Domi

Still in act II. I like modding more than playing and since the time is limited... Yeah. Good game though.

That would be my anti-romance. I want to see the relationship developing and be much more interesting than "I love you, let's sleep together," plus romantic epilogue. In this cases, I generally just chose not to say "I love you" and sleep with the character, and that's what I did with Casavir, because it was simply uninteresting. I love a romance to be a mini-game - not a very tough one, mind, but a mini-game where everything about your character affects which way the relationship goes - towards friendship, or towards love. And, of course, I want player to have a reasonable degree of control over fixing screw-ups via the Player-initiated options. But that's just me. I just love to have the romantic element in my games, along with the friendship element. I want to have my heroines to have a sweeping love stories to match the tale of their heroic endeavours on the Main Story Line front.

First of all I also register my vote for bringing in the writer who *wants* and *enjoys* writing the romances for writing the romances (hey, if I wrote/coded about 10 now for three different games for free, on my own time, there are gotta be people who'd do it for money). Secondly, I think no matter what bullets you will include up there it's a flawed way of thinking. Because a romance in a CRPG is going to be good not because it follows a "model", but because it is a story within the story, and an interesting story. Both the NPC and the relationship has to be discovered. And that means a LOT of content, not one dialogue where they kissed and made (or not made) out. I know that the voice-over is the new thing that everyone quotes when they say they can't write full-scaled romances any more, so I will express my personal opinion that voicing the first line and any emotional lines only is perfectly fine. So, all hail interesting and long romances that can truly become the material for bards' songs! (That's my personal measure of whether I should or should not incude a romance with that character - will it make for a good bard's song or not)