Loading the Game With Relationships

Our question today comes from Josh Jordan, an all-around great guy with a podcast, an indie publishing company, and who knows what else. He wanted to know about relationship maps and other ways of front-loading a game with relationship drama.

I can think of a couple of ways to build relationship drama into an RPG. These ideas aren’t my own; they come from games that far smarter designers than me have come up with. Let’s check ‘em out, shall we?

The first method is to ask questions.

The second method is very similar to the first, but uses a mad-lib-style sentence. This works really nicely and builds off of the character classes. For example, one of the Cleric’s bonds is

I am working on converting ___ to my faith.

This gives you a way to connect the characters in a way that reinforces the class.