Alright, thanks for linking that discussion. I'll try to keep my response to meaningful points
As things are right now, the site (and its authors and players) have grown up with the Back option being ever-present. This is fine, this is the way things are, the site was derived from CYoA books, which obviously had the back option IRL. CYS Games have been written with the express knowledge that mistakes can be undone by going back, and the player base knows this. Due to this common norm, 'throwaway' paths and joke endings exist, and that's fine.
In general, for a normal game, disabling back is a bad idea. It would feel restrictive, and unskilled authors would make otherwise good games painful. An otherwise good game could throw a player into an unwinnable state down the line, which be adversarial. This is a genuine concern, and I agree with it.
Now for the nuance.
At advanced levels of design, for what I'll call the Aerith reason, some choices are far more meaningful when permanent.
If the author is capable of making a game where 'failures' lead to interesting conclusions, the player is hurting their experience by running away from them by using Back (because they're conditioned that a 'bad' path is a dead end so they promptly go Back when they see a bad description in the first few lines). Since they've grown up in an environment where an ever-present Back has been a crutch, they're unintentionally spoiling their own experience.
In a lot of modern games, Ironman mode is a respected playstyle (and no honor system is going to stop me from reloading the accidental death of my namesake in XCOM without an enforced Ironman, speaking from experience here, damned falling damage). Paradox (Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Europa Universalis) only gives achievements in Ironman mode. XCOM Ironman is a whole different beast than cowardly reload-play. These games know that decisions are meaningful when irreversible, the mental frame of the player (the experience) is way different than playing with 'Backsies.' I want to create that experience.
SindrIV mentioned the problems of a failed boss fight (or any late game challenge) in a game with no back option spoiling a long-running game. The thing is, we have save-games that can be reloaded - the author could outright mention that this is a good place to save the game if they want to get all paths. If there's an option to automatically create a save-game the moment the player reaches a challenging 'instance,' from where they can reload combat or a skill challenge, that's fine by me - it makes the challenge itself meaningful, while not being adversarial (preventing the player from ever reloading would be adversarial). In fact, I'd be in favor of just adding a 'back to start of combat' link along with an End Game link in those moments. The win is meaningful when there's a risk of failure, and therein lies the crux of my argument for this system.
Quizzes on this site already implicitly do this when they don't show changes in score after each question. They hide the final result till the end, so the ending feels meaningful. Would Briar's excellent and devilish quizzes be as challenging (and be as rewarding in success) if you could immediately know if you answered correctly or not? No, they wouldn't. Hiding the outcome of a choice is a form of preventing players from being able to use Back.
I could build the interrogation sequence where I ask the player to 'lock in' their choices like a quiz (e.g. talk > talk > shout > hammer) but that makes for extremely unresponsive gameplay, (as the outcome is only known after the final choice, like a quiz) and thus I'd rather not go down this route (due to the lack of feedback to the player's actions).
In summary, I request authors (on request and not by default) be allowed to disable back at certain parts of the game, but saving definitely be a thing in those cases. In cases where there is no alternate path (e.g. boss fights), death pages should have a back to start of fight page, while disallowing saves and 'Back' during combat.
I hope I've been able to adequately explain my reasons, please let me know if otherwise.
Also, for some reason I imagined everything on that thread having a mullet for some weird reason.
