Narrative hooks

Imagine a story where the hero must stop the villain from unleashing a deadly pathogen. To me that’s sort of boring because obviously the hero is going to stop the villain from unleashing the pathogen because 99.9% of fiction sees the good guy save the day. So there’s not much friction. 

But imagine while trying to stop the villain a close personal friend of the hero is infected by the virus and now the only way to save that friend is to get a live sample from the villain so a cure can be reverse engineered. Now it matters. Now that friend is in danger and we can personally relate to worrying about someone sick or in danger. 

Now the protagonist can’t be infected because as I said before, 99.9% of fiction sees the hero win. So there’s stakes are automatically lowered when the tropes of genre are so clearly predictable. Short of a Logan or No Time to Die end of an era story, most people don’t believe that a main character is likely to punch their ticket. In gaming this is even more true, whether video game or tabletop, because players don’t expect their story to end like that. 

I’m more invested in stories about saving a specific character the protagonist cares about or a small town over saving the world or galaxy. At some point the sense of scale gets lost and readers and viewers mentally check out. It works from time to time but when every disaster is the biggest problem the world has ever known nothing feels like it matters.