Things in Real Life are often driven by needs/threats to your family (or girl friend) are there game mechanics that account for this?

I think the closest that I know of is Pendragon but what about others.
Also, why is this not common or have I just missed it all this time?
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Many narrative games have mechanics for influencing characters through friends/family/organizational ties. I generally find them to be cumbersome. In more traditional RPGs you often just roleplay it out with minimal (or no) mechanics involved.

Champions / HERO had the Dependent NPC disadvantage, this was specifically included to handle the frequent involvement of important people and lower level sidekicks* to superheros in the comics.

*Sidekicks could be an advantage or disadvantage depending on their competency.


I'm not a huge fan of the Super genre so not familiar with many games in the genre other than Champions, but it is such a common feature in comic books that I can't imagine a Supers RPG not including a way to handle it.

Sagas of the Icelanders.
Smallvile.
Pendragon.
Legacy: Life among the Ruins.

Gurps does it through the Dependent Disadvantage.  And for those that don't have some mechanic I've usually seen it done through RPing.

1E Oriental Adventures not only has birth and status tables but a scheme where a player (subject to DM approval) can map out their family tree.

The Song of Ice and Fire RPG has you essentially build your entire House before you even really start to build your PC (since you'll need to slot into the house somewhere).

In Beyond the Wall your family and childhood have a significant effect on your development, at least at character creation.

Even in D&D I'll sometimes run family centric campaigns, eg my Grand Duchy of Karameikos campaign often centred on the noble families - the ruling House Karameikos and the Vorloi especially, to whom most of the PCs were related.

Quote from: S'mon;1059105Even in D&D I'll sometimes run family centric campaigns, eg my Grand Duchy of Karameikos campaign often centred on the noble families - the ruling House Karameikos and the Vorloi especially, to whom most of the PCs were related.

But the OP was asking about mechanics for it. Do you have any special "family mechanics" or is it a roleplaying exercise?

Quote from: HappyDaze;1059107But the OP was asking about mechanics for it. Do you have any special "family mechanics" or is it a roleplaying exercise?

I used some rules for pregnancy and childbirth, which the nurse player criticised as not wholly realistic - personally I think she just didn't grasp the concept of a bunch of stuff being abstracted to one die roll.

There weren't a lot of mechanics. Family trees showed the relations; Classic D&D stat blocks & Dominion rules.

Mongoose Traveller has some family events that happen during character creation which give NPCs for use later.

Cyberpunk and Mekton both have lifepath rules that create family members for use.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1059073Many narrative games have mechanics for influencing characters through friends/family/organizational ties. I generally find them to be cumbersome. In more traditional RPGs you often just roleplay it out with minimal (or no) mechanics involved.

Or play the ever-popular homeless orphans so the GM can't use your family and friends against you.

There's a difference between family as just background or a character creation option that gets out of the way as soon as the game starts, and family as a relevant, driving factor for the actual game. It seems the OP wants the later, in which case there are few games around it seems. The ones I know of are:

Pendragon has players as medieval noble knights each managing their own family with farms, wife, children, household, etc. and these effect your character wealth, prestige, etc. The game mechanizes this through rolls for simulating productivity and seasons passing, and stats like Passions/Hates and virtue traits.

Sagas of the Icelanders has the group playing different members or roles of the same norse family - father, mother, child, godi, seidkona, huskarl, etc. and collectively managing it's activities like farming, cattle, raiding, feasting, trading, etc. The game mechanizes this through, again, productivity and seasonal rolls and also stats like Bonds and Relationships between characters, and specific social and gender expectation rules.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is about factions with different outlooks and ideologies trying to rebuild society after the apocalypse, and the families and people within each. I don't know this one well emough to describe, but it seems your faction and family are constant factors driving the game. There's an official supplement for it, Generation Ship, that carries the struggle to a huge colony ship adrift in space.

RuneQuest has a whole section on family history in Chargen, so takes family members very seriously. It also has various relationships that provide game mechanics for "What would my PC think about having a family member kidnapped?" and some cultures have Clans and family as a very oimportant part of the game. So, an orlanthi has a strong-seated sense of clan membership and an obligatoin to hunt down anyone who kidnaps members of the clan, Ancestor-worshipping clans have a sense of belonging that would have the same effect.

In our old RQ2 campaign, one of the PCs killed his parents at an early age, so the GM wouldn't be able to use them aganst him. When we pointed out that if that's how he felt, even if the GM tried it his PC probably wouldn't care, but his attitude was "The GMs would probably force me to do something". Of course, this was before Orlanthi Kinstrife was a big part of the culture.