Party Coherence Factor
Mar. 20th, 2019 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluai have seen this called the "D&D problem": when you have a large cast of disparate characters going adventuring together, how do you actually make it make sense for them to stick together?
the classic case is "why the fuck is the lawful good paladin traveling alongside this chaotic neutral rat bastard sorcerer"—and while you can come up with plausible near-term rationales for this ("the town you both were in was suddenly under attack, and thus you banded together to fight a common enemy"), it's reaaaally hard to stretch some plausible reason over the course of an entire adventure.
in D&D, folks tend to just kinda "go with it" because, on a meta level, we just wanna play a goddamn game with our friends.
in JRPGs, we are often also asked to kinda "go with it", but to varying degrees involving various slights-of-hand, and i find it super entertaining to squint at games and figure out, how much of a fast one is this game trying to pull?
my favorite case is Chrono Cross. there's a point, relatively early in the game, where you honestly don't have any incentive to go on. you got warped into a crazy alternate dimension, you figured out a way to warp back to your home dimension, and you saved the life of the random cute chick who helped you out while you were in alternate-dimension-land. you can just go home now!
but random-side-character Macha says, "hey, aren't you curious what that sketchy villain dude's deal is?" you can choose yes, and go track him down. or you can choose no, and... Macha proceeds to chide you for LACKING A SENSE OF ADVENTURE, and then you can choose yes or no again, until you finally just choose "yes" and go on an adventure.
and all your party members—all of them! just kinda go along? usually for "reasons" that are explained in literally one throwaway sentence. it's wild and silly and you're definitely not supposed to think about it too much, just go with it.
so yeah, Chrono Cross gets an F grade on Party Coherence Factor.
off the top of my head, here's grades for other random games:
FFXV: gets an A-, surprisingly. the plot's sort of a chaotic mess, but not in ways that drastically affect the believability of "these people would in fact join together to do these particular things"—it's a king and his royal-guard-slash-childhood-friends; of course they're sticking together. the ding is because it's never entirely explained why collecting all the astrals + royal arms is a higher priority than, y'know, anything else you could be doing to save your kingdom, but i think the assumption is that we're going by Anime Power Level Rules and everyone understands Noct needs over nine thousand to beat the big bad or whatever.
FFXIII: also gets an A-. as awkward as the whole l'Cie mechanic can be, it does present a very convenient forcing function wherein everyone involved is real damn motivated to stick together, because everyone else wants to murder them. i do vaguely remember finding it a bit surprising that everyone was so on-board with the mission to rescue Sazh and Vanille on the Palamecia, but everyone was kinda buddies by that point so good enough.
FFIX is like... a B? it's very coherent in the early part of the game: while not everyone has the same motivation (which is what FFXV and FFXIII had going for them), their motivations very neatly align—Steiner and Zidane are both determined to protect Garnet, Vivi wants to learn more about the other black mages and that seems to correlate really well with wherever the fuck the others are going, Freya's hometown gets obliterated fairly early on and her boyfriend has Tragic Anime Amnesia so it's not like she has much better to do...
but it gets a little tenuous later in the game. for instance: when it's demonstrated that Kuja is a real and potent threat, it sure seems like we should be sending a whole goddamn army to the Desert Palace rather than just Zidane and his ragtag buddies. also Garnet's insistence on not telling Cid that we're off to fight God is maddening, etc etc. basically, once the conflict goes global rather than strictly personal, it seems like it should have more of a global magnitude, but—hey, just go with it! it's fun fantasy adventure, making it global would be strictly less fun :P
anyway at this point i got bored of assigning ratings, but, feel free to share your own Party Coherence Factor scores in the comments or w/e
the classic case is "why the fuck is the lawful good paladin traveling alongside this chaotic neutral rat bastard sorcerer"—and while you can come up with plausible near-term rationales for this ("the town you both were in was suddenly under attack, and thus you banded together to fight a common enemy"), it's reaaaally hard to stretch some plausible reason over the course of an entire adventure.
in D&D, folks tend to just kinda "go with it" because, on a meta level, we just wanna play a goddamn game with our friends.
in JRPGs, we are often also asked to kinda "go with it", but to varying degrees involving various slights-of-hand, and i find it super entertaining to squint at games and figure out, how much of a fast one is this game trying to pull?
my favorite case is Chrono Cross. there's a point, relatively early in the game, where you honestly don't have any incentive to go on. you got warped into a crazy alternate dimension, you figured out a way to warp back to your home dimension, and you saved the life of the random cute chick who helped you out while you were in alternate-dimension-land. you can just go home now!
but random-side-character Macha says, "hey, aren't you curious what that sketchy villain dude's deal is?" you can choose yes, and go track him down. or you can choose no, and... Macha proceeds to chide you for LACKING A SENSE OF ADVENTURE, and then you can choose yes or no again, until you finally just choose "yes" and go on an adventure.
and all your party members—all of them! just kinda go along? usually for "reasons" that are explained in literally one throwaway sentence. it's wild and silly and you're definitely not supposed to think about it too much, just go with it.
so yeah, Chrono Cross gets an F grade on Party Coherence Factor.
off the top of my head, here's grades for other random games:
FFXV: gets an A-, surprisingly. the plot's sort of a chaotic mess, but not in ways that drastically affect the believability of "these people would in fact join together to do these particular things"—it's a king and his royal-guard-slash-childhood-friends; of course they're sticking together. the ding is because it's never entirely explained why collecting all the astrals + royal arms is a higher priority than, y'know, anything else you could be doing to save your kingdom, but i think the assumption is that we're going by Anime Power Level Rules and everyone understands Noct needs over nine thousand to beat the big bad or whatever.
FFXIII: also gets an A-. as awkward as the whole l'Cie mechanic can be, it does present a very convenient forcing function wherein everyone involved is real damn motivated to stick together, because everyone else wants to murder them. i do vaguely remember finding it a bit surprising that everyone was so on-board with the mission to rescue Sazh and Vanille on the Palamecia, but everyone was kinda buddies by that point so good enough.
FFIX is like... a B? it's very coherent in the early part of the game: while not everyone has the same motivation (which is what FFXV and FFXIII had going for them), their motivations very neatly align—Steiner and Zidane are both determined to protect Garnet, Vivi wants to learn more about the other black mages and that seems to correlate really well with wherever the fuck the others are going, Freya's hometown gets obliterated fairly early on and her boyfriend has Tragic Anime Amnesia so it's not like she has much better to do...
but it gets a little tenuous later in the game. for instance: when it's demonstrated that Kuja is a real and potent threat, it sure seems like we should be sending a whole goddamn army to the Desert Palace rather than just Zidane and his ragtag buddies. also Garnet's insistence on not telling Cid that we're off to fight God is maddening, etc etc. basically, once the conflict goes global rather than strictly personal, it seems like it should have more of a global magnitude, but—hey, just go with it! it's fun fantasy adventure, making it global would be strictly less fun :P
anyway at this point i got bored of assigning ratings, but, feel free to share your own Party Coherence Factor scores in the comments or w/e
no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 12:19 am (UTC)FE is a neat example where i feel like there's an interesting tipping point that happens about the .. ehhhh, 10th chapter or so in all the games? where it goes from 'ragtag gang of buddies' that clashes directly with your point to 'legitimate army' where idealistic 'save the nation' macro notions (but not always) tend to be enough.
FE9 - A - I feel like it cheats here considering the Greil Mercenaries are a thing and actually being a group that re-forms between the games and such lol. Not only do they have their close-knit group of friends but it's almost like a little hippie commune with swords that stumbles onto the plot lol....
Critical Role s2 - C/D - honestly all of these darlings are the 'rat bastard' warlock/rogue/mage/etc lol; and the early episodes would struggle from this if the actors weren't as talented (and didn't have good chemistry with each other) as they do. Nott/Caleb met each other pre-game and they stuck with the main group out of sheer safety-in-numbers factor, likewise with Molly/Yasha. Fjord, you almost get the sense is more bored with existence than anything else and Jester is the emotional glue that distracts them all and re-focuses them on the Mission of The Day (usually doing x task to earn money) alarmingly commonly. It works /way/ better emotionally than it does logically.
these are fun to think about, may plop in more here later ~
no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 07:21 am (UTC)Final Fantasy XIII has my favourite answer to the question 'why do these characters stick together?': 'they don't.' Lightning just fucks off on her own for half the game and it's twenty hours before she concedes that, fine, she might as well work with these guys.
Final Fantasy X is solid: there's Yuna, there's her guardians, there's the guy who's just dropped into this world and really needs to stick with anyone willing to take him under their wing. You know both why they're travelling and why they're doing it together.
I love Final Fantasy VIII with all my heart, but I can't say for sure why these crazy kids stick together past the point of doing contractually obliged missions.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 05:59 pm (UTC)As far as video games - I give FFVI a solid B. The party splitting that happens in the first half is neat and gives you opportunities to try out everyone's different gimmicks and shows off some fun party interactions, and then in the second half you're Getting The Band Back Together and I love that shit. The major markdown is, like... what the fuck is Setzer's angle? We need an airship guy, Celes strong-arms him into being the airship guy (twice!), that's dope, but he has nothing to do with anyone OTHER than Celes and there's a bit where she leaves the party but he's still around? Even without a dismissive blonde telling him what to do? What's that about? (This is a callout post for Setzer Gabbiani)
I'd grade Tales of Symphonia pretty high, because everyone has clear personal reasons for wanting to Stick It To the Man and also Lloyd and Colette are big dorks who somehow turn everyone they meet into close personal friends within 30 minutes. A-, only because some of these friendships are not as well developed as others.
I never beat Tales of Vesperia but I played some of it co-op with friends and I remember being impressed with the organic way party members rotated in and out through the early game, like, our goals happen to be in the same direction so let's go together for a bit! And now I'm off to do something else so bye for now! Thought that was neat. Should play that game for real one of these days.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-24 07:58 pm (UTC)A friend of mine once told me about a D&D game she was adjacent to, where one person wanted to play lawful good and one chaotic evil, and the DM said "only if you figure out why you aren't killing each other, in-character." Their eventual decision was that their characters were soulmates and they were DETERMINED to convert each other, and in the meantime, LEAVE HIM ALONE HE'S MINE AND MINE ONLY. Which to me is delightful.
A lot of tabletop games I've played in have generally started with "explain why you're all part of $group," too, so I really like things like that. Like, in my husband's Exalted game, we all worked for this specific power broker, so as long as we wanted that to be true, we had to stick together. Our reasons for working for him were our own, but that was his rule.