There’s an encounter late in Chapter 4 of my WIP, The Rise of Cthulhu, where there is a choice based on Curiosity vs. Ignorance. If your Curiosity is 70 or higher, you have to choose the Curiosity-based choice. If it’s 30 or lower, you have to choose the Ignorance-based choice. If it’s in between, you can choose either one, and the one you choose shifts you toward that end of the spectrum. Trying to maintain a middle ground gives you more freedom of action, and skewing far in one direction in this instance means you cannot help yourself.
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I apologize if I’ve judged incorrectly—it sounds like IF is something where you want absolute and total control over every single output regarding your player and how the game responds to them. In other words, earlier IF and parser games are more your style. Those games tend to not to make “wrong guesses” and instead make no guesses to ensure all players are accounted for.
Contemporary IF players tend to want their game to adapt to their choices. Having the game not make guesses feel as if the game isn’t remembering their choices. They may also feel bored or uninterested by the game asking their response for each scenario (or default to a neutral or not describing them at all).
I’m not sure if I have this correct, of course. All I am reading that you favor a different sub-genre? approach? to IF games and that it’s been very difficult adjusting to the current style. To which I say, it must’ve been incredibly frustrating for you to find immersion in your stories.
I think I understand where you’re coming from, let me see:
Say you have 25 charm. You need 24 charm to select Option B (24 charm). You’re frustrated because:
- You feel you must always choose charm choices just so you can play charm choices later, even when you want to play more diversely.
- You feel annoyed that if you had 23 charm instead, you hit a fail state that doesn’t make any sense as you were just one shy of 24.
If you’re saying this, it’s something I also feel frustrated by. When coding games, accounting for specific intervals of failure for every choice and option can be hard for authors who aren’t coders and who have limited time. I think I heard Tally Ho and One Knight Stand tend to add in fun failure states.
Authors are usually taught that if player does not hit XYZ threshold, then the player meets fail state. It’s easier to code—especially since authors are often one-person teams, but now players feel they must play a certain way to hit enough points, which is very frustrating.
I struggled with Life as a Wizard because of this. I tried to give failure intervals with my own WIP, which is very. very. very time consuming. But the playthrough feels responsive. Sorry for the rambling, by the way.
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Age gap/ older woman/younger man romances.
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Not really, tbh. It’s not so much that i want personally full and total control etc. It’s more of a situation when, since the attempts for IF to adapt to player’s choices inevitably lead to mistakes about what those choices actually “mean” and exactly how the players might want the game to “adapt to them”, that i think a natural conclusion to this would be to let the player convey these things rather than try to guess them. This has a side benefit of saving the author work that goes in the often-faulty guesswork.
The game has much simpler means to show the player that their choices are remembered and matter – that is, by having these choices affect the plot. I believe this is ultimately what the IF players actually want. At least going by the amount of complaints aimed at IFs which make the player feel like they’re just a hapless observer in a story where the author’s OCs are running the show and getting all the spotlight.
Also i’m not sure why you feel that the game asking the player for their input to avoid confusion would feel like not remembering their choices. After all, if you’re asked to clarify why you made the choice(s) that you did, then those choices evidently are remembered.
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That can have its pitfalls too. If the player makes the same type of choice repeatedly and still gets asked about it every time, it can feel like the game isn’t remembering them.
“Why am I still always being offered peace-and-love reaction options when by now it should be obvious that I’m playing as a ruthless cynic?”
“Why is the game still asking me if I’m romantically interested in this person when I’ve clearly and repeatedly signalled that I am?”
“When I’ve been consistently roleplaying a shy MC, why doesn’t that ever show up in the flavor text around my dialogue and actions?”
“Why are my stoic and emotional playthroughs of this game completely identical outside of choice blocks?”
It’s of course possible that a reader of your tastes (and there are plenty!) wouldn’t say any of those things, because you strongly prefer a game that makes as few assumptions as possible. But I’ve also seen plenty of irritable responses from readers when it feels like the game doesn’t really keep track of their personality.
Having the power to affect the plot rather than just observe it is indeed a near-universal preference among the readership.[1] But I don’t think the same is true when it comes to distaste for personality stats, especially when it comes to their use in flavor text rather than gating off choices (and especially if the author treats the “middle zone” as its own thing, not just a blah default for failed minmaxers).
An author who gets so scared of “guessing” that they don’t textually extrapolate from past reader choices without explicit reader say-so is likely to annoy a bunch of the audience by not making them feel “remembered.” They’re vulnerable to the “fake choice” criticism–“you keep asking me why I did that, and then my answer doesn’t really affect the text I’m given later, you just ask me again.” The author may even end up in the trap of making readers feel like they’re not affecting the plot; on the evidence of complaints I’ve seen through the years, a high total volume of “how did you feel about that?” or “why did you do that?” choices can feel like a game of fake-choice railroading, even in games where the MC does a bunch of plot-consequential things.
Though there’s timing to consider–readers can get upset if you push highly consequential choices on them that they don’t understand, because they haven’t yet observed enough to grasp the likely impacts on the plot. Lots of popular games start with mostly-observing (often observing the actions of cool OCs) before moving into high-consequence mode. ↩︎
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That’s a good point. I suppose a refinement could be made here, where the game uses player’s consistency (after a few initial interactions) to determine whether questions are warranted, if the MC displays behavior which doesn’t match the pattern? If a game/MC notices they “aren’t acting like themselves” that might even lend to the perception that the game “remembers your choices” if simply asking instead supposedly can lead to opposite feeling.
I think this is a misunderstanding of my suggestion. Which was to always give a choice of behavior and then apply it for the associated scene/block. In this sense there’s no content “outside of choice blocks” and the choice is applied to the dialogue and actions of that particular sequence. So if e .g. the players opts for their MC to be pissed and angry, they are pissed and angry rather than snap back to shy wallflower they’ve played before immediately.
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Getting back to a really old comment but just reading through this thread now - I had exactly the same thought. Choosing between the obvious options (like always having to pick swordfighting to succeed if that is your highest skill) can become quite limiting in terms of gameplay.
That’s why I’m implementing a system similar to the one you mentioned in my WIP Sins in Chrome. The player is able to choose a cybernetic body modification, and then further available choices or interactions are based only on the chosen augmentation.
Looking forward to see how this is received 
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Argh, I forgot about the existence of the internet again! But at least I’m two weeks late rather than eight years late this time…
@Doginacan Callbacks! Yes! I think part of what I love about them is that it makes me feel like all the little tiny choices I make aren’t just there because the writer wanted to give me something to do, and actually matter in a small way. Also @Cain_Abel Yes! It is so rewarding when a character mentions something the two of you did together, or a choice you made. It makes the relationship feel so much more real when you know your decisions aren’t just being fed into a stats recorder.
@CobaltAlbireo On hiding stats. Yes, I feel the same way. The fact is, fairmath does reward consistency of character choices more than anything else, so it’s hard not to end up maximising. I quite like it when games make it clear early on that you are going to need more than one strong stat, because then it gives you more options. I am now wondering how hard it would be to have an option early on to allow the player to select whether they want to see stats or not. I think possibly not all that difficult? You could for example have two versions of the stats page: one which shows stats normally, and the other which shows only qualitative accounts of how things are going and how you are known. Though perhaps even that would be more information than you would like? I suppose there could be a third option to turn off stats altogether? As others have said, I don’t think it would be fair to just not give the option of seeing stats, because they are really important to some play styles, but I think it could be possible to give you the option to shut them off at the start and then never have a chance to see them without re-starting the game, for example (anything less than that would, I suspect, be like locking yourself out of a particular app on your phone, where you just get really fast at navigating to the right part of the settings menu to unlock it!).
@Myrtle I love all these examples. I do use a lot of “if number >X you can do the thing” stats for the main plot, because I think it’s a really effective way to make outcomes match up to who the player has told the game they are. But I have increasingly been using the kinds of things you describe to account for things the game can’t record as a main stat, because it won’t affect the various end states. For example, are you chatty, or more of a listener? That won’t really affect how good a leader you are, or how skilled you are at channeling magic, but it matters to what NPCs expect from you, and how they respond to you. Some of them will prefer one, some another, maybe.
That said, I totally take @fsix 's point. The code is necessarily fairly simple (though of course you can do a lot of layering), and there’s no way really to record intention. I suspect it’s one of those situations where a mixed approach is best. For example, I generally try really hard not to put words into the PC’s mouth if I can instead give them a dialogue choice. And when I can, I make those kinds of callbacks specific to one choice (“What are you wearing?”, for example), so I’m not extrapolating. I think something can potentially also be done with a weaker text change. In your ‘irreverence’ example, say, it might work better if an NPC just kind of raised an eyebrow if you made the snarky choice when you usually haven’t done. It’s a bit more ambiguous, so it can be read into, but it is meaningfully there.
@Havenstone I have been thinking so much about this!! Because of course, it isn’t just that you have to match what the player wants to say, but potentially how they want to say it. And all in about five dialogue options. So, for example, I have found it easier to write the ‘straightforward’ option a bit more snarky, and the ‘dutiful’ option a bit more earnest. It might perhaps be safer to just write all PC dialogue options in the same fairly neutral tone, but I do find that tricky when I am reading a game, and none of the options have beauty or pizzazz! One approach I have been experimenting with is picking, say, five fictional characters I know well, and writing a dialogue line for each of them in response to the situation. What would Captain Picard say? What about Stephen Maturin? Or Sam Vimes? Or Susan Ivanova? Something I like about this approach is that each time, it gives the player a glimpse into another version of the story - the version where they played as a completely different sort of person. I think it is inevitable that players will end up with no options that match how they see their character, but perhaps by mixing up the characters I imagine, they won’t be in that position too often? I suppose a much more labour intensive way would be to let the player choose a ‘type’ at the start, and write like three versions of each dialogue choice - one snarky, one kind, one, I don’t know, thoughtful or something.
@LisHz I think I agree with your point about ‘responsive not restrictive’. Particularly when it comes to multireplace flavour dialogue. In your example, a player who is about 50% subtle and 50% attention grabbing, presumably they sometimes slip into a room and sometimes stride in. Maybe the player would have chosen the other option this time, but I think if they are playing the character as quite versatile in that way, it probably won’t damage immersion too much if you choose the opposite. It is still the sort of thing they might have done.
I also think it’s important that the above example is a bit of flavour text to describe what the player does. Generally, your choices impact how other people in the game see you. And I think that is mainly where it’s rewarding to introduce a lot of variability. Maybe you will choose to be tactful this time, but because you generally haven’t been tactful up until now, this character isn’t going to trust you to do so now.
Basically, I think it is totally fair game if the NPCs make assumptions about what the PC will do based on what they’ve done before, because that’s how people work. I think it’s fair enough if they are surprised when you act differently to how they imagined. But I do think that is really different from the game guessing how you will respond, which I think would annoy me.
I am very interested in all the discussion about what to do with ‘middling’ PCs. I don’t end up in that position particularly often because I tend to just always choose the chatty options, but I do think that without really having a plan for non-extreme players, there is a danger that you are really writing a game with maybe six possible character archetypes the player can choose if they want to be able to succeed in their endeavours. I don’t have an answer for this, but it is an interesting problem. I suppose you could sort of divide the ‘opposed’ stat into, say, three groups: first 33%, middle 33%, last 33%. Then decide what sort of a person the middle one is, and think of ways for them to succeed that are unique to that particular, more equivocal build.
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