Conversation in CG

In most IF, a conversation between 2 or more characters… is not that conversation-ish.
I mean, it’s like… he says “hablahablah”. “bbllrrlbbrl” she replies. “beebububob” they exclaim.

Okay… that’s actually not what I wanted to point out. Let’s say…
You have a scene where you as the PC are enganged in a conversation with other NPCs.
Which one will you prefer?

  1. Get full control of what your PC asks or says. This is not necessarily you-ask-I-answer-I-ask-you-answer conversation style. Results in more choices and “denser” choice scenes.
  2. Let the conversation “flows” by itself, less control over what your PC’s saying. Results in “less dense” choice scenes, but not necessarily lesser choice options.

It is my belief, only the second can be truly accomplished - no matter how many different conversational possibilities you allow as choices, there will be things you, as an author, do not think of.

Especially when it comes to romance.

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@Eiwynn is right. It’s not possible to make an option for every thing the player might want to say. What is possible is for the player to always have some choice over what their character says.

That’s my preference even if there only a few options. I find that choosing what my character says helps me bond with her. Even if it’s a false choice, or there’s no choice at all, but my response is built into the page break button, it’s still better than having my character say something without me.

Of course, I know on the author’s side that can get kind of unwieldy, but that’s my preference.

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Well, what I have in mind is actually the first option :confused:

I’m currently writing a story and I get to the part where the PC have some talks with NPCs.

Yes, I’m aware of that “many choices little impact”. However, I write the options so that each will provide quite radical stats change and what the PC said will probably control the flow of the conversation since this conv. is one of my way to world-build the universe.

It’s basically where you have a chit-chat scenes and presented with average 3 choices each scenes… These choices will branch a 'lil bit but you can always ask another topic. The result was… yea… choices packed scenes that I personally found it too tedious sometime, but I like it in the other side.