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The story game I'm working on has a long wall of text I'm separating with a 'choice'. The choice doesn't have a concrete effect like you earn a new item or discover a new character, but it does effect personality variables. 

I don't want to make my story linear, but I sort of need these choices otherwise you end up with 2000 words in a row. :/ So my questions would be: does a variable change count as an effect? If you were reading a story, would you prefer reading a lot in a row or making a choice, even though it doesn't seem to directly change anything? 

 

Another random question that came to mind: how much text can you tolerate before you get bored and wander away to other stuff? 

(Just asking for opinion, so I have a general idea of choice to text proportion.) 

Reading the examples given, it gives the impression you consider any choice that doesn't hand out an item or new character(?) to be meaningless. I'm not sure if that was your intention but it sounds like an odd sort of game you're writing. In most cases what you'd be looking at is how a choice effects the plot.

Either way there was a discussion on this not too long ago in another thread in this section you might find helpful.

Those were examples xD What I meant was a choice directly affecting the plot, yes, compared to a choice that appears to only change a few sentences. 

I'll be sure to find it. 

 

On text: use white space. Then you can include lots of text without it being a wall. At the same time, if you're putting 2,000 words on one page, that's an entire short story and not much of a CYS story.

As for effects, just make sure there is an actual effect. In other words if your options at the end of the page are:

Train with a knife
Train with a gun
Train with your fists

It is pretty obvious that you're attempting to add to a skill. Make sure the next page acknowledges that you actually learned something in that skill and make sure the increased skill provides a value in a choice later in the story and you're fine.

Thank you :0 

So far I have 800 words on one page and still wondering if I should cut it in the middle, like have 400 words then a link leading to the other 400 so it isn't overwhelming. 

As for the other advice, I'll keep that in mind! 

This has come up before and most agree 1000 words is about the max they want to read on a page.

You could do choices for the purposes of role play, if you're making something more geared towards the game side of things.

The Shadowrun CRPGs by Harebrained schemes do this where they offer you dialogue that simply allows you to chose the personality of your character, even if it isn't referenced later on (and some actual choices, ofcourse: it can't all be smoke and mirrors). 

I quite enjoyed being able to chose wether my character was stoic or jokey or something else, made role-playing tons of fun. Don't know how it would translate to story games thought, particularily if there aren't any 'gameplay' segments; constantly having to pick between 3 choices that don't change anything for the purposes of fluff probably would get annoying, but hey, you could add something minor like relationships or stats (think Choice of Games) to make even those minor choices have consenquences.

Best of luck,