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I've started working on my story game, but I've run into a bit of a dilemma. There's this situation where the player is offered one of two choices but both lead to an identical set of events happening, with the only difference being that one of the choices will have a few extra steps leading to the same result. I'm not really sure if it's worth leaving the choice in.

On the one hand, it makes sense that the protagonist has this choice since it is something that he would reasonably think of as an idea. Things just don't work out as he had hoped.

On the other hand, it doesn't really add any new information, nor does it open a path to any new endings.

I'm kind of at a loss as to which approach I should take in this case. I'd really appreciate advice on how you folks would deal with this sort of scenario.

I'd probably have to read it to know specifically. Generally its of course best to branch in some way, even if its small, but its not hard for me to imagine exceptions where this could work. I doubt it actually matters very much. As long as it presents some different thoughts he has it probably wont detract that much as long as there's still a lot of options to make later on in the story which feel more impactful. Although i do feel like there's a way to always improve that or make it a bit more engaging. If you offer me the link to the story I wouldn't mind giving it a quick read over to give a fresh perspective.

I haven't really penned that part down yet. Basically, the protagonist has a headstrong companion that wants to do things a certain way. If the protagonist tries to do something that doesn't yield the results the companion wants, then the companion takes matters into their own hands.

I'm sorry that I'm being vague. I just don't want to spoil my own story too much before I publish it.

That's basically a branch and bottleneck structure, which in theory is fine if not overused, sometimes branches do just fold back into each other.

If the same event happened, but you at least wrote it out a little differently or had the character's perspective on it change as a result of their failed attempt before the paths rejoined, that might go over better than just dumping them back onto the same page.

Oh, I see. I think I will try to rewrite any repeating pages to take into account previous events that might have happened then.

You might look up in the Help section how On Page Scripting works, it's a way you can change a few lines here and there based on a variable without needing to use entire duplicate pages.

I'm just writing the stuff in a word doc right now. I'm sure when I move the thing to the CYS editor, I'll have tons of questions. I already think I might have to dabble with variables and stuff, so I will be checking it out anyway, I'm sure.