Teeth Clenched Teamwork / Tabletop Games

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• This is how the Inner Sphere responded after the invasion of the Clans in the 3050s timeframe in BattleTech. The five Great Houses (and Com Star) have spent the last three or four hundred years fighting with each other constantly, and when the Clans arrive, initially each faction leaves their rivals to their fate, believing they can hold their own or at least let these 'alien invaders' do the hard work for them. Only the intervention of Jamie Wolf finally makes the Inner Sphere cooperate in what is at best an Enemy Mine scenario.
  • The invading Clans also have their own beef with each other, specifically with Clan Wolf and Jade Falcon, who's invasion corridor are next to each other, and they don't mind taking the time to attack the other when they get the opportunity. Then there's Clan Steel Viper, who share the Falcons invasion route. Eventually, they too started fighting each other and the Vipers were forcefully ejected out of the Inner Sphere for good.
  • ilKhan Ulric Kerensky deliberately invoked this trope when assigning reinforcement clans to the invasion. He deliberately assigned the reinforcement clans to invader clans for which they had contention with: Jade Falcons got the Steel Vipers, Ghost Bears got the Hell's Horses, and the Smoke Jaguars got the Nova Cats. His reason for doing this is that, as a staunch Warden stuck as a perverse punishment by the Crusader faction to head the whole invasion he disagrees with, he's doing whatever he can to covertly sabotage the whole invasion. Only his own, Clan Wolf, did not need another clan to reinforce them, since during his time as its Khan he ensured that the clan took the invasion with the seriousness and gravity it required before he was named ilKhan and it was the farthest along in the invasion, and his successor as Khan of the Wolves, Natasha Kerensky, was of the same ideological bent as him and even lived among the Inner Sphere as the covert recon operation decades before.
  • The teeth-clenching loosens briefly and slightly after the Battle of Luthien between the Federated Suns and Draconis Combine. Given that Hanse Davion used his magnificent bastardry to find a way to keep the Combine from falling while simultaneously keeping his neutrality promise to Kurita ^note Davion had given his word that the Federated Suns would not take advantage of the Draconis Combine being on the ropes by landing FedSuns troops on Combine territory. Therefore, he drafted the largest single mercenary contract ever by hiring the most elite merc regiments in the Inner Sphere and sending them to defend Luthien and fight alongside the Combine defenders of the world. As they weren't FedSuns troops, Hanse had kept his word., he managed to impress Takashi and Theodore Kurita sufficiently to briefly thaw the long enmity between the two powers.
• Changeling: The Lost revolves around this kind of teamwork. Four to six vaguely human characters who have been tortured in unique ways for the last twenty years all show up on earth around the same time and agree to work together out of necessity for numbers. Then a Fetch shows up and three of them want it dead, two of them want to reason with it and one of them is off picking his nose. If any of them actually hurts the others, they will get hit with the result of their Magically-Binding Contract that keeps them allies.
• A Teeth Clenched Party can lead to some brilliant situations in Dungeons & Dragons, especially when the players make their characters without caring how well they'll work with the rest of the team. Regularly degrades into We ARE Struggling Together, forcing the Dungeon Master to come up with Enemy Mine scenarios just to keep the players' characters from knifing each other over a few pieces of gold. Often overlaps with Elves vs. Dwarves and Evil Cannot Comprehend Good.
• Exalted: this is a common feature, especially in Circles that don't get along very well, but the absolute peak has to be when Sidereals of different factions are forced to cooperate. There's even an NPC who goes out of his way to force Bronze and Gold Sidereals to work together.
• The five Praetors of New Phyrexia in Magic: The Gathering. In particular, Jin-Gitaxias and Vorinclex never hide their hatred towards each other.
  • Many fans believe that this will eventually lead to an all-out Enemy Civil War.
• Can pop up in Masks: A New Generation. The players get a "Team Pool" that they can spend to boost each other through Team Spirit, but difficult circumstances (no clear leader, a distrusted leader, diverging aims in a given scenario) will reduce the size of the team pool and the overall effectiveness of the team.
• Implied in Sentinels Of The Multverse thanks to some of the card art, Word of God, and game mechanics, as any team of heroes works together even if the relationships between characters are actually strained.
  • In the first case, "Hippocratic Oath" in The Sentinels' deck shows Dr. Medico separating a bruised Expatriette and Chrono Ranger, who had apparently gotten into a fight.
  • Most superhero teams aren't fond of working with Setback and Guise — and further, they don't like being on a team with each other. Expatriette is the one hero who likes inviting Setback along, being a couple.
  • Tempest and Sky-Scraper will work together, but they do not get along well. Sky-Scraper is a Thorathian, like Voss, although her backstory has her in the resistance against him. Tempest, after seeing her in action against her nemesis, comes around to respect and admire her and she has joined the Prime Wardens by the time of the Tactics: Prime War expansion.
  • As far as mechanics go, Setback is hit again — some of his cards are detrimental to the hero team as a whole — forcing card destruction or discards — so working alongside him can be rough.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Imperial forces working together with xenos, which has happened in a variety of ways from Worthy Opponent to painfully bad. Indeed, several Imperial forces working with other Imperial forces, such as Space Wolves and Dark Angels, qualify.
    This is sometimes codified: the races are broken up into two super-factions, Order and Disorder (since the punchier antonym for "order" is already taken.) Disorder are everybody's enemies, all the time, especially each other; Order will team up in the face of an overwhelming threat from Disorder, and fight to the death any other time. This is officially codified by the Allies system introduced in the game's 6th edition rules, which has four settings (ranging from "battle-brothers" to "come the apocalypse, but not before"), with the middle two representing this trope. The main difference is that in the first the factions dislike each other a great deal but are willing to mostly cooperate, while the second is for those who are relentlessly paranoid and keeping an eye on each other in order to spot the coming betrayal so they can fire first.
  • This is the only way the Chaos Gods know how to work together, as the constant struggle for power they engage in inside the Warp, plus the intrinsic opposition some of the Gods have to each other, makes any alliance grudging at best and guaranteed to only last as long as they can keep causing trouble in realspace.

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