, though. If the players want to pursue them, I say let them; just have the NPCs react realistically and things will turn out fine. PC-PC relationships are stranger, but up to the players *shrug*

Most of the time we do not delve into the details. Yes, most characters do have some significant other, one is curently engaged to be married, but this not given a lot of screen time, so to speak. I don't recall any PC-to-PC romances, and the PC-to-NPC tend to get away with things like "I use a part of the reward to pay for the long planned trip to France, and we spend the week relaxing (and you-know-what)."

Only in rare cases we play it in more detail. The most memorable one, I think, was a unique opportunity I, as a GM, had when an outsider played one of the NPCs. It was a dark and stormy night...

One PC, a decker, had this girlfirend. He got a little busy, you know, so he neglected her for some time. She didn't know he was a runner, he claimed he worked a legal job as a computer security specialist, so when a fixer called at an odd hour it was, you know, "Dear, it is an *emergency*, I *have* to go right now." But he did find some time to spend with her, never mind this was in the middle of a job, so after a nice evening they ended up in bed (after not seing one another for about three weeks). At about one past midnight came an *urgent* call from one of the other PCs and the decker *had* to leave...

...and this happened about 5 minutes after the decker's player's real-life girlfriend came to pay us a visit. I managed to convince her to play the character's girlfriend and let me tell you, the dialogue was *much* more amusing to watch than if I had had to play the NPC...

Although it hasn't come up often, I've written characters involved in romantic relationships before, mostly with NPC's. The most fun IC relationships, however, have been ones I didn't see coming. For instance, I recently had my character (with his naive Robin Hood streak) stumble right into the middle of a love triangle involving two other NPC's.

Essentially, my character was trying to help an elven physad break free of her Tir ties. At the same time, another NPC, a mystic adept who belongs to the Ancients, was helping out the group, and happened to be sweet on the physad NPC. However, the physad NPC fell for my character instead.

The game is still ongoing, but now I have to figure out how to let the NPC down gently as well as dodge the Paladins and defuse the ganger NPC's emotions. (My character is a Fox shaman, thus open combat = BAD).

Good stuff.

We frequently have background stuff in our games. By that, I mean not *just* dating, but other stuff... house hunting, contact szmoozing, roleplaying dinners out with the gang. We love our NPCs. Some we love more than others.

But I have to admit, the IC dating stuff is way funny!!! NPC S.O. only, though. Like the time my decker started dating this very attractive accountant, fell head-over-heels, and ended up engaged... to a Tir Prince??? The role-playing scene of the, So, Honey, I haven't been totally honest about what I do for a living... Moral of the story - always do a full background check on anyone who isn't a one-night-stand.

Heck, Fangirl, if I were you, and Emo brought in a cute NPC to flirt with, I'd probably do multiple background checks, assensing checks, hire private detectives, etc, etc.

Ah, the good old college days.

Heh, one of my PC's had a nice NPC relationship I didn't really know about until the GM said it was there.

GM: "Oh, btw, you know that girl who's making a push to be Capa of Seattle? You used to date her."

Me: "Um. Ok. Is she cute? And more importantly, did the relationship end well? Or do I have to worry about having pissed off A SEATTLE MOB FAMILY?!"

Heck of a way to get introduced to the mob war stuff.

How did that turn out? If it turned out arbitrarily badly, I hope you got a nice fat paycheck or handful of karma at the end.

Seriously, that's like playing a runner circa 2006, and one day out of the blue the GM says, "OBTW, you used to date Victoria Gotti."

Unless your gm is deliberately screwing with narrative structure for effect, that is fairly solid example of shitty gming.

Amnesia Flaw can be a bitch.

Oh... then it's very GOOD gming.

In the SR and Eberron group I rp with, we have a mix of pc and npc relationships going on. In the first SR game I'm playing in, my ex Tir assassin is currently dating the Sioux wolf shaman npc we have in the party.
I'd say that whether IC relationships in parties depend a lot on what group of roleplayers you have, and how comfortable they are with dealing with such matters. I also see no problem with players playing members of the opposite sex either- I've seen it done very very well, including instances when the roles are the opposite way round for a pair of players.

Romance and relationship are as much part of a character's life as running the shadows.

As most things, unless it's done in excessive proportions, and if everyone knows when to let things 'fade to black', there isn't really a problem.

Bye
Thanee

How do your characters meet their SO's? What's the strangest/most interesting "when we first met" story you have? I mean, I hope they're more exotic than "I met her and took her out to dinner" or "we met in a pachinko parlor and started sharing the drugs" like in Neuromancer.

haha, it occurs to me that the Connor-Bella-A'ja-Kolman love quadrangle was pretty interesting. let me see if i can hash it out from memory (none of the characters were mine):

Connor started out as an amnesiatic street sam. his first fixer was A'ja Rose. they fell for each other, had a good relationship, then broke it off for undisclosed reasons. they remain good friends, and she still fixes for him fairly often. A'ja went on to date a street doc named Kolman; Kolman and Connor hated each other at first sight, but were both caught up in the machinations of Deus that led up to Brainscan. Bella, a mage, also got caught up in the same deal, and started making eyes at Connor.

at this point, Connor regained his memory: he was a Ghost. he also had a daughter. the Ghosts found him about the same time he found them, and they offered him a great deal: he'd work for them by covertly reporting to them on the Seattle runner scene, and in excange, he'd get to see his daughter once a month or so.

so Connor, once he got back, put the moves on Bella because he needed a mage in his pocket he could trust. the stress didn't do anything good for him and Kolman, and all that came to a head in Hong Kong just before the kidnapping of Aneki. once Aneki was safe and sound in Seattle, Kolman left for parts unknown, leaving A'ja unhappily alone.

after the Arco run, Connor put together a massive strike into the Tir, kidnapping his own daughter and cutting his ties to the Tir prince who had been holding Connor's nuts over the fire. this freed Connor up to actually pursue a real relationship with Bella... which has worked out quite well, thus far. Bella is making a bumpy but steady transition from shotgun-toting combat mage to shotgun-toting combat mage and working mom.

Cool.

Kidnapping of Aneki?

Does "is planning on making a harem of Stockholm Syndromed women" count as an IC relationship?