As we approach the end of the month, here are some of the inspirations for the setting of my latest chapter!
The storyline can get pretty dark at times so it’s nice to have this chapter set somewhere lush and vibrant and colourful and alive.
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Oh, man. Now I miss Midsummer.
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Lol don’t worry, I have it stored elsewhere as well - that’s just my quick-reference system!
I’m sorry you’ve not been feeling well btw. Hope you’re having a nice time reading though!
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finally finally finally gained enough confidence to drop something for my game. the anxiety of letting people see my work kills me 
. anyway thats a goal of february and march half completed !! [yes i was and still kind of am severely late on this goal…]
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Urgh. I’m trying to sort out this situatuon where the MC is working in a kinda-sorta superhero agency (they have superpowers and fight eldritch cultists) has the option to be horrible to their coworkers in their new team, which is an important branching point for later, but I can’t figure out a motivation as to why they would want to.
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Does the MC feel like they’re not as good as the MC’s old team (if they had one)? Does the MC feel like they’ll only hinder them rather than help them? Have they just gotten stuck in traffic for over half an hour on a single merge lane while suffering from period cramps and a work-stress induced headache? (totally not speaking from recent experience) Do they think their new coworkers are holier-than-thou stuck up little hypocrites? There’s plenty of potential reasons to dislike new people, ranging from petty to at least sort of reasonable sounding.
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Oh dear. That would certainly be a reason to act snappy (bonus points for low blood sugar), and the other team members would probably agree. It also, hopefully, wouldn’t be a long-term behavioral pattern.
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A potential motivation for people who behave horribly to their coworkers could be that maybe they think kindness would encourage weakness in their coworkers, or that it would be a sign of weakness from the MC? So they behave like an asshole instead. There are some people who consider ‘being kind’ = ‘being weak’ (even if that’s a bit wild to me), especially people in leadership positions, or people who aspire to be in leadership positions.
If the MC thinks there’s a high chance their new coworkers might die during their fights with the cultists, it might also be an attempt to distance themselves emotionally from people they think are likely to not be around for long. People generally take the path that’ll cause them the least amount of pain, and what that path looks like differs from person to person. Someone dying in front of you that you’ve gotten to know and care about tends to hurt more than a stranger you don’t like, even if the reason for the dislike is a self-fulfilling prophecy through being mean to them from the get-go, which is essentially baiting them into creating reasons for you to not like them. There was a game I played where a major character does this to the MC, basically just desperately trying to create reasons to hate them regardless of your behaviour due to insert plot element, and I really liked how that was implemented (however it’s a spoiler for said game).
But if it’s short-time meanness you want, probably just making them have a bad day is the go-to. A lot of people can behave horribly when they’re not doing great themselves!
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No no, it’s a long-term pattern where the MC goes out of their way to prevent the team from bonding, which ultimately results to half of them dying because the group cohesion is lacking. If the MC is just reasonably grumply and simply ignores them, they’ll simply bond among themselves (and the cultist infiltrator among them strikes a friendship with another NPC, which leads to said infiltrator starting to question their worldview and pulling their punches with the inevitable betrayal, because they realize not everyone outside the cult is a horrible person unlike what they were taught).
(For best results, make sure to have the team click well, in which case said infiltrator takes down their whole cult by themself before the MC’s team realizes what’s happening.)
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Has the MC ever been in a situation in which bonds led to greater losses? Like, someone’s bad behavior was tolerated because they were a friend and excuses were made (but that led to people like the MC or those the MC cared about getting hurt)? Or, did social drama distract the MC or people who were supposed to help the MC, leading to a preventable disaster? etc.
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@LiliArch Oooh. Why do people go out of their way to reduce team bonding? Some great ideas here already. I think one possibility, building on @LisHz’s thoughts, is that they really feel personal bonds are unprofessional and cloud judgement. For example, there are loads of Star Trek plots where it’s suggested that being a good Starfleet officer basically involves being able to shut down your personal feelings for your crewmates and make your decisions wholly objectively. The MC might feel that this is hard enough to do if you’re just colleagues, but extremely difficult if you are actually friends, so might go out of their way to stop people making friends.
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Hmmmm. I like that.
(I’m going to leave the actual reasoning to the player, but I need some idea in my head to be able to write the actions! The same way I need a reason for the MC in another story to actually want to romance their arranged spouse instead of fake-romancing them.)
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Yeah I hear you. I also find my headcanon for things like this also help me make my after-choice-text more interesting.
Reasons to romance your arranged spouse:
- They are hot.
- They are in exactly the same position you are, so you want to make it easy for them.
- You’re stuck in this situation so it will be oh, so much better for you both to try to become sincerely attached.
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Haha!
Anyway the problem is that the spouse in question is a supervillain, and the MC’s parents literally just tried to buy them off from attacking them with the marriage offer (some great parenting all around there) and the spouse wasn’t all keen to accept it either. They agreed (because they realized the MC would be worse off if they didn’t, due to the aforementioned great parenting, and they’re a weird kind of supervillain who goes around rescuing people, but the MC doesn’t know any of that initially) and make it clear to the MC that the only expectations they have is that the MC doesn’t go around wreaking havoc in their base (which the MC can ignore, with… consequences).
So my initial impulse is that if the MC does decide to try and actually romance the spouse, they must be angling for some advantage, but that might just be because the way I initially pictured their dynamic was with the MC secretly plotting to murder the spouse and become a supervillain themself…
(And now I’m writing walls of text when I should be preparing for my TTRPG night. Urgh. I need to move.)
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Some MCs are gentle souls that relocate flies and silverfish instead of killing them. Others would want to make the best of a bad lot (so they would genuinely try and find common ground with their villainous spouse, reform them, or act as their safe harbor, etc.). And more villainous MCs would either not shit where they eat (not antagonize someone with access to them at their most vulnerable), or want to be 1/2 of a villain power couple (that is genuinely in love).
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What I like most about this story (aside from the “Yes, I gave you a haunted mirror, but I didn’t know you were going to break it!”) is how the MC can be so much more a villain than the villain spouse is.
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An emotional bond can be an asset, but it can also be a liability in a line of work which involves a lot of people dying suddenly.
Soldiers, in particular, often resort to the necessity of not building a connection with people who they expect to die (usually new arrivals who aren’t likely to survive long enough to pick up the basic experience needed to last a while on a high-intensity battlefield) - because that means they won’t be mourning a new friend when that rookie inevitably gets themselves killed.
The most extreme manifestation of this was probably with Soviet officers during the Second World War, who were obviously facing an existential struggle which demanded immense levels of human sacrifice. They’d often refer to the soldiers who were killed under their command as “broken pencils” or other such euphemisms simply because they couldn’t afford to have an emotional breakdown from processing the number of human beings who’ve just died on their orders.
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@LiliArch From my experience, when one person on a team has been horrible to all the others, that has actually been a pretty effective bonding factor in everyone’s resentment of them. There is nothing like having an enemy in common to unify your workforce! I think those that undermine cohesion best are usually those that pick favourites, spread malicious rumours, and are otherwise unfair in their treatment of others.
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Yeah, the idea is just that the player can’t pick this specific one NPC has something very special going on by having the MC be capable of being horrible only to that one.
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I did finish four scenes in my chapter, as it turns out, but the total remaining number is not four, but six. Funny how that works, sometimes.
And, while it might not be as much progress as I’d like, I did make a decent chunk of headway in one of the future projects, mostly on the mechanical end of things. So I’ll call it a successful month, even if the main thing I learned was that the chapter I’m trying to finish is, lengthwise, more like three of the normal kind (and those are already decently long).
Such are the tribulations of trying to bring a lot of plot threads back together in the penultimate chapter, I suppose.
I hope everyone’s made some progress they can be happy with this month, and… somehow, it’s nearly May already.
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