For today I wanted to talk about an epiphany I had while my wife and I were playing a game: almost no player characters are married! The character I was playing at the time was a 30 year old respected knight and my wife quite accurately pointed out that it was absurd for my character not to be married or widowed. I laughed and said that my character was married to his work but it drew my attention to the rather glaring discrepancy that players and DMs hardly ever give characters families or include families in story arcs.
What I realized is that just like in real life a spouse and a family limits a characters options and freedom of action. Especially at the beginning of a campaign players do not want to be tied to an area or have dependents because they do not know what the campaign will require of them. Also many young gamers do not include families or spouses in their backstories because they are not at the stage of life where that thought would pop into their heads. Furthermore, the lack of spouse and family for PCs brought my attention to the unrealistic nature of most fantasy parties. A bunch of completely unattached people happen to meet and go out to save the world.
So, should your character be married? Not necessarily, but you should ask yourself some questions like: How old is my character? How highly placed in society am I? Do I have property or title to pass on? Would having a family enrich my character’s personality or backstory? These and many other good questions for character persona and backstory generation can be found here and here.
The answers to these questions can help you decide if you should have an in game family. After deciding whether or not to have a family it’s ultimately up to you and the DM to work out how prominent your family will be in the story. For example, in a recent game a party member who was a low ranking noble took the party out of the main arc to rescue his family and his serfs during an invasion. Had he not had a family that entire story arc might never have occurred. Remember that backstory is meaningless unless it has in game ramifications.
Marriage is a big commitment, so don’t take it lightly in real life or at the table.
- Gestalt Gamer (Dan)
I think the only time I have ever had married characters in a game of mine was back in junior high. (don’t know why we were up for it then)
But as you say, being married puts a lot of limitations on a person. Right now I am in a college program and most of my classmates are 15 or more years younger than me. When we talk about what we are going to do when we are finished, well, I really like the sounds of some of the things they have planned, but I have a wife and a kid who will have had to deal with my focus being on school and our finances being limited for two years by the time this is over. I can’t subject them to even longer and I sure as heck am not going to uproot my family to follow up this program with another in another part of the country.
A married character could be interesting, but to do it properly would require a lot of questions be answered. As you say – it shouldn’t be entered lightly.
I agree with you. Being married now also makes me realize how ripe some of that can be for roleplay. A knight drawn away from his family because of his duty. Or a simple man/woman drawn away from their home in order to do what is necessary to protect it. One of the things I didn’t have time to talk about is the positives that having a married character can add. For example how much more weighted is the defeat of evil to a father and husband than to a wandering soldier?
In one Eberron campaign, we had two characters get married. My changeling wizard Xiv and the lionman (catfolk) warrior Kohan. Since we were quite experienced when we wed, we were already quite wealthy and well known. (alliteration unintentional) We had quite an interesting turnout out our wedding (everything from Fey to Angels to Sphinx to Rakshasa), and the events led to an interesting series of adventures.
In any setting, marriage with a non-adventurer leaves the spouse and children vulnerable. While that can be good for story, a lot of players are uncomfortable with that vunerability. In a lot of cases it comes from experiences with bad GM’s.
Another point to this is that for many people roleplaying a romantic relationship is not as satisfying as a real relationship. I’ve only had a couple of characters where the chemistry really came through and swept me away. I know others who have never had that visceral feeling during roleplay. I suspect some people have it all the time. Without that feeling, roleplaying a romance seems like playing house.
Lastly, time spent roleplaying with the wife and kids breaks up the group flow. Unless you only have two players who are playing the marriage out with themselves, then this splits the party and puts the players in the spotlight quite a bit. I don’t think this is always a bad thing, but if not moderated it can cause group problems.
Generally from what I have seen, marriage is usually something that happens when characters are considering retired from active adventuring. Even adventures like to have a chance to sit around a hearth and raise a family . . . and occasionally get called out to help their friends and defend their homes.
Your character kills people, then he plunders their corpses. That is a big deal and not something that should be taken lightly. Have you tried it yourself?
What we are doing is roleplaying and it matters for as much as we put into it. The same thing goes for comics, movies and books. Killing and marriages matters in these medias as much, as we put into it. No more, no less. The same thing applies to marriages in games. I have played plenty of games with characters being married. I have done this during high school, when no one was in a long term relationship and I am doing it now with people being married, divorced, and in long term or short term relationships. It only matters for as much as you put into it in the fiction.
In one campaign love, marriage and arranged marriages play a big role, but we don’t put much into it. You can read about it here: http://mortengreis.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/love-devious-plots-and-complicated-schemes/
That is one of my D&D-campaigns. In the other we only have vague references to dating, boy- and girlfriends and stuff like that. There is much room for it, but it does play a role between the characters.
In my Call of Cthulhu – Delta Green-campaign it matters a lot, because it’s their relations to normal humans unaware of the cosmic horrors, that are the gauge for how far from normalcy the characters are. One plays a single dad with three teen daughters, another plays a perpetual single struggling to reach out to her neighbor, and a third plays a carefree lover boy. All are the characters harmed through their encounters with the Cthulhu Mythos, and that is what makes it such a powerful experience roleplaying as the game shifts between them battling cosmic horrors and relating to other people – in other words the game is dependent on what we put into it. The same applies to in game marriages: Just as your character may be a killer, a looter and a war veteran, he may be married and a parent.
The Delta Green-thing is described here: http://mortengreis.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/delta-green-relation-scenes-getting-to-know-your-investigator/
Introduce marriage to the game, and invest in it according to what is desired. If it not about being married, having children and dividing time between plundering dungeons and raising kids, don’t spend much time on it and vice versa. Talk to the GM about it, do you want the marriage-aspect to a passive element in the back story, do you want to play encounters with you spouse in between adventures or can the adventures include trouble with the family? For instance in my D&D-campaign spouses are often involved directly in the intrigues, but in the Call of Cthulhu-campaign, I as the GM do not interfere at all, and all scenes (and they are played) are played in between missions solely by the players (They take turns playing each others’ relations).
The closest I have ever come being in a game with an in-game family was a D&D 3.5 campaign where Joseph (a PC) was engaged to a woman he met while in the circus. But instead of marrying her, he ran away and joined our adventuring party.
Eventually, the circus crossed paths with our party and Joseph had a good old shotgun wedding! For totally unrelated reasons, the party dissolved shortly after that, so I have no idea how the whole situation would have played out. Though, the player did say that had the game continued, Joseph would have likely run off again.