Forums » Help » Romance affiliation without consent

I have this romance slowly developing with another players character and today they finally marked my character as having entered a romance with them. For the record thats perfectly fine with me, they are in fact entering a romance. The issue I had was when they marked their character as entering a romance with mine, there was no question about it on my side....it simply appeared as a notification that their character and mind had entered a romance together.

Again, this instance is something I'd agree to, but it was very jarring to note there was no option for me to decline. Nor is there a way short of requesting a mod to reverse this that I've noticed.

What worries me is that if this is the case, then anyone can enter a romance with my characters (or anyone elses) without permission or presumably even speaking to them and there is not an option to decline or alter the choice made. There's several reasons I think this is actually kind of a scary situation.

Is this a bug? Even my partner who entered the romance with my character was shocked by the fact there was no request, and seemed concerned by the notion as well. If it is I'll submit a bug report, if not I will probably post this in suggestions because I'm not comfortable with the idea of anyone being able to essentially forcefully enter a romance with another character.

For context, this is the first romance any of my characters have entered into.

I might be able to clarify a bit about the relationship connections. I hope this is helpful when a character clicks another character and notes it as anything (Friendship or Romance) that's the specific character's feelings.

For example, I have two characters in an RP I'm in. One likes the other character. The other character loathes the first. So for the one, it shows as a friendship. For the other, it shows as an enemy.

In the case of a romance, it only reciprocates that both characters are in a romance when both have hit the romance option, and it will declare you mutually are in a romance. You can also rename those features by choosing different names.

I highly recommend these articles from RPR and I have them bookmarked for when I need them.

The character connections article explains the basic how-to of what to do.
The character widgets article explains what widgets there are available.

I truly hope this helps! I use the connections all the time and I really hope this is useful.

Hey Voldarian_Empire,

The request for confirmation occurs when the characters first establish a connection. Once that is confirmed, it can be edited, from acquantince to friend or friend to enemy or even into a romance. In the past, I did require confirmation for every single change in a relationship, even an already existing one, but people hated it and I eventually changed it to not needing confirmation after years of people lobbying me to do so.

Presumably, your two characters already had some sort of friendship connection, and your friend just edited the existing connection. If they were a random person who had never spoken to you, you would have had to confirm their ability to form a relationship of any kind with your characters first.

Relationships can also be uneven; character A could have romantic feelings toward character B, and character B is not "forced" to reciprocate them in any way.

If you do have a character relationship that someone edits into a romance and you feel that that is harassment, you have a wide range of options for removing that connection, up to and including blocking the person.

I agree with you, and don't think it's a bug.

While you have to ping back for it to be on both characters, the one-sided non-refusable option is still... weird. Being able to make imbalanced pairs with a friend's characters is fun (the friend/enemy example above, delusional affection/crushy clinginess, etc), but it should definitely be with permission if the characters don't already have a connection. I think it would be nice to have an option, either account wide or on characters, to make it so you can have to agree to a character connection.

Between the uncomfortableness of OOC-non-consentual declarations of IC romance and the possibility of... certain types of characters wandering around and randomly declaring people their enemies, I agree it might be good to be able to have the option of controlling that better.

Edit: had not seen Kim's reply before posting this. This makes sense now. ^v^ Making it toggleable or controllable might still make sense, but I have no idea how painful that may be to implement.

Hmmm... it appears it’s the ‘notification’ part that has generated this thread? Personally I like the way the character relationship widget works, especially with only having the need for the initial connection approval.

I suppose you could ‘break the tie’ completely or just from your side if you don’t feel like being connected to the other character, but how a character ‘feels’ about another after they connect should be left up to the individual character.

I did have some characters request a ‘romance’ with some of mine a while back and thought it ‘cute’, but the player got upset at one when my character returned an ‘acquaintance’ connection instead of reciprocating the ‘romance’ and immediately ended the RP and blocked me. Some people really take this way too seriously.

@Kim

Thank you for taking the time to reply to this. The character pair in question was something that started over a year ago now and I didn't realize until after this was posted that they were originally acquaintances, then friends. The notion someone could simply label a romance was unsettling, but the idea of upgrading an existing one makes sense. This is basically the first time I've used character connections so I didn't realize this was the case.

As for one sided romance, I do agree it makes sense to have a character with romantic feelings for another character who doesn't necessarily return said feelings. I would argue, however, in that case the wording could be a bit more clear. Currently it said with my experience my partners character 'entered a romance' with mine, which if my character didn't return those feelings would be an inaccurate description of the relationship. I think unless that ever changes I'll probably not use one sided romance connections.

Regardless, knowing they need permission to enter a relationship, and that it can be removed if I chose, makes me feel a million times better about this. Sorry I may have jumped the gun on this but I hope you all can understand I was coming from a place of concern.

Good point! That's not the best way to phrase it. I'm updating it now.