Relationships in Gateways

Recently, some larps have attempted to combine romance/rival/friendship (such as my Falling in Love and Tombstone’s Pardners) rules into a single coherent system. 

I’ve found these a bit uneven, but I thought Gateways’ version was the best so far. Here’s how it worked.

Relationships

The relationship rules covered allies, rivals and falling in love. The mechanics were optional, so that if you felt that, through roleplaying, your relationship with another character was developing, you could short-circuit the bookkeeping and simply give that character a relationship card.

Relationship cards

Each character had several relationship cards. They all worked the same, and they looked like this:

Avery Grayson’s Ally/Romance/Rival (pick one): You may Assist or Hinder the named character.  Permanent. No more than three relationship cards (one of each type – ally/romance/rival) may affect any single skill check.

You gave your card to your ally/rival/love interest, and they could then use it to assist or hinder you in skill checks. They didn’t need to have a relevant skill, but just being present helped (or hindered).

(I explain Gateways’ skills and task resolution system here.)

One thing I really liked about the relationship cards was how seamlessly they fit into the task-resolution system. And as a writer, I appreciated that Gateways’ authors hadn’t needed to invent unique heart abilities for each character, which were a feature in other games. With 79 players, that would have been a lot of rival/ally/romance abilities!

Paramount relationships

Characters also had paramount relationship cards – for the single most important person in your universe. (Maybe “the one”, or a ride-or-die ally, or perhaps even your nemesis.)

Your paramount relationship card looked like this:

Avery Grayson’s Ally/Romance/Rival (pick one): You may Assist or Hinder the named character. When you do, draw from the SAME deck. Permanent. No more than three relationship cards (one of each type – ally/romance/rival) may affect any single skill check)

So this ability is more powerful than a regular Assist or Hinder, as drawing from the same deck gives you a better chance of drawing a higher card.

Developing a relationship

So while I suspect a lot of relationships were cemented through roleplaying, how did the actual mechanic work? Well, it was very similar to the system I outlined in Writing Freeform Larps (and refined here).

The inside back cover of each character booklet included a table which looked like this:

Character	Romance	Ally	Rival
Character 1		III
Character 2	II
Character 3	IIII
Character 4			II
Example indicators of an ally/romance/rival relationship: Give me something I value / Take something I value from me Put yourself at risk to assist/defend (or to hinder/attack) me Go to a social event with me Help me accomplish something important to me Tell me something secret about yourself Discover we have a common/analogous history or trauma Do something important to assist/harm someone I care about Make me laugh, cry, or share some other emotional event Share a romantic and/or sexual encounter with me Discover we have ‘chemistry’ (Romance only – you have chemistry if you both draw the same number from a Skill Deck. Return the card and shuffle after the first draw.) Tell me how important I have become to you (ie, give me a relationship Ability card)

Notes

• The suggested target number was five, so if someone ticked off five indicators, you would give them a relationship card.
• There were specific rules for some aliens as they couldn’t form relationships.

Changing Relationships

And if you felt your relationship had changed, you could reclaim your relationship card (or change it). I have no idea if anyone did this – I didn’t.

What didn’t work

So for me, the rivalry ability card didn’t really work. Identifying a rival was fine, but I’m not sure how effective the ability card was, as I can’t see it being used much.

For example, I developed a rival during the game (although I forgot to give them a rival card – probably because this was new to me), but he was never present when I made skill checks, and vice versa. So while the rivalry card was nice to roleplay, it had no mechanical effect (for me, at least).

Mind you, I’m not sure what would make a rival ability actually work. Maybe that’s work in progress!