(Warning: the following may contain spoilers for Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight.)
As some of you may know, I’m a sucker for a good romance.
Building Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight was an educational experience for me in many ways. Being a hopeless romantic, that had to include learning how to develop an effective romance plot for a Fantasy Role-Playing Game (FRPG). There’s a lot more to this than I realized at first. And the evolution of my thoughts on this topic ended up having a significant influence on the development of the first module, as well as on my plans for the rest of the series.
A key part of the “Sanctum” saga as I originally conceived it is the love story between Robin and The Miracle Worker — whose name in the novels, it may surprise some of you to learn, is Orion. One of the first things I realized when I started trying to adapt the story for Neverwinter Nights, though, was that simply importing the characters and the plot from the novel would not create the kind of FRPG experience that I wanted. I wanted to create an interactive story, one that the player would feel fully immersed into, and in as personal a way as possible. I was comfortable specifying the player’s background, since I’ve never thought that background defines who a person really is. But dictating the player’s name, personality, gender, and so on — in short, their identity — didn’t quite sit right with me.
I know that other (and some quite successful) builders have done this, and I did consider it. But one of the things I learned from my years as a Dungeon Master is the fine line that you have to walk between defining the story on the one hand, and giving the players freedom to contribute to and feel that they are a part of it on the other. This is something that a novelist doesn’t have to consider at all, because a novel is not interactive in the way that an FRPG is. As with any other kind of storytelling, a good FRPG needs to have a strong and tightly developed plot. But that plot also has to be flexible enough to make the player feel that they are a participant, rather than a spectator, in the events they are playing. So when I started building the Sanctum modules, I reluctantly decided that the personality of one of my most beloved characters (Orion) would have to be set aside — to allow the player to put himself into the story (and into his romance) instead.
As time went by, though, I realized that I still wasn’t satisfied with this. In keeping with the plot of the novels, Sanctum I initially only had a possible romance between a male player and Robin. But women play FRPGs, too. And as I came to realize, they not only make up a sizable part of the player community, but are often some of its most discerning members — particularly when it comes to romance plots. A Bioware forum discussion that I participated in last year really brought this point home to me, along with the fact that I was ignoring many of the players who might best be able to appreciate a module romance. So even though Sanctum I was already largely written and plotted out, I resolved to try to think of a way to introduce a male romance into it as well.
(Continued in Balancing Romance Plots – Part II)