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Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago

Imagine a storygame with a detailed plot which has multiple characters that you can play through, with possibly the choice of which character you want to start with.

Now consider this. Character death is possible, but with a catch - as soon as your current character dies, the story continues and you change to one of the other characters, continuing the story. 

Of course, the plot would have changed drastically, since one of the main characters is no longer there to affect various events. There's also the possibility that some character routes will always lead to death (because they're meant to die, or because a character who could have saved them has already died as a result of your decisions). If a player survives a character's route long enough, however, then their "chapter" has finished, at least for the moment, and you can move on to one of the other characters to continue the story.

Thinking about this, it sounds pretty complicated depending on how many characters you have and may well lead the reader to experiment with multiple character deaths to see how they affect the story. Perhaps some good endings could only be reached by deliberately killing off a character who might have otherwise survived.

What are your thoughts on this, and how feasible is it? I don't know if something like this already exists, but I haven't seen one in a detailed storygame so far. It could potentially place greater emphasis on the urgency of survival and how each character is directly connected to the main storyline.

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago

I believe that a game in the Homo Perfectus series has a concept similar to the concept you mentioned about, except it uses endings instead of normal deaths. This is a good idea to show that you put a bunch of effort in the game, but you must be willing to put numerous hours and pages in your game if you attempt to do it. (Unless you create a story game where deaths aren't possible that is, but that's obvious)

In my opinion, it isn't feasible, unless you are willing to commit numerous hours of work in creating different paths, or making slight variations of the paths that you wrote about, and of course the endings that you get. To be honest, I think this is a good incentive to make readers play through the wrong paths, rather than a restart or an end game and leave comments link.

I believe that I had an idea like this whilst I was brainstorming for a game in the Wilderness contest, which I didn't complete because I am a lazy writer, and that it's too big of a scope of an idea. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's an alright idea, assuming that you don't have a strict deadline because of a contest, or if you're a lazy writer. 

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago
It's doable, it would just require a lot of attention to detail and a willingness to write multiple versions of the same scenes over and over again. Complexity would vary a lot depending on how interwoven you want each character's story to be. What you're suggesting right now sounds incredibly complicated, but, how feasible it is just depends on how much time you're willing to put in and whether you think you can stick to a project of that scale.

As usual, outlining is the first step to figuring this stuff out. You need to identify your cast of characters and then lay out all the plot points with notes on how they can be changed and by who to get an idea of just how much you're biting off here and scale it down or up depending on what you think you can handle.

Another approach to experiment with the same basic idea in a more manageable way would be dropping the 'drastically changing plot' idea and making something more like a roguelike or puzzle dungeon scenario. Every character's actions matter in that what they've cleared part of the way forward using whatever unique skills, but the focus is on achieving a goal in a more meta way and not so much on their relationships with the others.

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago
Near impossible within the current scripting system. I'm working on a game that invokes your example at some level, but beyond the issue of writing content from multiple perspectives, you need a system to deliver that content. SQL is a great solution if you're building in Unity, but there's nothing with that power here. The only option you have is to hard code every single interaction into every single page and run a massive chain of if/elses in every single page for every permutation (it's not worth it, believe me).

This is an interesting concept from a storytelling perspective, but not worth it at all from a design/implementation perspective, unless you can code in javascript (and even then, I'm not sure it'd handle databases that well)

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago

I had a concept for a story once called "Legacy" which was going to just follow a whole family bloodline.

Would probably be mostly royal in nature and in a fantasy setting since that's the easiest way to do it. The family probably wouldn't start out as royalty though and the first protagonist probably would have been just some commoner from a barbarian tribe or some other humble beginning.

Eventually the family member you were playing as would die in some fashion (Either violently or natural causes) and when that happened you just took over as one of their children.

If the protagonist you played as had no children then the story ended, though I probably would have had to do an arbitrary stopping point as well just so the story didn't go on forever. So the bloodline surviving 1000 years or so would be a fine stopping point.

Never got past the brief idea phase because it would be just too damn long.

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago

Sounds awfully like Crusader Kings II.

Storygame Progression Upon Character Death

6 years ago

Never played it, but the idea was partially inspired by a campaign in the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 expansion pack. (You played as a different descendent in each scenario)