Writing Support Conversations

[MattAquaFlame]

I feel like the most difficult part of making a Fire Emblem Rom Hack is making Support Conversations, it can be short, or it can be long, but it’s just that it involves character writing and brainstorming ideas, but it’s a situation of Quantity over Quality, another thing is that some of them provide some characters to be, well characters, or provide some World Building, but to be honest, this is the main problem, if you run out of ideas, then you won’t make anymore interesting support conversations.

I just want to say, if you can’t take the heat then get out of the kitchen, because you need to maintain a balance of making the Dish just right, Keep Going then you’ll burn the Chicken, stop then you’ll risk Food Poisoning.

It’s the problem with having too many supports, and not enough supports, if you are having too many supports, then the audience will get bored easily, if you have not enough supports, then the Audience will think you’re lazy.

That’s my opinion on writing support conversations and my experience with it.

[YangWenli]

I’m working on a hack that’ll have 60 playable characters by the end, and insisted on giving all of them the standard GBA minimum of 3 partners each for gameplay reasons. The result is that I’ll have to write well over 300 conversations. I seriously wonder if it’s worth it to put in that much effort, when the vast majority of the content will never be seen by most players.

[BluechanXD]

As someone who’s already written 178 support convos for an estimated 400+ support convo total, it definitely becomes a challenge to completely differentiate everything in terms of themes and premises for what is essentially a small look into the relationship between two characters.

However, something I’ve always kept in mind for each support is that in order to make them interesting, they need to fall into one of three general categories: character development, character backgrounds/backstories, and world building. The scope of the world is beyond the central plot of any story, so supports are a great way to implement ideas you have for your setting and characters without shoving everything into the main cutscene dialogue.

I think the biggest issue with supports, fan or official in general, is that some aren’t being used to have us learn something. We can’t care about what’s going on in the plot or understand motivations if we don’t understand characters or how the world works beyond the limitations of cutscenes. Supports should ultimately fill in the gaps in a narrative and be a creative space for ideas that don’t fit anywhere else.

[Vorgus]

Support conversations can be daunting to write - no objection there at all! At the same time, they’re (in my view) one of the most well-liked parts of Fire Emblem. Their combat bonuses usually aren’t too important, but their ability to enrich our understanding of characters is beautifully executed. Think about the smooth connection between gameplay and story, here. The more you use two characters together, the more they get to know each other, unlocking character-developing conversations and combat bonuses when they’re close. It’s brilliant!

Not to mention, for Fire Emblem games where a lot of playable characters do not really contribute to the main plot, we really only get to hear them talk during support conversations. Those conversations bring to life otherwise forgettable characters.

But, the question is, what to write?

Obviously support conversations can feel challenging, but flip that coin to the other side, and they present a lovely opportunity. One of my favorite parts of making a rom hack is lining up all my playable characters (on an Excel file) and asking myself - who would have something to say to whom? That’s always my starting point. Who would have a fascinating conversation?

Two characters might have a fascinating conversation with each other for a few reasons (and having just one of these reasons is a good enough justification to make them support partners):

• They already have an established relationship. They’re brothers, or old friends, or fellow mercenaries. So them talking would be them deepening their relationship or discussing past events that brought them together or brought them into the plot.
• They have no relationship, but they have personalities that would either complement or clash each other in interesting ways. Maybe one is headstrong and brash and the other is calm and collected. One could be bookish scholar and the other doesn’t know how to read. Put them together and see what happens. Do they conflict, or do they learn from each other (usually the first, followed by the second)?
• They have a reason to talk to each other based on the events of the plot. Maybe one of the characters you recruit early on had their village destroyed by a group of necromancers who were gathering corpses to create a zombie army. Then, mid way through the game, you recruit one of the necromancers who betrayed her comrades in a moment of clarity of conscience. Woah - these two probably have a lot to talk about. Grudges to be hashed out, apologies to be uttered, forgiveness to be offered. The plot demands these two talk (and potentially fall in love)
• Speaking of romance, the next reason for a support is romance. When you look at these two, you’re just sure that they could fall in love. Make it happen in just three conversations. Not everyone is a fan of romantic supports, but I’m a huge sucker for them.
• The anti-reason / the wildcard. Two characters have absolutely no reason to be support partners. Great, cool, you’re gonna make them support anyway. What would they talk about? Maybe one of them has a secret hobby the other walks in on them perfecting. Maybe they both have the same strange mysterious birthmark. Who knows! Always toss in a few wildcards and see where your imagination takes you!

Once I’ve sorted out my established-relationship supports, my personality supports, my plot-demands-it supports, my romance supports, and my wildcard supports, I start writing down, in as little as a single sentence, what I want to happen in the C, the B, and A support conversation for a given pairing. If you have the right core idea, these little conversation notes aren’t too bad to whip up.

And then you write them.

It’s always a lot of work, but this method has helped me turn a daunting task into a slightly more organized, less daunting task

[PKLucky]

So, when it comes to the “right amount” of supports and “is it worth it” to even have them, here’s my opinion:

1. You can’t please everyone. Someone out there is gonna complain about too many supports if you have 10 pairs, someone’s gonna complain there’s too little supports if you have 100 pairs. An exaggeration of an actual phenomenon? Yes, absolutely, but you get my point.
2. As a writer who loves their characters to death and want people to know more about them, I say yes it’s absolutely worth it! Even if a player only plays through your game once and doesn’t discover every single support chain, I think it’s beneficial to have that option for players who DO want to see what makes your little skrunklies tick. And I know I personally get a lot of satisfaction of exploring different parts of my characters via support writing. You know how some writers claim that their characters “write for themselves” sometimes? That’s how I feel when I plan out supports and actually sit down and write them out. It’s fun!

Also, shoutout to Bluechan and Vorgus on their takes on what goes into a support. I can’t really say much on that front because I pretty much agree with all their tips there and would just end up regurgitating what they said lol

Oh, I will also say, that (if you plan for your hack to have a base menu of some sort) base conversations are also a great way of exploring character if you’re willing to do a bit of an extra workload. There’s opportunity to have more than two characters interact with each other and since it’s typically a one-time conversation, you don’t need to go too far with planning a three act structure like you would do with a support chain of C through A rank. Hell, sometimes I turn a support conversation into a base conversation if I feel like the original convo couldn’t be well-written as a full chain. Tbh you could forgo having supports and do base conversations instead, idk i’m not your dad

[randalldandall]

Totally fair assessment. But first, it doesn’t have to be “quantity over quality” if you don’t want it to be! There’s nothing stopping you from lower the amount of support partners per unit, or even having a lopsided amount of supports per character. There’s plenty of precedent for both approaches in actual FE. There’s no one making you write 6 support chains per character. You’re in charge of your project, at the end of the day.

Something I find helpful is coming up with characters in pairs or triples, so that some characters already come with some sort of familiarity with each other. That way, it’s easier to come up with support ideas.

There should also be some complete strangers for variety as well, of course, but there’s still a lot of variation you can get from making characters in 2s and 3s (that’s also not to say you have to introduce them all at the same time!). Longtime friends, siblings, rivals, exes, or preexisting lovers immediately come to mind. You can also look to FE’s traditions, like giving you red/green cavs, 3 pegasus knights, etc, for ideas, assuming you want to replicate those archetypes in your hack.

Maybe you have two characters who haven’t seen each other since knight training. Were they inseparable? Did they hate each other’s guts? Was there a one-sided rivalry? No particular thoughts about each other at all? There’s a lot of directions you could go with it, but either way, the characters already have an excuse to interact.

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And some things to hopefully lessen your stress:

• I know it’s hard, but try to avoid fixating on hypotheticals on what your audience may think. Ofc, it’s natural to think about it sometimes. You’re spending a massive amount of time on a game and it feels like an extension of yourself, in many ways. You want people to enjoy it, and it’s very good you’re keeping others in mind. But it’s not good if you stress yourself to the point you are afraid of your own project. It’s kind of an extension of “you are your own worst critic.” You’re always going to think of the most negative responses possible, but you have no way of actually knowing if its reality.

• Similarly, try to pinpoint what kind of game you’re going for. FEs vary a lot between whether they value combat, plot, customization, social systems, etc most highly. I think FE is one of the few fandoms I’ve been in where a game that is the top of someone’s tier list could be on the bottom of the next person’s. Neither person is necessarily wrong, they just value entirely different things. In short, you’re not going to be able to please everybody. In anything, but uniquely so when you’re dealing with FE. And that’s okay. You just need to focus on making something both you and your associated audience will be happy with.

• Mileage may vary with this last one, since it’s a numbers game. I personally think about writing supports as the entire chain, not each individual conversation. If I have 3 supports to write for one unit, I have 3 supports to write, not 9-12. One sounds much less intimidating workload-wise, even though it’s the same thing. It also helps me see the entire chain as one entity, as opposed to 3-4 disconnected conversations that I have to make connect. I also try to write drafts of the entire chain of the support in one go, not individually, unless I’m absolutely stumped on one.