Exchange of Realities

Romance is practically a fact about human nature, and quite possibly one of the most popular plot elements the writing world has ever seen. It is also one of the hardest to do well, and one of the likeliest to annoy people in the process. In a game, some of the likeliest people to be annoyed by how a PC/NPC romance is handled are the other players. I’m not talking about the GM’s Jealous Significant Other effect, though that one’s trouble as it is. There are plenty of other ways to get on the group’s nerves. Note: The following are particularly annoying when done by a PC, particularly in a face to face game due to the screen time they absorb.

• All One Characterization. For some reason, large numbers of RPG couples come out looking like a badly written Hallmark commercial. All this “I love you!” “I love you more!” or an inability to maintain eye contact with anyone else that rapidly descends into poetry doesn’t do much beyond giving the rest of the group sugar-sickness. If you’re going to be couple-y, at least do so in a way we haven’t all seen before; maybe you’ll earn a little extra RP XP instead of just having the entire table yelling “Get a room!” at you.
• Obsession. One character gets so hung up on another character that the latter is all he ever thinks about, all he ever talks about, the impetus of everything he does, the person he’ll always insist on bringing in for help whether she’s appropriate to the situation or not… you get the idea. You can practically see the group reaching for cluebats as the character’s eyes mist over.
• Potentially dangerous obsession. I find myself rolling my eyes anytime a character going into a mission that could be described as dangerous at best and suicidal at worst starts mooncalfing over how much he wishes his love interest were present. Yes, there are circumstances in which this would be appropriate—hopelessly outnumbered and the LI is a force of nature on the battlefield, captured but the LI could mount a rescue easily—but there are situations to which bringing the love interest is asking for trouble.
• Exclusion of the other characters (“What am I, chopped liver?”). Say you’ve got a really cohesive group. They’ve fought together, saved each other from near-death experiences, pulled through situations they shouldn’t have been able to survive through trust and teamwork alone, and in general have learned to depend on each other. Then one meets a love interest, and suddenly Everything’s Different. Yes, this can be dramatically enjoyable, but it also makes for dramatic changes to the overall theme—not so much of a good thing. (Particularly not when at least one member of the group is in it for the teamwork.) And then there’s what happens when the love interest is technically an enemy of one or more of the PCs—the types of narrative gymnastics a resolution for that will take can get downright absurd.
• Exclusion by plot. This one’s more a GM issue than anything, and more an out of character concern than an in-character concern, but it’s important to take into account. When you’ve got a group where you know people are interested in romances, that’s just lovely, but if everyone in the group is getting cheerfully paired off, and the world is alive with vows of undying affection from PC and NPC alike, but there’s one character sitting apart from it all trying to figure out what just happened, and that character is played by one of the people who would be interested in a romantic subplot—then you have a problem. (After all, one single character consistently missing out on much of anything is a rather bad situation.) And if all the screen time is going to romantic subplots, and there are people who do not have them and are not involved in the existing ones, they will be justifiably irritated whether they wanted one or not.

Even one of these steps can cause raised hackles at a game table; multiples at once are likelier to result in obvious irritation or even minor rifts. Be careful!