Effective talk: Giving players valuable and unique choices
Year of Talk: 2022
Overview:
Balancing act between a cohesive narrative, narrative impact the player feels they have in the game, and so on.
Due to no GM to adjust the game's narrative depending on player choices. It limits the amount of options available to the player. Each one counts.
Important to know when to make a game more suspenseful or playful and so on.
Try to understand how players might react and what they feel at that time.
Types of Impact:
Three main types; Cascades, Callbacks, and Heuristics
Cascades:
When a player's choice will affect the game state.
This can be killing off a character or siding with a side in a conflict.
The options must affect the world state.
Advantages:
Easier to set up than other options.
Normally there are a limited situation these options occur.
It keeps players talking about the options people choose.
Challenges:
It is very possible to over-promise and not deliver on it. People don't like it when it happens.
If too many options are given consistently people might lose track and can drastically grow the narrative of the game.
Tips and Tricks:
Make sure that narrative outputs that come out of said cascades can easily be noticed and affect the main narrative.
Determine how the decision might affect the story of the entire game.
Make sure the decision can be noticed in some way until the end of the game.
Callbacks:
Reference to previous events in the story.
It can be either a player's decision or some event in the story.
Makes sure people remember what might of recently happened.
Advantages:
It needs a lot of effort to implement.
No need to track its progress over the story. Once it appears it disappears.
It's possible to underpromise and over-deliver. (Too many callbacks which can be annoying).
Challenges:
Cant only have callbacks. People might get tired and feel like the story isn't moving forward.
A lot of booleans/flags to determine what can and cannot be called in the game.
Requires a lot of knowledge on all the things that can be referenced and have been referenced.
Players might think more things are being tracked that are important than exist.
Tips and Tricks:
Helps conversation flow better and feel less awkward. Take into account past comments or events.
Set up naming conventions so it's easier to know where different callbacks are meant to be slotted.
Spreadsheet with the entire list of all possible callbacks. Allows grouping and getting stats on how often callbacks occur.
Heuristics:
Simplify the problem to help reach a solution that works the majority of the time.
An example given is not knowing anyone has been struck by lightning. So it is not very likely to happen.
It helps when trying to show the relationship status between characters.
Will only need a handful of status effects that determine how a character sees the player to properly determine how they might react to the player's actions.
Advantages:
It helps make it easier to determine players' current relationships with different characters.
Can add nuance to cascade and callbacks as characters that are angry with the player might not like certain actions while other characters enjoy them.
Allows for a lot more reactions from characters to different situations.
Challenges:
Will need to consider how relationships might change over time and include a lot more dialogue to compensate.
Need various cascade and callbacks to be effective.
A lot of effort from writers to make sure the dialogue is impactful.
Can become too oversimplified and the narrative might become not enjoyable.
Tips and Tricks:
Once fully set up it can be easily used for a lot of characters.
Can be used to guide what options are available for cascades.
Depending on how the characters feel towards the player they might be more or less willing to reveal information.
Can use previous heuristics to help guide future decisions that can be options.
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