Honestly, I think the issue described with the found family trope is present in a lot of stories about families. I’ve seen plenty where the plot is something like; “Hey I know your mother/father abandoned you for no good reason when you were an infant and is a terrible person in the present to boot but they’re your family!” The implication is that it’s wrong for the person not to immediately reconnect with said family member. I love stories of reconciliation and forgiveness, so it’s annoying to me when the solution to the problem is the idea that since they’re family, it’s wrong to dislike any action they take.
As for found family in IF… While there’s no way to please everyone I think it could work under the right circumstances. However, I think the best way to pull it off would be to not have super rude, combative members of said found family? That’s always been the thing that’s annoyed me about it. I love stories about good people banding together and connecting to become something of a family over time. So when there’s some jerk smack dab in the middle of it making people uncomfortable, it’s harder for me to get into.
Overall I do like the trope. When done well it has great potential, though it is harder to do in IF.
Found family trope is a hit or miss for me but one thing is a clear nope to me like @SamsonJBodney explained, if a asshole/rude/mean/cold/heavily sarcastic person is around, I don’t care your reasons of being that way, if you can’t be a decent/respectful person to other people then you better believe that found family feeling will be so stale than a bag of hard crackers.
I mentioned this in a post in another thread, but I think a specific issue that exists with choicescript found family is the structure of the works it typically appears in.
A lot of the works follow a general formula with the following elements:
The group that you are expected to become found family to was already together with the MC just being introduced to them. They already have a clear family dynamic.
The game is structured in one of two ways. There is “downtime” in between story beats where you chose the person you spend time with or during the story sections you choose to accompany a single person. In either of these cases the reader almost always chooses to spend time with the character they want to romance
The works follow a fairly short time frame (at least that has been published so far, multi book works we’ll still have to see how it turns out) or a longer time frame with a lot of time skips between plot points.
The problem I have with this formula combined with found family is that there is already a dynamic, and the MC never really feels like they’re joining it. It feels more like they’re “X’s partner” instead of a family member where X is the member of the group the MC is romancing. Outside of major story moments, they rarely interact with anyone aside from X unless its for Plot Things. Wayhaven does a bit better on this by having a best friend, but even then its still two people in the group you’re just coworkers with.
With shorter works, there isn’t really time to develop a proper dynamic. With longer works, a lot of the downtime is skipped, so you don’t really see interactions that show the MC becoming closer to people. Either way, it usually ends up with the MC becoming close to a single person as a romantic partner, and everyone else being acquaintances.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation. You have a love interest that has traits that don’t match up with the established LI norms. Maybe they swear so much anything with them will get flagged by Apple Store, maybe they tend to smoke like a train from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, maybe they are a battle-hungry fanatic that constantly searches for something bigger and stronger and doesn’t care about much aside from that (Hawkins, my beloved), maybe they are an unfeeling and cold creature that cares about your character, but has troubles expressing that in the socially normal ways, maybe they just don’t like to go outside or talk to anyone who isn’t their love interest. The possibilities of their quirks or unusual traits are endless.
But here comes your player character, the romantic partner! Under their watchful presence, nagging and constant unability to show sympathy to their unique traits your beloved starts to change, becoming far more socially acceptable and tolerable, so you won’t feel ashamed going out with them. The thing that bugs me, essentially, is the fact all characters you create for such a character with quirks are assumed to want them to change, to want them to be something closer to romantic stereotypes and “normal” dating and thus can’t simply… not give a damn about that and not push them towards the mushy-mushy normal romantic behaviour or not be concerned with their behaviour. This often is obvious in games where you can start a FWB - eventually in series (yes, this is about M) everyone will start looking at you weirdly for not jumping into eternal love, for being quite okay with the idea of just staying FWB like that.
See, I dislike the fact that’s the party line for every RO that falls out of the usual romance stuff. I often don’t want to fix them and often my MC are just as bad as them or just as unusual and weird, so they really don’t have enough of a room to speak about such thing.
In fact, often my MCs like their lovers for their traits and features and would not like them to change. The only dynamic I accept with “I can fix it!” angle is the one where the pair serves as both a dampener and concentrator to each other’s traits. Warrior eggs fellow warrior on, but loves him enough to drag him back to his side, two ambitious workaholics make a very stable pair when they’re working in separate firms and step on the heads of different people, two bearers of a forbidden technique find unity in their shared knowledge, yet keep each other from falling victim to it. That’s the only variation I usually accept.
I’m not gonna lie, when I heard that for people who hold out with sex with M in Wayhaven are going to have a payoff that is really sweet, I was very conflicted. On one hand, I have no doubt it will indeed be very sweet and make me go “awwwww!” because that is Wayhaven’s specialty. On the other hand, that’s not really why I like M’s route. I expected more of a: (Spoilers for a very and light description of how I imagine it going I suppose?)
M: gets inches away from the MC “I… want you.”
MC: “That all depends… is it finally going to mean something?”
M: Very long pause then just nods
MC: Also long pause “Yes.”
Then immediately que a descriptor along the lines of Fire Up the Night by New Medicine and still show that insanely high sex drive they have. After all, falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you lose that sex drive, it just means it’s a more focused sex drive.
I think character development should happen with characters, but I also agree that a character is only as good as their quirks and flaws, and the only way those should go away is if they are:
A) Actually harmful to themselves or others (M’s smoking that they start easing back on because they don’t want to risk it around the MC)
or
B) Naturally worked through/progressed from the natural progression of the narrative. For example: A character who is carefree with long hair becoming a bit more stoic and cutting said hair, because the bad guy grabbed it during a fight and it nearly lost them their life.
Note that while this is a reason, and even probably the primary reason, a romanced M also feels less need to smoke, because the reason M smokes is that it numbs their senses, and the Detective focuses their senses on them, which is, in practice, the same thing.
That is very true, and while I consider myself to be a bit of a romantic, I also can’t help my brain logically going, “Nicotine helps numb pain. Morgan smokes to help numb the pain from… things we were told in the newest book. A good relationship does not numb physical pain. It helps make life more bearable! But not numb pain. Therefore they do it for MC.” But, we enjoy Wayhaven because it is sappy and has moments that make our hearts feel good, so I’m pretty positive your reason is the most correct one LMAO
I mean, you’re not wrong concerning what Wayhaven is about, but “numb pain” isn’t why a romanced M doesn’t feel the need to smoke when the Detective is around. M’s constant discomfort isn’t due to the B3 revealed stuff, it’s because their hypersenses are constantly assaulted by everything. But when the Detective is around, a large part of those hypersenses… let’s call it processing power is busy with the Detective, who doesn’t trigger M’s discomfort.
It’s… kind of like covering a bad smell with a good one. The bad smell (i.e., all the stuff that grates M’s senses) is still there, they just don’t notice it as much because there’s all that sweet lavender in the air. This is sort-of explained in B2’s roof scene.
Im increeedibly late to the party, but as the person who instigated the Julien hatred, I kinda want to build on this.
Night Road is one of those games I keep coming back to because I enjoy the story, and for a game about “picking a side” its refreshingly nonjudgemental about either one, and taking the third option doesnt feel out of left field either. It has that New Vegas feel of your character being able to be an independent operator, you can decide how you feel about the sides, being a vampire, etc, and let those guide your actions.
That said, ye olde supervillain “You’ll have to do what we say or we’ll never take out the mind-[screw] nanobots” was a very squicky plot point Ive never much cared for. What makes it worse is it seems like the Camarilla leader and Julien were supposed to be windows into the Camarilla and not!Anarch factions, and there are multiple points where it feels like the two should have been on the opposite faction.
Anyway, grousing aside, I think the Camarilla leader had a solid connection with the MC, but I think “Used to be classmates/acquainted neonates” is a bit too poor of a connection for a supposed faction lead. It also doesnt help that theres precious little in the way of other underlings of Sim’s or other vampires to build out his side.
What annoyed me about this is that Julian is very explicitly only anarch because he’s not Camarilla. It feels like we have the Camarilla and… an independent and that they’re just called an Anarch because “its VtM, its always Camarilla and Anarchs”
Yeah especially since he claims to be your friend and even if you guys both bust out together, he just kinda ditches you to go make it big.
I think the one scenario where it really does work to play on previous relationship is if you’re Banu Haqim because in that origin, he’s your sire. And relationships with sires in VtM are usually… complicated.
Hardsuit Labs got axed by Paradox, development moved to another team and Paradox has refused to name them. Scuttlebutt for that reasoning is Hardsuit Labs and some Paradox folks were on the receiving end of harassment and death threats for delaying it.
Official word is its still in development, set for release on the tail end of 2023 or perhaps into 2024. Personally, I think it’s in development hell and the sudden VtM games (The CoG ones and the Battle Royale) were supposed to help fill in the gaps while things were worked out.
Yeah, while there’s nothing saying that every Prince has to be the biggest politicking scum in the setting, it’s kinda shocking how infrequently I felt that I had to walk on eggshells around the Prince of Tucson.
Meanwhile, my brain instantly said, “Julien is absolutely gonna try to use you for some sick objective if you follow him, and will stake you in the middle of the Grand Canyon when he’s done,” which is normally what I should be thinking for the Prince, not the Anarch(-adjacent) leader.
Actually you’re supposed to think that about both, the only difference is the Anarch will pretend you never existed and ‘edit’ you out of the story to take all the credit while the Prince will fill out the paperwork to mark you as a traitorous failure that forced him to save the day in a way that ‘stopped’ him from being able to share any of the benefit he acquired with the rest of the Camarilla.
Ugh, don’t remind me of Swansong, please. I loved The Council, and I was looking forward to checking out Swansong, and then the devs went EGS exclusive.
So I pretty much chose the objective right answer by siding with the Inquisition, even if they (probably) would’ve turned on me, too, is what I’m seeing.
Ah well, me getting beheaded by Julien made it all moot in the end anyhow. XD
