The Romance/Social arc will come only when you can have a good control on what to hear and what to say in-game
So, if given a Social interaction menu (similar to the combat system) I don't think there's nothing stopping you from using several communication tools to befriend or romance someone
It's really funny to think on toady researching this, but you must think of all those date sim games, different people react to different approaches differently, and if you want to get to one place or the other with them, you really gotta ''push the different buttons'' accordingly
How does this translate to DF?
Well, in the combat system, all the atacks and personal qualities you can use/are are determined by the raws on your creature, you can use modifiers to your atack, and combat's better strategy is timing. leveling up on certain skills help
They say war and love works similarly right? So let's try to draw parallels
In a romance system, certain interactions suffer buffs or nerfs in effectivity determined by your personality (think boasting done by someone with very little pride, for example), your mood in the moment of talking (this also applies to faked moods btw) with someone also affects how this person will perceive you, it's another modifier
moods also affect how you perceive other people and actions, if you have been treasoned recently, you won't really form strong new relationships soon, you'll be distrusting, etc. So in romance and social interactions timing also seems to be very important
And, the most common thing for both love and combat is that levelling up certain skill really does affect success
On the gamification of a relationship system, you gotta realize there's always people that'll find the most optimal way to do something. Min-maxing is a way, likeable or not, to play a game, as equal to others. Yeah, maybe I find breaking up with my gf to be emotionally dumb myself as to fight a FB that feeds of your hope and hapyness more effectively a little bit wretched, but that's how DF is
On the dinamism of relationships, it's also a trait of personality and experience based traits
Some people, over the course of their lives, learn the value of friendship, and as so, are impervious to the effects of relationship rust, for an example
we literally have values already, so it'd be a good idea to give them such an use
A relationship goes where two people take it. As a player, you have control on what to do and what not to do, but unless toady really makes a good npc IA, then knowing people probably it's gonna be a little bit bland and not very complex
I hope it really isn't like that, and given that the very next update talks about how people can have ulterior motivations you dont know about and act them on their own without telling anybody, I think we can really expect relationships to be complex and satisfactory
Really, most of your questions, or almost all questions can be answered to how toady is gonna make the relationship sytem work out, what is considered an stimulus, and what not, how complex or abstracted he'll make it, that thing
On relatively short term, I think you can expect someone understanding you've saved them if you kill the person atacking them, and that can lead to (if his gratitude value is high) to an automatic affection and trust, leveling up your relationship to friendship. If afterwards you even consider each other cool dudes, you can easily grow into best friends and stuff like that
I just wrote all of this rant in one setting without making any formal order and just saying things as they came to mind, so feel free to ask questions