Oooh is that a rival club ?
That’s a substandard club that trains servants that I just made up just now, but which I may will use in the future.
Honestly, considering the fact that the Cadbury Club has some fairly questionable members (Fitzie being the most obvious, though you can have a genuinely awful and relatively incompetent Tally Ho MC as a member), I’m not entirely positive that there’s a clear tier below.
The Cadbury Club is the club for Servants (to which Fitzie, the Tally Ho MC, and Starling belong).
You’re confusing the Cadbury with the Noble Gases.
There’s a reason why the Jolly Good Person is Fitzie’s last chance at valet’ing - Cadbury is about to expel them.
I made a typo; I mistook Tabby for Fitzie.
I’d also addd in the fact that the Cadbury club doesn’t do any/thorough background checks. A clear example of this is the Tally Ho MC. Like, they could be former thief and Cadbury would still not give a fuck!
You know, it will be really funny if the club trains better servants than the Cadbury club (maybe way more competent, too) does but doesn’t get the recognition they deserve due to Cadbury having more VIP clients and longer time in the industry
Yes, that’s still my current notion–of course, we’ll see how things go, as Chapter 8 is far up ahead. But right now, my plan is to have there be a path that leads to Fitzie no longer being in the employ of the MC.
Breaking my lurking silence to wonder if this is truly heartening to hear? Everything Fitzie has said or done thus far has been to keep their job – if you’re a pushover, they act out, but they try so hard not to cross boundaries that would get them fired. Hence their complicated feelings about a relationship with the MC – they seem more afraid of you growing tired of them than anybody catching on. So this might not be the ‘good’ ending, for Fitzie at least!
I love this relationship so much, especially with these messy power dynamics. No matter how kind your MC may be and how much you-the-player know that you wouldn’t dismiss Fitzie, they have to deal with the fact that the only sway they have over you is mercurial. It makes the relationship far more vivid to have a character constantly acting on internal logic. And for that logic to be consistent with the world itself. I guess the price for intelligent character writing is knowing that this relationship is practically doomed – unless Fitzie’s mysterious backstory plays out in our favor. The quote below keeps me up at night!
#“There is a certain Romantic streak in this story. Is the pearl the single clue you have to find the identity of your no-doubt noble parents?”
“$!{sir}!” says Fitzie, coloring.
“Well, I have to call it as I see it. The plot points appear to be falling into place. An optimistic orphan, a keepsake, a mysterious past. No doubt the pearl opens up into a locket of some sort depicting your parents. I’ve read dozens of novels with this story. Luckily, you’ll find your parents before the end of the last chapter. Watch out for the twist though. Sometimes there’s a twist. A tragic ending or a betrayal or pair of identical twins. Sometimes all of them.”
Fitzie has rubbed at least one person on these forums the wrong way, and they posted a desire for a parting of ways. I can understand their perspective - Fitzie might rub me the wrong way if I didn’t find them so attractive - and I’m a champion of being able to get rid of unwanted party members, so to speak, so I’m glad that choice might be available for those who want it. I certainly don’t want to get rid of Fitzie, but I’d prefer a tidier power dynamic when it comes to a romance.
Fitzie can rub me in ALL sorts of ways.
My first impression of Fitzie was: “Ugh, he’s so annoying”. Until he started getting in the way of all other ROs in an impressive show of pettiness and flirting with MC and then denying he was flirting. At that point, I gave up. “He’s annoying but he’s MY kind of annoying”. And now he can do whatever he wants with me or MC, I adore him
I agree, but it’s a tricky line for a writer to walk, and I’ve definitely found myself pissed off by that type of character in other games, rather than charmed.
I find Fitzie tolerable and even somewhat endearing when the MC has the upper hand, but having it the other way around tends to lead to crossed lines.
I… I don’t think I ever had the upper hand with Fitzie I feel bad being strict with him. I’ll probably create a very prim and proper MC in the future but for now I cannnnn’t
I agree, I’ve tried the relationship both ways and having Fitzie in charge only really worked for me on one character out of many. I’m just too tied to the Jeeves model of servant (and probably too lawful good-aligned in real life ). I’m sort of amazed I like Fitzie at all, since I didn’t take to Haze or Valentine from previous games, or - further back - Prenzie the Fool, even though Fools are awesome, as everyone knows. Fitzie is just special, I guess.
Oh hey, I’m the exact opposite! Haze and Valentine are my favourites back in Tally Ho, but I think I prefer the other characters—Tabby, Gilberto and Vyv—as my MCs’ ROs here.
Not to say I dislike Fitzie, though. They are a fun character to talk about for sure, with all their intricacies both in-universe and out!
Here’s my monthly-ish update:
I’ve had a very productive month, and chapter four is at 96,000 words–in fact, I’m not 100% sure whether what I am writing is chapter four, or chapter four and chapter five. I’m not sure how I want to break this up, pacing wise. I figure I’ll just write it, and then my editor and I will figure out the right place to put the chapter break.
I have one scene to write involving Tabby and Marmaduke and a difficult conversation about romance, and then it’s time to jump into the free roaming section, in which you can explore the house, the village, play golf, or ignore all that and do some club activities. It’s hard for me to get a sense of how long these vignettes will be, but I imagine it will be somewhere between the scope of the opera/boxing/press chapter of Cakes and Ale and the Foxhunt chapter of Tally Ho.
I’m really happy with how this chapter is going, and I think there’s going to be a lot of good opportunities to roleplay different kinds of characters in this chapter. My semester has started again in earnest, however, and I’ve had to take on more responsibilties at work than I expected, so my recent mad pace will slow down a bit down, to be resumed in the summer.
Right now, I expect to finish what I’m working on (is it chapter 4? chapter 4 and 5? 4 and a piece of 5?) this semester–and I can’t pin it down more tightly than that. I’m spending a lot of time working on the prose and letting the MC spend time with characters and develop relationships and friendships, but of course that takes stupid amounts of time. Doing this while still giving a lot of attention to the RO characters, even more so. But if you like Juniper, Buck, and Pilcrow, you’ll enjoy these moments in this chapter, I think.
Oh, hey, I know this feeling. I’m occasionally working on a fanfic and at one point I looked at the chapter I was writing and went “shit, this is HOW MANY pages long already? I got to break this thing up.”
Ooof, hope that at least you’re getting paid mo- AHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Oh gods. I almost got through that with a straight face, but then I realised I was suggesting people in education get paid commensurately to the work they do and I just cracked.
Hope everything goes your way!
Wait, Pilcrow? Pilcrow is coming with us?? YES!!!
I’m the opposite; more often than not, I’ll get done with everything I wanted to do/say in a chapter, then realize it’s far too short and I really need to come up with a few more pages somewhere…
No, Pilcrow is staying back behind the bar where she belongs. Still, you’ll have the opportunity to have several interesting scenes with her where you can get to know her just a tiny bit more.