An Uncomfortable Subject

[fiat_knox]

Does the topic of love and romance crop up in your Traveller games at all? And I don't even mean the specific instance of the player characters getting involved with potential S.O.s or with NPCs.

I mean, do you have Patrons who want to book passage with their plus one because they're eloping, or something like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet only with fleets of warships?

T'other day, I saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Seven of Nine was being encouraged to try dating, sadly straight of course (it'd have been hilarious if she'd gone dating with both the Delaney twins!) and the sub plot of the episode "Someone To Watch Over Me" had been bodily lifted from Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew.

I am just curious, is all.

And yes, the subject is uncomfortable to some - hence the title. But see my Jack Harkness signature quote below as an indicator of where I stand on this subject.

 

[Kilgs]

Not in a Traveller game as I've found the "eloping couple on the run" a bit too cliche but I've had it come up in PbP games in other genre. It's a lot easier to fade to black in PbP so I've managed to avoid any odd situations.

 

[Gadrin]

Does the topic of love and romance crop up in your Traveller games at all? And I don't even mean the specific instance of the player characters getting involved with potential S.O.s or with NPCs.

I mean, do you have Patrons who want to book passage with their plus one because they're eloping, or something like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet only with fleets of warships?

T'other day, I saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Seven of Nine was being encouraged to try dating, sadly straight of course (it'd have been hilarious if she'd gone dating with both the Delaney twins!) and the sub plot of the episode "Someone To Watch Over Me" had been bodily lifted from Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew.

I am just curious, is all.

And yes, the subject is uncomfortable to some - hence the title. But see my Jack Harkness signature quote below as an indicator of where I stand on this subject.

Now wait until you get to Voyager Ep: Body and Soul you'll have a good laugh. It's a multi-faceted
look at romance

Less so with Muse which also features a multi-faceted love/like story between acquaintances.
But touches on the Fan Fiction type of relationships that outsiders to the troop dream up for
their own amusements. Muse is actually one of my favorite eps and I'm not a drama-major type
guy either.

All bets are off if you already have seen them

>

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

Does the topic of love and romance crop up in your Traveller games at all? And I don't even mean the specific instance of the player characters getting involved with potential S.O.s or with NPCs.

I mean, do you have Patrons who want to book passage with their plus one because they're eloping, or something like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet only with fleets of warships?

I've always found it hard to make room for most romantic encounters in the kinds of scenarios I run with my players. Although the group that I referee are all guys (surprise, surprise), and I do take pains to have as many female NPC's (and other not-necessarily-middle-age-white guys) as I can come in and out of their lives, most of the time there's too much "fighting for our lives" and professional/adversarial interaction with the NPC's to make room for it.

And since the crew I usually referee for include a fairly recent widower and a really recent divorcé, I'm not sure how well anything like that would fly at the moment, anyway.

T'other day, I saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Seven of Nine was being encouraged to try dating, sadly straight of course (it'd have been hilarious if she'd gone dating with both the Delaney twins!) and the sub plot of the episode "Someone To Watch Over Me" had been bodily lifted from Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew.

Well, in light of the personal trials she was going through at the time, I doubt she would have been terribly comfortable with including the Delaney twins in those particular plot developments ... :smirk:

 

[cvrader]

In the game I am currently playing in, a relationship may be blossoming between my character and an NPC. In the course of play, it turns out that a hostage rescue situation from my background, has cropped up and the hostage, now 10 years older and in my line of work has discovered how I saved her ten years ago. My character background however also noted that I was a child of a professional collective (think of a group marriage among professors of economy) while the NPC is more fractured (her parents were the ones responsible for her hostage taking...).
She has ended up signing on our trader as a security asset as well as taking some time to figure out our relationship.
I have always enjoyed the possibilities of love and romance in RPGs and as I get older, I find that it makes for more interesting stories.

 

[mike wightman]

There's a rather disturbing scenario in The Traveller Adventure concerning a world in the Aramis subsector where the locals hire offworld 'concubines' to bear their young and basically act as sex slaves.

The pcs become involved when a couple plus their 'slave' book passage back to their homeworld but the concubine wants away.

 

[fiat_knox]

There's a rather disturbing scenario in The Traveller Adventure concerning a world in the Aramis subsector where the locals hire offworld 'concubines' to bear their young and basically act as sex slaves.

The pcs become involved when a couple plus their 'slave' book passage back to their homeworld but the concubine wants away.

The somewhat monastic atmosphere surrounding Traveller does make the idea of any sort of adventure relating to romance or emotional attachment somewhat incongruous. Players tend to be more comfortable with shooting and killing things.

The detached attitude does also lead to ... less than completely mature plotlines, as well, as if there were no middle ground between complete celibacy and utter debauchery, as if a quantum excitation gap existed between the states permitting no intermediate values.

I've been pondering writing up a bunch of Patron encounters where the common theme was romance. I just didn't know if the target readership was any more mature now than I was back in t'day of Classic Traveller.

Because it seems to me that stories involving just killing things, theft and deception, murder, intrigue, warfare and crime aren't nearly as interesting unless there's an element of attachment mixed in somewhere. The women in a lot of stories tend to be at the very least as capable, and in some cases, even deadlier than, their male counterparts, and in this day and age authors of sf stories really can't keep sex and romance away from their stories any more, not like they used to be able to.

Harry Harrison kept it real with the Stainless Steel Rat, giving Jim diGriz a wife and kids to collude with him across the Galaxy, the Family d'Alembert had their romances, every Starfleet Captain from Kirk onwards had their little interludes and even the Gray Lensman found himself a mate.

Not to mention how Rose, and every female Companion, somehow managed to get to snog The Doctor at some point - and even Captain Jack Harkness enjoyed some lip action with The Doctor, not to mention with half the known Universe ...

So I was just wondering how Traveller could ever imagine itself free of this whole subject. And the answer is, it can't.

 

[Klaus]

I've always woven in the potential for romance into my plots. The Life Events from MGT often include a significant relationship from the character's past, which means the opportunity for ex-es to become plot hooks.

My current game is quite dark and noirish, and set amongst organised crime. I set the players some dark situations and let them pick the moral tone, rather than hoping for them to be just and honourable. By planning for them to be bad they've ended up being quite good. They avoided bumping off the innocent couple once they finally discovered the wife was pregnant, and when confronted them with a people trafficking operation one of the players ended up rescuing one of the slaves and now has a rather sweet fatherly relationship with her (his character lost a child in his background), which has made his life harder as he must protect her from his rivals.

The other player has struck up a more platonic friendship with the hot courier pilot, unusually for him, while he tries to fend off the unwanted advances of his crime bosses psychotic and mentally unstable daughter. I'm toying with throwing in the former love of his life, sort of Bonnie to his Clyde, who betrayed him and broke his heart all those years ago. She was actually an undercover fed, and the plot seems to be calling for her.

Another plot point is that one of their rivals in the gang is having an affair with another henchman's wife. If they can get the evidence, they can start an internecine conflict.

Then there was the celebration put on by the hiver gangster whose life they'd saved. The hiver had a full partying-hard entourage and left them to it, which ended up in some sort of sybaritic decadence, which I left to the players imagination, given that their characters couldn't remember much. They were mildy perturbed that there was another male humanoid disentangling themselves from the 'mass' the morning after....

 

[Icosahedron]

There's a lot of different folk out there, and from a referee standpoint it can be difficult to accommodate everyone. You can have people who are comfortable with graphic sex, language and violence in a game with people who have very different outlooks - especially if you're playing over the internet with players from different countries and cultures.

I've even had a situation where a PC developed by a player with one POV was taken over by another player with the opposite POV - in the middle of a bedroom scene!

Believe me, that plays havoc with your game!

All you can do is the usual referee balancing act - try to get to know your players and produce a game that makes them happy - or at least a game that doesn't make anyone unhappy - if you can.

Personally, I like my games to reflect real life, the good, the bad and the despicable. Whether a topic I include is 'disturbing' or not is a value judgement that I leave to the PCs. I'll leave things out if I know an existing player will find it offensive, but I'm afraid joining players have to decide whether a 'warts and all' game is the right one for them.

My take is a simple one - the whole point of RPGs is to live vicariously through your character and get to do things you wouldn't normally be able to do.
If you don't object to characters making war, why should you object to them making love?

 

[Whipsnade]

The somewhat monastic atmosphere surrounding Traveller does make the idea of any sort of adventure relating to romance or emotional attachment somewhat incongruous. Players tend to be more comfortable with shooting and killing things.

Fiat Knox,

I'd say it is more a case of the monasticism surrounding common in-game professions and not the game itself. People tend to confuse Mr. Miller's dislike of distasteful published Traveller adventures or campaigns with an actual prohibition in the Traveller rules.

I believe Mr. Miller's stance to be a wise one, Traveller needs to appeal to a great many people after all. What is a "mature" theme for some may be seen as purient or silly to others.

The detached attitude does also lead to ... less than completely mature plotlines...

I'd suggest the opposite actually. I've seen what passes for "mature" plotlines or scenes among most of the RPG players at FLGS in several states. While they may have thought they were being mature, adults would have another term for it.

I've been pondering writing up a bunch of Patron encounters where the common theme was romance. I just didn't know if the target readership was any more mature now than I was back in t'day of Classic Traveller.

I'd go with it, not because the target readership is more mature - if anything they're much less mature - but because they would make for good adventure seeds for GMs and groups who can use them properly instead of puriently

So I was just wondering how Traveller could ever imagine itself free of this whole subject. And the answer is, it can't.

Traveller never did imagine itself as free of the subject. It just left the subject, like so much else, up to individual GMs and their groups.

I never had a problem inserting "romance" into my campaigns because of a few simple factors. First, my players were exclusively male and so were their characters. Second, they all had lives outside of gaming, lives which included actual girlfriends. While it was fun pretending to be a pilot or combat rifleman, no one felt a great need to pretend being a boyfriend because they were already doing that in real life.

I was able to insert various hooks, plots, and pulls involving romantic entanglements but no one ever felt the need to roleplay sexual intercourse at the table. When I had players announce on shore leave they were heading for a knocking shop or visiting a woman they knew in this port, it wasn't so that they could then roleplay the encounter. They said it so the rest of the party could find them if necessary.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Trent]

Ugh. Did you have to mention "voyager", let alone describe an episode? It's the only trek series I decided to quit watching as it really quit being anything even vaguely trek related and just became "the jeri ryan show".

Thanks for the nausea, now excuse me whilst I voyage to the bathroom for some alka seltzer.

As to romance, John Varley's "Gaea" trilogy, especially the middle book, "Wizard", had some interspecies sex and romance.

In the traveller milieu, maybe local duke's son is being compelled to marry the daughter of another duke, a woman with the personality of 2 of 36d (What some of us call 7 0f 9) and would rather marry an open airlock sans spacesuit. So he's trying to escape, perhaps with a woman he actually would rather live with then jump naked into jump space.

Do the players go for the reward and return the renegade noble to a forced marriage with a woman who's personality would make a tarantula spin a noose and hang himself or help him escape the bonds of unholy matrimony?

 

[Blue Ghost]

Does the topic of love and romance crop up in your Traveller games at all? And I don't even mean the specific instance of the player characters getting involved with potential S.O.s or with NPCs.

I mean, do you have Patrons who want to book passage with their plus one because they're eloping, or something like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet only with fleets of warships?

T'other day, I saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Seven of Nine was being encouraged to try dating, sadly straight of course (it'd have been hilarious if she'd gone dating with both the Delaney twins!) and the sub plot of the episode "Someone To Watch Over Me" had been bodily lifted from Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew.

I am just curious, is all.

And yes, the subject is uncomfortable to some - hence the title. But see my Jack Harkness signature quote below as an indicator of where I stand on this subject.

This is actually one of my story plots. Oh well.

 

[sabredog]

In my current campaign the tradewar is getting amped up and the player-captain of my group decided to try to pour on the charm with one of the opposing privateers (she is listed in the Adventurers thread) to try to get her to flip to his side. Unbeknownst to the players she is currently romantically involved with another privateer captain who is fighting on the side of the players. Their involvement is a secret between the two NPC crews and the reason the two NPC crews signed up on opposing sides in the first place was to try to use the time-honored mercenary technique of making the fight look good, nobody really gets hurt, and when the money runs dry just flip a coin to decide who won and then it’s off to fleece the next two fools who want to hire mercs to fight their war.
So anyway, the player takes her out to a really expensive dinner and tries to makes his case for why she is supposedly fighting for a dishonorable employer and that she should come over to his side. In the end, since the player starts to think she’s really interested in him and flipping sides she gets to milk him for some good intel - then gives him a lecture on the social contract between a mercenary and the employer, why contracts can’t be broken because it is bad enough worrying about the employer leaving you hanging to get out of paying, but if the merc gets a rep for doing that then the merc doesn’t get to eat…yada, yada….the player started to get kind of ticked at her so she just blew him a kiss and walked off. Her crew picked her up and they laughed all the way back to their ship thinking about what an easy prize the players were going to be when they next met.
Prior to this campaign I haven’t had any romantic plots popping up of my own doing unless I was something I wrote in while using player input from players who were already married/whatever in real life, and wanted to come up with a plausible way to work that into the game, too. It always added some fun to the game by way of complicating the usual player plans, and then if I injected some NPC using that to manipulate the players it added even more interest. But there was going to be no way I would let one of my games get turned into something uncomfortable for everyone to play in. Players that started to get a little too caught up in the role-play in the more intimate aspects of the romance were told to go get a room somewhere else.

 

[ShapeShifter]

RL is the proper place for amore.

 

[saundby]

My group of players is usually pretty well split between the sexes, lately thhe ladies have the advantage of numbers. Romantic and sexual elements have always been a part of my game as they're a basic motivation of people, and the characters pretend to be something like people.

We usually don't feel it necessary to go into too deep of detail, overall we keep our play pretty light though there are times aside from the romantic elements when the drama gets pretty deep and they like me sending them to interesting places in space.

We have teens in the group as well as older folks. The older folks are all good around the younger types, the teens are mostly tagging along with their parents or are the kids of former players, only a few "strays" that come by to play (my daughter's going to be stealing them away from me for her CoC campaign pretty soon, I believe.) In general everyone's pretty clear what's going on in the situations we play, even if it's just understanding gained from TV or movies rather than life experience.

Since characters are usually transient types, the usual sorts of situations that occur around transients arise as part of the game. One-nighters, users on both sides, eyelash fluttering at customs agents and so on. The play situations are usually kept somewhere around PG-13 though the OOC comments often run to R or occasionally heavily obfuscated points beyond.

We tend to run more toward scatalogical references than sexual innuendo in our group. Jokes about who is going to clean up what are far more more common than ones about who is doing what with whom (or what, and how.)

Anyway, the situations occur, the character types are there, but beyond a certain point we don't feel it adds to the game to describe the details. And nobody takes what the characters are up to in the game too seriously.

 

[Icosahedron]

RL is the proper place for amore.

No intent or interest in a flame war, Shapeshifter, but your outlook does intrigue me.
Judging by the number of discussions around here about the importance of realism in RPGs, I really don't understand why anyone would want to remove such a central feature of humanity from a game - especially if those same people include combat.
Killing or maiming someone is far more despicable than f***ing them.

Just goes to show the weird standards of our own society I suppose - the fact that I can write 'kill' without anyone complaining, but someone would want to jump on me if I wrote 'f***' in full. :nonono:
Anyway, I'll pull back from the brink of religious politics, we don't want to go down that route, this comment is about realism in gaming.

Since characters are usually transient types, the usual sorts of situations that occur around transients arise as part of the game. One-nighters, users on both sides, eyelash fluttering at customs agents and so on. The play situations are usually kept somewhere around PG-13 though the OOC comments often run to R or occasionally heavily obfuscated points beyond.

Anyway, the situations occur, the character types are there, but beyond a certain point we don't feel it adds to the game to describe the details. And nobody takes what the characters are up to in the game too seriously.

Yeah, my take too. It's a game. If you restrict your characters to what you'd do in real life, I figure you're missing the whole point of RPGs.

I'm not too familiar with the American movie ratings, but my games (no kids AFAIK) are centred around 15-18 ratings. I'm personally ok with anything you can see on UK TV or even European TV, but I wouldn't see the point in including 'top shelf' or 'plain wrapper' material or the gore you get in Hostel or Saw (which I find more offensive than any depictions of consensual activity). OTOH I know some players don't like anything more explicit than Disney, and I try to work a comfortable compromise between realism and decency.

As you say, there comes a point when graphic descriptions add nothing to a game, and different people have different ideas about where that line should be drawn. That's cool, we each just look for a game with like-minded people and excuse ourselves if we find ourselves in a game we don't enjoy. No worries.

 

[sabredog]

No intent or interest in a flame war, Shapeshifter, but your outlook does intrigue me.
Judging by the number of discussions around here about the importance of realism in RPGs, I really don't understand why anyone would want to remove such a central feature of humanity from a game - especially if those same people include combat.
Killing or maiming someone is far more despicable than f***ing them.

I agree that it does seem pretty odd the things we find acceptable in certain situations.

Just speculating here, but maybe because in RL you don't always get the vicarious thrills of combat and saving the universe. Just like in video games you can't die, but you can get the adrenaline rush of combat, driving fast, doing things the majority of people might not ever be able to, let alone want to do in real life.

Sex (not romance, that's different) on the other hand is always more fun in real life, is something you can and want to do in real life, and I don't really want to hear the vivid descriptions I hear in the locker room at work let alone the ones from some the players I've had in the past while I'm running a game.

If I'm playing in someone else's game, rare but it has happened, then I'll play along with the group's mores and amusements but I might not play again nor participate in the evening's vicarious frolicking. It's their game, their rules, whatever.

Mind you I'm not a squeamish guy by any means and have seen, smelled, tasted, and felt and just plain experienced a lot more than the majority of any of my social circles ever have, ever wanted to, or ever will outside of a game or a graphic novel (and a lot of that I would have preferred to avoid myself as well) - but when it comes to sex -as in real life - I prefer to keep that private and think that's just for the best so I don't have to worry about upsetting anyone else in the group who might be offended, or having to hear the graphic description of what some guy is doing to a centaur with his elf.

 

[Icosahedron]

Just speculating here, but maybe because in RL you don't always get the vicarious thrills of combat and saving the universe. Just like in video games you can't die, but you can get the adrenaline rush of combat, driving fast, doing things the majority of people might not ever be able to, let alone want to do in real life.

Sex (not romance, that's different) on the other hand is always more fun in real life, is something you can and want to do in real life, and I don't really want to hear the vivid descriptions I hear in the locker room at work let alone the ones from some the players I've had in the past while I'm running a game.

Well, for some people those thrills/needs are not taken care of in real life either, in fact there's a current thread somewhere here on that very theme. Personally I think it should be a Basic Human Right, but this isn't the place for a debate about it.

Anyway, it's always good to be able to approach that stunning blonde and actually score.

I agree though, locker room detail usually doesn't add anything. That's why I tend to keep my games around the 15 rating, and 18 only if it's necessary for the plot (eg what the character actually did or didn't do might be important when the police come knocking on his door with a warrant and a picture of a dead girl...)

...having to hear the graphic description of what some guy is doing to a centaur with his elf.

LOL. You're not wrong there... Too much information. :rofl:

 

[aramis]

..., or having to hear the graphic description of what some guy is doing to a centaur with his elf.

Made the mistake of playing in an Ironwood™ game, eh?

Me, I try for PG13.

Which is why my Justifiers games failed. Some think anthropomorphics and want to do Furrysexuality, and others think of a Cewtain Wascally Wabbit...

 

[fiat_knox]

Thanks, Everyone

I'd like, at this point, to thank everyone who's particpated in this discussion.

I'm glad to see that there is a wide range of attitudes towards love and romance. This is the 21st Century, and despite the fact that official publications probably have to remain "family friendly" and leave out all the lovin', yet pack in lots of killin', though how that's "family friendly" is beyond me unless the family in question is the Dahmers, I am pleased to see that Traveller gaming groups do address the matter to some extent or another.

I guess I'm more used to the far more adult White Wolf World of Darkness setting. Coming to the PG-rated Traveller is a bit like someone stumbling out of a Texas Chicken Ranch and straight into a convent.

A survivalist convent, with lots and lots of guns ...