RPGaDay 2019
The one time I really played up a “friendship” in an RPG scenario was during a FASA Trek adventure, where an NPC was an old friend of one of the PCs, and through the course of the story this friend gets killed.
To emphasize how close this NPC was to the PC, I had a scene out of Top Gun where the PC had to clear out his dead friend’s quarters, and he came across the same type of photo that Maverick found of him and Goose.
The players actually muttered ‘Aw, man!’ when I described that scene.
Good times.