Relationship Complications
There's a really good post by Elmcat about prepping settlement-based adventures by designing neighborhood blocks and representing buildings (etc.) as people! But it also has a petty desire table that I felt like would be nice to generalize: that although people's relationships are often overdetermined by their relative positions in a social matrix (in TTRPG terms, we can refer to these as factional allegiances), it's interesting when a socially determined relationship is complicated by a personal one, whether mutual or one-sided.
To that end, I came up with a D20 table similar to Elmcat's, with just 10 results; the idea is that results [11–20] are straightforward and fully overdetermined, whereas [1–10] are complicated:
D20 | Relation |
---|---|
1 | Aspiration: X wants to be Y |
2 | Competition: X wants to outdo Y |
3 | Fear: X personally fears Y |
4 | Grudge: X feels Y wronged them |
5 | Hatred: X outright doesn’t like Y |
6 | Infatuation: X desires after Y |
7 | Jealousy: X wants something Y has |
8 | Obligation: X owes Y something |
9 | Pity: X looks down on Y |
10 | Respect: X admires Y |
I haven't used this yet, but it aligns with how I write characters/situations and how I perceive interesting relationships to function in literature. For fun, I rolled twice: [3] fear and [8] obligation. Would that be fucked up or what?
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