There’s a couple that do harlequin romance. I know there’s one about reproducing a sitcom. I feel like I’ve heard of multiple games that deliver what you’re looking for but I can’t remember any specific names. You need some way to collapse the possibility space of big events in the story (will this character rush to stop their love at the airport or decide to find a new love?) What resolution system you use is up to personal preference. I’m thinking of something like Lady Blackbird where a character would have vague backstory briefs like “lost an important friend” that the player can expand upon and calcify into something new when their character solidifies or radically changes and aspect of themselves.Ĭonflict resolution (or game resource management) will need to be keyed to the kind of stakes involved in the story. A theoretical relationship drama game would have stats for character beliefs, flaws, relationships, and perhaps “curios”. Shadowrun has stats for guns, robots, and hacking. DnD has stats for monsters, weapons, and magic. The job of the game designer is to create a system that provides metrics for character and challenges keyed to what kind of story you want to tell. Regardless of the stakes being slaying a dragon or trying to survive your first day of college, the actual drama of a story is “will this character succeed despite what’s in their way?” What’s “in their way” could be themselves (morals, flaws, beliefs) or it could be external (enemies, lack of resources, distance, danger, etc). I guess it’s the relationship drama counterpart to pastoral fantasy, kind of? Pastoral drama?Īnyway, I’m trying to figure out a way to turn it into a game that has stakes and such, because while I love the high drama of Pasiones or other drama-focused games I could use some purely positive relationship gaming as well. Now this may be a genre that’s huge and I’ve just never come across it before, but it feels very refreshing to me. Sure, there are one-off characters who are jerks, but they’re less malicious than clueless or superficial. It’s all very… benign, would be a word for it, I guess. The drama comes almost entirely from the characters’ internal conflicts: Someone is attracted to someone else and don’t know if they feel the same way, someone has an issue that prevents them from enjoying their life and they’re trying to work through it, someone is feeling insecure about something and their friends help them try to get over it. Even the ones who started out as selfish or intentionally disruptive have mellowed out or realised they have issues they need to work on. The characters - and it has a huge cast, built over many years - are nearly universally good people.
A few weeks back I got caught up on the webcomic Questionable Content and I was struck by how, well, wholesome it is, using the word in the way that was fashionable a couple of years ago.
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