Character Romance tracker

What are your thoughts on turning character interactions into a point system. Kind of like negative and positive interactions make two characters have a further likelihood of falling in love or becoming enemies. This would keep track of character interactions and make sure a writer doesn't suddenly make a character save another for example even though they've had nothing but negative interactions. This would also apply for love, making one character more likely to do something for a character they specifically like.

 

I have seen too many players have their characters immediately fall for each other, I too am guilty of it, though it usually happens after chatting on discord or via PMs, though I would like to know more about this points system you propose.

 

This sounds like it could be a very fun game mechanic, but I'm curious about how the logistics would work out. "Romance" is already such a hard thing to quantify. For example, what about a pair of characters who start off having largely negative reactions to each other, but then after some turning point in their relationship they realize that they really do care about each other?

If you've ever played Dragon Age 2, I think that would be a good romance system to look at. In that one, the game has Rivalry points and Friendship points. The tracker starts out neural, in the middle of the scale, and as long as you end up far enough in either direction you can successfully complete the romance.

 

In the past it wasn't a point system, but an forum topic version on another site / not my own thing. It was a little annoying to keep up with it, and only could be in one pairing / roleplay 'cause of it for that character. I'm one for having options to have same character in more then one thing.

Just saying something from experience here.

 

It's an interesting idea. Romance does seem to crop up a lot, and rather quickly in games all too often it seems. And then if the players have a falling out, I've often lost two characters as a result because they have tied their characters SO close together that it doesn't make sense for one to stay behind and the other move on to whatever... Fortunately I usually don't lose the writer, just the characters - which were often hyper-focused on the romance aspects anyway.

It is an interesting thought though to have some sort of system in place so people could see just how compatible their characters are at any given point and time and what progression for the relationship would make sense for what they want to accomplish. (I am not always sure that the latter part is usually a consideration, but that might be a whole different topic :P )

 

Huh, that's an interesting idea but it... it sure does sound unpleasant to me as a player. I'm not sure who this benefits--if it's fun for me and the person I'm writing the romance with to have them fall in love at the speed of RP, who does it hurt? I feel like being required to have my character interact X amount of times with someone else in order to write a romance plot would really turn me off. Maybe if there were other mechanics that made this feel more natural? (I can't think of what that would be, but I'm sure it's been done in some storygame-type TTRPG or another.) As a feature by itself though it seems really odd.

 

I think it would always be something that has a case-by-case component to it. Especially since you will always have those interesting pairings that by most criteria wouldn't seem to work out but do, and that is what makes them interesting. But I think having something like this could be another useful tool for people to use for character development to help flesh things out and provide the reasoning behind why a character does something or doesn't.

 

As a tool that's optional and available it makes a lot of sense to me! Some people do like that sort of thing. (I'm not one of them, mind, but I can see how this would appeal.) I think I read the OP as like a required mechanic, which may just be me reading into it! I also did just leave a site that had some like, light development tracking mechanics that I feel like didn't strongly impact actual writing... Which was new for me somehow, and a valuable experience to teach me that I just do not care for that sort of thing. So my own personal bias here, haha.