I’ve been drawn away from MMOs over the past few days by the highly addictive Dragon Age.   As befits someone of my advanced years, I’m playing it through on ‘easy’ settings.   Unfortunately, I’m finding some characters aren’t as easy as they look.

I’d read that Dragon Age allows for sex and romance.    Of course, I immediately tried to cosy up with all the surrounding NPCs.  My character is a no-nonsense, hotblooded dwarf.   However, it turned out that it wasn’t as easy as all that.   Apparently you are only able to romance certain characters in the game (depending on the gender of your own character), and none of them are ‘easy’.  It takes time and work.   I checked  to see who I could make a play for and Alistair’s name came up.  Alistair?    He’d been following me about for a while, but I hadn’t thought of him as a sex object.  I’d been too busy to trying to flirt with Duncan or Cailan, or that bad guy that I forget the name of but really quite fancy.   (I mean my character fancies him).    Alistair was a bit of boy next door type.

Once I found that he was up for it (or at least, further up for it than any of the other characters who were available at the time), he suddenly started looking a lot more attractive.   Beggars can’t be choosers, you know.  There’s a war on.    So I set all out to get him.   I talked to him at any opportunity,  gave him the best armour and weapons I could find, chose him for every party, gave him gifts, arranged impromptu trips back to camp on the off-chance that he’d get bored with sitting at the campfire, even switched to being an archer so I could watch him flexing his muscles in battle.    Did any of it do any good?  No.  The guy is driving me nuts.   I don’t know if he’s being coy, or if he’s strangely asexual, but he doesn’t seem to notice whatever I do.   If I give him a gift, he goes all ‘Oh, really?  For ME?’ as if he hasn’t noticed that he’s the only person in my party who I give gifts to. As if he hasn’t worked out WHY I’m giving him gifts.   For goodness sake.

I keep dragging him out, thinking that the thrill of battle and the b0nd of fighting together might spark some interest in him.  I even put all my points into coercion, in the hope that I might be able to persuade him to go for a quick snog round the back of the supply cart.   But no, he’s still prissying around, pretending he hasn’t noticed I’m interested.   What do I have to do?  (I mean, what does my character have to do?)

It was never this hard in real life, I’m telling you.