Kay seems alright so far, but not enough interaction with them yet for me to be too sure. I don’t have too strong of feelings about most of the others, Mal is a bit too much of a flirt for my taste and Fracture is a little too prickly.
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I think the RO I’m more interested in is Alistair. His reaction to MC’s real name was interesting (and somewhat suspicious), so I’m curious to know where that came from.
Despite everything I also like Fracture (my MC is an extrovert, so it’s a nice contrast to all his grumpiness), and Wil and Kay are alright. The most complicated one is CG. My MC hates everything related to the Coven, so their relationship could be better.
I didn’t romance anyone in the past but Shauna and Grant are lovely and my MC misses having them around :')
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On the stats page there’s an option called ‘tone indicators’. If you enable it, then it will show which options are the flirt ones.
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The ONE time I don’t check the stats page. I’m turning it on ASAP 
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Thanks! Though as a broken introvert MC, I prefer it not known. Breaks immersion of feeling that run out well.
Gosh! That’s quite a few replies! Thanks everyone for all your interest, commentary, bug reports, and stats! It’s all enormously helpful whether for balancing, fixes, or just plain motivation.
Also in general, very interesting to see how varying all the relationship values are. Gonna have to keep that going on my end!
Well, I think I’m keeping on top of things. Honestly I’ve just been lucky enough to be able to treat writing like a job for the past several months. I’ll adjust once I have a regular job again, I’m sure.
I’ve been trying my best to sprinkle those past references in there! Not every combination gets a unique line; in that section I was drawing towards either slight similarities or big differences. Without the brokenheart variable active, the comparison doesn’t happen - I do intend for the previous love interest to come up in some contexts even without brokenheart though, cause like… feels wrong for MC never to think about them.
In an ideal world I’d reference everything all the time, but alas I have to pull myself away to continue making progress on the story. There are a couple of reactive dialogues etc. that are so niche they are essentially easter eggs 
(e.g. if you are the same gender and have/had a similar hair colour/length as another member of AdVenture, there’s a unique line in the media attentoin segment. I don’t know why I felt the need to do that, but I sure did do it)
As mentioned, there are flirting tone indicators! Those aren’t used in the flashback but are otherwise present throughout. I’ll continue to include these markers whether or not the tone indicators are enabled: [Start @{(aro = 1) Romance|Aromantic Relationship}] / [Block romance/flirting]
I’m not completely sure what I’ll be doing with the multi-flirt scenario. I know specifically what Mal will do/say but otherwise idk. There’s a non-zero possibility you might be able to carry something on with an Altruist and non-Altruist completely separately, but no guarantees.
There are red flag ROs and there are toxic biohazards. So uh… no. No he is not.
Also, my math is off somewhere if you managed to get guts to -1%! That’s incredibly funny.
Question, did you pick a fight with Teddie and/or get into an argument about the mission? If you didn’t argue I’ll need to tweak something or otherwise it’ll be possible to get him to like -10 or lower XD.
If you’re referring to the text saying something to this effect: What happened after you fled? You know all too well that Prii and Shauna didn’t make it out alive, but you never saw the others. - that’s a situation where MC’s knowledge differs from the player’s. I may need to drop a mention earlier on to make that more clear, but we’ll see.
I’m aiming for proactivity, depending on the RO! For example, Wil has some differences in dialogue provided you’ve chosen a flirt option* at least once, even passively, including a flirt of their own. However, without first choosing a flirt to activate the ‘interest’ variable in the RO, Mallory is the only one who will flirt (outside maybe an instance or two where you can interpret a comment as flirting if you so chose). I want to avoid players feeling like they have to fend thirsty ROs off with a stick.
Flirt options including things like choosing to get flustered or lost for words, i.e. the ones labelled [passive] with tone indicators on.
Huh! I’ll keep an eye out for the stats thing.
That section I left a rogue pipe pushing all the options along one from where they should be. This will be fixed! (thanks everyone who mentioned this)
So in both cases this is intentional. For Alistair, the 0% represents him being a total stranger with no connection to you, not even as a tenuous teammate. However, his rel value also rises super fast compared to anyone else.
The Mallory thing… I’m gonna congratulate you on being the first person to pick up on this: How certain characters act/react won’t always line up with the rel bar, and this is fully deliberate.
:3
Ehehehe. That was fun to write.
I want to have a good chunk of stuff regarding just past friendships and not only crushes/relationships. Just adds up fast with all the different permutations. D: (I guess there’s a chance to talk about them with CG a little!)
Thanks for the typo, I think I swapped from Wil’s name to their pronoun there. XD
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Make sense, my second interpretation with Mal would have been something along the line of shapeshifting being their power and possibly a link to their identity, and so the mc picking up on them instantly could have walked all over some insecurity or vulnerability of their.
As to Alistair I’m more surprised but with the context that ‘stranger mean 0%’ it make sense, My starting assumption was that since even people who dislike us don’t start at 0 and how a lot of other games taught me to expect to see low relationship value as antipathy, I assumed that 0% by default to other peoples would represent deep misanthropy or smth, do relationship point represent something more general like emotional involvement in this game?
ps: I liked the confrontation with Teddie a lot, In part because the narration helped a lot put myself in the shoes of the mc I felt tense and a bit angry afterward and I rarely react strongly to stories like that.
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That really irritated me as well. Rampage’s job in my playthrough was to be bait for our ambush. That was literally the job I gave her and she agreed to. So why all the whining after the fact, when no one raised any objections at the time, about using her as bait for Hit (which was actually her only opponent/fight) after I’d already handled Ranger? If either of them had a problem with it, bringing it up pre-fight would have been more appropriate than complaining about it afterward. All she had to do was say “I’m not comfortable being bait.” All Teddie had to do was say “I’m not comfortable with her being bait” or “I’ll be bait.”
Also, who fights superheroes of any level and expects not to get hit?
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In my case I used Fracture as bait, thinking I took into account their greater sturdiness and protectiveness and then went to help rampage since Hit is the damage dealer anyway and they were fighting them, sadly I sneaked up on Hit and Teddie took it as me putting Rampage in harm way, felt overblown at the time but then the game already sold me that he’s pretty intense and antagonistic in general, and his friend is a vulnerability of his.
What shook me a little at the time is the way I was roleplaying paradigm. They were someone deeply uncomfortable with their body and physical contact as well as someone who expect danger at all time… and so physically restraining them randomly like that would be the perfect way to escalate this into a fight (granted, even with average peoples acting like Teddie did would signal that the situation becoming physical is in the cards).
Anyway, wouldn’t have liked to be here but the scene made me care about the team and it’s future dynamics even more.
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Since I’d started everyone to that point below 50%, my own scaling had changed from that sort of ‘0% is hate’ mindset. The values mean slightly different things for different characters - Alistair’s 10% is not Catalyst’s 10% - but lean towards overall attitude/friendliness. Depending on choices it’s possible for certain characters to like you and not trust you or vice versa.
I may tweak some of the wording of argument/choice for clarification. The ‘occupy Hit’s attention’ choice (and its counterpart with Mis) is intended as a particularly ruthless “I am deliberately allowing them to get hurt in service of winning” type of decision. I’m realising now that it’s easy to conflate the subsequent upset with the initial decision on which of the pair is taking point.
FWIW, Teddie is often a powder keg when it comes to Kay. Their friendship/his protectiveness is something that’ll be dug into more in time. For a little more insight into how he ticks, if you use Teddie as a decoy for Mis and talk to him later, he’ll bring it up: not only does he take no hit to relationship, standing your ground actually increases it.
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‘I may tweak some of the wording of argument/choice for clarification. The ‘occupy Hit’s attention’ choice (and its counterpart with Mis) is intended as a particularly ruthless…’
May be for the best since it wasn’t intended, honestly even as a overreaction it was a good scene since it suddenly pushed in my face how what you can assume was an unambiguous good strategic decisions (quickly eliminate the greatest threat to the team, no risk of death, etc) can fail because you don’t know your team and so it can a bad thing to do simply because they don’t value what you do and don’t know your intentions either (Teddie goal in hindsight wouldn’t be ‘no one seriously wounded and the goal was accomplished’ but ‘I must protect my friend’ and so would assume you were just callous), the strength of the scene for me is the shock of thinking I did the job flawlessly (and being congratulated for it) to almost coming to blow with how badly I fucked up in Teddie eyes.
…doesn’t make him not a pain in the ass of course.
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Yeeeah, but I don’t want you to change it, just add a reaction choice. It pissed me off, but it felt like it was supposed to piss me off. While MC sees the interaction as unfair, Teddie and Kay see the MC as some outsider who used them and got one of them hurt unnecessesarily. (I know that’s spelled wrong, my brain isn’t right now. At least I think that’s spelled wrong.) If anything, I’d like a more conversational pushback than just a nakedly aggressive one, something for an MC that really doesn’t get that there’s a distinction that Teddie’s trying to make because no one they’ve known over the past five years would have made it for them. If MC has no clue that what they did is seen as not okay or why it’s seen that way, getting aggressive right back doesn’t fit any more than the option I took of backing off and going to apologise to Kay did.
I chose Rampage because she was so gung-ho about it. And she had the “flashier” ability. Also…well, even the little I know about sheep, those things are nimble and surprisingly fast. I thought she’d really be doing better at keeping Hit on the backfoot and (given that rams um…ram things…I wasn’t worried about her head being a weak point. Which really points up how little MC knows about thier new teammates.
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bug
''s liberating to be separate from the Coven, but having a touchpoint with Cee each morning has been surprisingly pleasant. Far less like the oppressive overseer than you would have guessed. It’s only now that you’re realising that might have something to do with $!cg specifically.}
Cee’s kept your head in the game for these past eight-ish days. You’ll have to make do without her.’
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Thanks for indulging my insane question and I totally understand! For the guts thing, it was my weakness beforehand and then just got that much worse afterwards, not entirely sure what made it get to -1% but I thought it was funny too! For Teddy, I did not get start any arguments but he did not like my actions during the missions, talked it out with him afterwards and the text made it seem like he felt better about it (the option saying he was too angry to talk further was greyed out) but the relationship level stayed at 11%
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Okay. This story is awesome and I absolutely love it! I loved the Dinamics with the AdVencter crew, least before it all went so very wrong. The echoes of memories of hanging out with the gang are bittersweet to read when they popped up. Excellent writing there! Speaking of excellent writing:
Why the heck do we got to play a double agent! I want to be everyone’s friend, not a spy snooping on potential future friends! I’ve been guilt tripped and that’s great because I don’t want to backstab anyone, and in my efforts to be loyal to everyone, I’m putting (small) knives into everyone’s backs. Excellent character writing. I shamelessly enjoyed the body horror, becoming an eldrich necromorth Tzeentch deamon like terror! Muhhahaha! (If a friendly one - ive been playing a lot of dead space’s remake lately and I’ve also gotten into both versions of Warhammer, okay) but yeah, the powers are very cool.
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Still happy you liked the scene! I personally do like what it shows about Teddie.
(thank you for the bug also, it’ll be fixed for the next update)
Right, fair enough! Changes would mostly be towards clarity not altering what actually happened.
It’s valuable to know when it feels like you can’t quite react how you want. I’ll keep looking at that section - I hadn’t thought about the angle of just plain not understanding.
I figured out what happened and added something so that it should only now be possible to lower it to, uh, well, 0. XD
(every stat goes down after the flashback, it’s a reflection of how harsh the last five years have been)
That makes sense RE: Teddie. I’m going to tweak a couple values here and there. It’s easy to forget that while there are a bunch of +rels sprinkled all over the place, few people are gonna hit all of them, and Teddie tends to have harsher negative reactions in general. He’s supposed to be slow to befriend, but not THIS prickly!
Thanks so much! I have a blast writing the gribbly powers and the backstory. The torn loyalties is something that’ll be played up throughout, cause well, of course!
Thank you for the report. Can I ask, was this a brand new file or had you loaded an older save?
This bug is proving quite troublesome and the only pattern I’m finding so far is in loading saves from a previous build.
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It was on old save
Thanks - can you let me know if this recurs in future from a fresh save? It’s looking like that’s what’s causing the error.
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