The Mythcreant Podcast 569 – Audience Choices in Storytelling
When reading a book or watching a movie, there aren’t many choices for the audience to make. We can decide how fast to read and whether to keep going, but the actual story is set. But what if it wasn’t? Not all storytelling mediums are the same, and this week we’re talking about the ones where players get to make choices. Do those choices matter? That’s an entirely different question.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Joining me for a third time is my brother Ari.
Ari: Hello once again, everyone.
Oren: So you know what’s fun: writing one story. So what would be twice as fun is if you had to write two stories, based on a choice someone made early at the beginning.
Ari: Well, that’s just many times the story. So that’s just a better story at that point. That’s more story for your story.
Oren: Yeah. And then you could do it a couple more times until you’re writing infinity stories pretty quickly.
Ari: Mm-hmm. I don’t see any problems with this.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just fine. So this is what happens when you introduce audience choice into storytelling, and I’m using that terminology specifically because this can cover a range of different mediums. The most obvious examples would be either TTRPGs or video games where the players can make choices directly. But in theory, you can also have something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are some movies that work this way.
Ari: You mean the storytelling masterpiece of the Clue movie with multiple endings.
Oren: Yeah, although that one is less about audience choice, that one’s more like what theater you happen to be in.
Ari: It’s true, but I just wanted to reference one of my favorite movies.
Oren: It’s a good movie. Netflix has a movie. I’ve forgotten the name of it and I should have looked this up before the show, but whatever, I’ll put it in the show notes, that has an interactive element where, as you’re watching it, you decide what happens next and it’s quasi-interactive. So when you’re dealing with a written medium, this of course introduces a whole host of problems. With an RPG, you’re not really writing an RPG.
Ari: Hopefully not, anyway.
Oren: Presumably you’re reacting in real time, but with a video game you still gotta write whatever happens because of the characters doing things. So that’s hard. So here’s a important question. Is more choice more good?
Ari: No.
Oren: No? Okay.
Ari: No, not at, not at all. It can be good, but like a lot of things, there’s moderation.
Oren: All right. Well, that’s the end of the podcast.
Ari: Yeah, we did it. I solved it. You’re welcome. Everyone come back next time.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I love making choices in video games and feeling like it matters, but that second part is important. And I recognize that most game studios don’t have infinite writing time.
Ari: Exactly. The quality of the story matters a lot more to me than the number of choices. I would love more choices in my RPGs, but not if it comes with the cost of a game being worse or the story being worse.
Oren: There’s a concept in game design called Diamond Dialogue, which is where you make a choice and it goes off in two directions, and then those both come back to the same place.
Ari: I’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3, and there’s a ton of that in there. And some of it is more obvious than others.
Oren: You can make it work, but sometimes it starts to feel pretty obvious that you’re not really making any different choices and the results are kind of… jarring. In Rogue Trader, which is a Warhammer 40k game, you can become almost fully chaos-infected and everyone will just hang out until the end of, I think act four.
Ari: Yeah. Then – Team Good is a generous term, uh, Team Not-Chaos – will leave your group at that point. You hit the threshold for when the choice will matter because, like you said, there’s limited time and also the game might not function super properly if most of your party disappeared early.
Oren: There are a lot of very chaos choices you can make that I figure would’ve driven them away long before then.
Ari: Oh, yeah. 100%.
Oren: Heinrix is an Inquisitor and he is there watching me make a deal with the chaos governor of one of my planets. Like, I don’t think he’s sticking around for that.
Ari: This is actually interesting. The video games I see take two approaches and we kind of see them at different spots in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Rogue Trader.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Ari: Whereas in Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s really easy to lose your party members super early based on those decisions you make. But once you hit a certain point late in act two, or especially in act three, it feels like no matter what you do, they are with you till the end. You have your lady who, her whole thing is “I hate mind flayers,” and you’re like, let’s all be mind players. And she’ll be like, okay, that sounds like a great idea. I was like, wait a minute, this seems like one of the one things you would not be okay with. And then you have, like you mentioned in Rogue Trader, where it feels like at the beginning it’s almost impossible to lose them with a couple of notable exceptions. And then at the end is when it’s like, oh, oh, you made those choices – okay, time for consequences. And so then you lose a bunch of party members if you have gone to the wrong type of evil.
Oren: Yeah. It is funny how easy it is to not get certain party members at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3. Almost like the game has a few traps built into it.
Ari: Like, you could just slap Gale’s hand and he’s just gone. Bye, Gale. Or if you’re the dark urge, it’s even worse. if you don’t understand the dialogue that the dark urge gives you, where it’s like imagine you’re doing an evil thing, means you are doing the evil thing – then Gale’s just dead in that one. It’s so easy, and then at the late game, it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you say to these people.
Oren: I was really confused how quickly Lae’zel agreed to lie to the other Githyanki for me, and that’s not really a choice thing. She’ll do that regardless of what choices you make, but that was definitely an example of them sacrificing character realism for the sake of keeping the party together.
Ari: Yeah, and I don’t mind, I understand the limitations of game development, although sometimes it feels like Baldur’s Gate certainly had the resources to do some of these things better than they did. But what I don’t like is when it feels like the game is trying to trick me into thinking that, oh yeah, your choices definitely matter. Don’t worry about it…wait. No, they don’t. Like that Diamond Dialogue design, when that is so heavily used to the point where I know what I say doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’ve gone so far as to reload just to see, and it is like, there’s eight options here and they’re all meaningless. There’s no difference and nothing changes based on what you say, and what you say could be radically different! Like: what are you doing? I wanna take over the world and eat the dead and rip and tear and skulls for the skull throne and whatnot. Or you could be like, I wanna just help everybody. And then the thing goes, well, you’ll figure that out tomorrow. And then that’s the end of the dialogue. Why did you have me respond to this? This doesn’t matter.
Oren: The funniest one is when Raphael, the demon or devil, I forget which one –
Ari: He is a devil.
Oren: Yeah. And he offers you a bargain for your soul and you can’t accept. Yeah, you can say yes.
Ari: He is like, you’re not supposed to say that yet. That’s not till act three. Go away. We’re not ready for that.
Oren: Why did you give me this choice if I’m not allowed to take it?
Ari: Baldur’s Gate, I think, has this worse than Rogue Trader, but it’s like the game assumes, well, no one’s going to click this. Why’d you put it in there? Someone’s gonna click it.
Oren: That is replicating the accurate D&D experience though, because sometimes GMs will give you a choice and they just don’t expect you to make one of the choices. But you can, and sometimes it feels like it makes some more sense to.
Ari: At least in A TTRPG, you can react to it as the GM. The game is just kinda left floundering. You’re like, oh, what a lovely lampshade you have here. It’s beautiful. It really ties the room together.
Oren: There are some times where I feel like the choice actively makes the game worse is when you are given a choice that has a really negative repercussion that there’s just no way you could have predicted. I just feel like, why are you punishing me for this? The worst one, the worst of any I’ve ever seen was this game called Heart of the Woods, which is a visual novel that does not appear to have any branching choices. It appears a hundred percent linear until you get to the end, where there are two bad endings and a good one, and which one you get depends on a random dialogue choice you made eight hours ago.
Ari: Excellent.
Oren: Did you say ‘I promise to make it up to you’, or did you say ‘you’re right?’ Because you should have said ‘you’re right’ if you wanted the good ending.
Ari: I don’t want you to say you’ll make it up to me. I wanna be right.
Oren: It’s the weirdest thing. And it was so surprising that when our friend who’d recommended it to me was talking to me about the game, he didn’t understand what I meant because he just didn’t realize there were multiple endings. Because it does not seem like a game with multiple endings.
Ari: I’ve seen some people defend this when a character says something in a video game and then it just turns out they’re lying to you. Like in Baldur’s Gate 3 – Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good game, by the way, for anyone wondering. I do think it’s a good game, but I’m playing it right now and it is one of the biggest RPGs that’s come out in the last decade, so I’m using it as an example. Where you meet murder Harley Quinn Orin – not podcast Oren, very different. Alter ego, I assume. And she’s like, oh, I took one of your people and I’m gonna murder them if you come after me. That’s just a lie. She won’t. So it’s almost like, she lies to you, but this is a video game. I don’t…A, she could just kill them. If this was a realistic world, she could see me coming and stab them in the face. But also, it’s a video game. So I know there are limitations and I just kind of have to believe characters ’cause there’s no way to check their story. It feels like the choice of ‘do you go after them or not’ doesn’t really feel like a choice. Because I have no idea what the consequences are without looking them up. And anytime I have to look up the consequences of an action, not because I wanna make the perfect choice, but just so I understand where are we operating here as far as is this character even being truthful with me, I think is a failure of the game story. And I would rather less choice than that.
Oren: Yeah, I kind of feel like you probably shouldn’t put in choices that you know are just leading to a deliberately bad ending, but that’s obviously a pretty controversial stance. I do think we could compromise on don’t have characters recommend things that if I do them, will be bad for non-story reasons. The most blatant example of this is in Mass Effect 2.
Ari: That’s rough buddy.
Oren: Poor Jacob. Not a great character to start with. And when you’re talking to him, and I think Miranda is the other one, Miranda’s like you could go and prepare to fight the collectors, which means do all the side quests. And Jacob’s like, no, I think you should go and fight the collectors immediately because we don’t have time to wait around. Do not do that!
Ari: Don’t do that. That’s the bad ending.
Oren: You will get the worst ending. But in character, it makes sense that Jacob would say that because we don’t have time, right? The collectors are doing stuff now. Jacob doesn’t know that the collectors will just wait for you to do all the side quests.
Ari: Also, if you do it that way, Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly short game. Mass effect 2 is like 80% companion acquisition and then loyalty missions.
Oren: Yeah, it’s bizarre to me that they even have a character suggesting that. And I’ve even seen that listed in reasons Jacob’s a terrible character and like, that’s not Jacob’s fault, man. Don’t put that on him.
Ari: And I could see why the writer put it in there. That makes sense for him to say. But also, this is a video game, and don’t tell me to do something that’s not just a bad idea story-wise, but also robbing me of a lot of content. Like back in Baldur’s Gate 3, your dream visitor – who in my game is just my character, but with a commanding mustache –
Oren: It’s a good visitor.
Ari: – Will say, don’t go to the Githyanki creche. Don’t go into the astral prism. If you don’t do that, that’s a huge amount of the story you just don’t get. You’ll learn those things eventually anyway, at least for the astral prism part. But you can just skip the Githyanki creche and if you follow that character’s advice, ’cause they’ve been right about everything else so far and they seem to have your best interests at heart, you just missed out on a pretty cool area. And the same can be said for visiting House of Hope in act three, Raphael’s House. The dream visitor, who you know now at this point and is theoretically even more your ally, says don’t do that. It’s a waste of time. It’s dangerous. There’s no reason to do it. We have a plan, but is there a real reason I shouldn’t do it? Or is there just this character telling me and they’re just wrong. And it turns out the dream visitor is just incorrect. You can just do that. Get a bunch of cool loot. It’s great.
Oren: And you can see how they’re imagining this because in a tabletop game, if I had an NPC suggest, okay, don’t go there, and the players are like, oh, that’s a good idea, I would then create the story in such a way where a different cool thing happened. Something that wouldn’t have happened if they’d gone to the House of Hope, if I had been designing the game properly. Now, there are GMs who will design a whole dungeon for you and then be like, do you want to go to the dungeon?
Ari: Yes.
Oren: And then you don’t get the out of game signal and so you say no ’cause you think there’s a different place to go. And then they’re just kind of sad. That’s its own thing.
Ari: Playing an RPG with your friends, there’s also that room for investigation to a certain point when an NPC in a video game says a thing, sometimes I’m like, no, I wanna know more about that. And then there’s just no dialogue for it, but in tabletop, your players could be like, do we believe them? Are they telling the truth? What vibe do we get from that? Yeah. And you can, as the GM, be like, well, you sense that they’re really scared or something. You know, you could give reasons as to why this person might personally say this, but not necessarily as the GM telling you that you shouldn’t do a thing. That can make a huge difference. And video games just don’t have that flexibility. It’s especially bad in Baldur’s Gate 3 because the character, the way it talks to you is omnipotent narrator-type voice that just appears in your head. So it feels, if anyone is the writer stand-in for what I should and shouldn’t do at this point, it’s this magic voice in my head that seems to know everything.
Oren: I mean, if we’re gonna keep talking about choices in Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s very funny that they have this whole temptation arc with the tadpoles, but taking the tadpoles doesn’t do anything. Nothing bad happens if you take them. They’re just cool powers.
Ari: I assume it’s a relic of an earlier system that was going to make that matter. I can see a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 where that was a huge part of it. I think either the remnants of it when they scrapped it or stuff that they had, so they just put it in there because don’t waste the work if you can use it somewhere. And then you don’t see anything about it past act one, which makes me think that that was dropped relatively early and act one was designed kind of as the standalone space where they were still figuring out what they wanted the game to be, which is why sometimes the very beginning, I think they’ve taken this out. Your character has voice lines in act one as just a random person, and I assume that’s a relic from when your character was supposed to be voiced, and they never talk again, and it’s just weird.
Oren: I really wish your character was voiced. I know why they’re not. I understand that it production-wise would’ve been a nightmare, but man, one of the few moments that I actively dislike Baldur’s Gate 3 is when an NPC gives me like a brilliant setup for some kind of impassioned reply, and my character just stands there silently.
Ari: And it’s funny ’cause I feel like they could have at least voiced some of the replies for the origin characters, because they already had the voice actors in, they have the dialogue choices. Obviously that is more time in the booth and costs more, but I personally believe Baldur’s Gate 3 had the resources for that.
Oren: The tadpole thing reminded me of a better version of that in Road Trader, where you start off the game with a shard of this chaos blade. And that’s one of the big choices they ask you to make in the beginning, is what are you gonna do with this thing? And you can start leaning into it and you will eventually get really cool powers. You will also be chaos-ed.
Ari: You get a really cool sword. That’s not the same as saying it’s a really good sword, but it is really cool.
Oren: It looks great. You will feel stylish.
Ari: Yes, 100% the sword element part of Rogue Trader works really well, A lot better than the tadpole non-dilemma that the game introduces. And you get to make friends with the giant space chicken if you want, which is pretty cool too.
Oren: Everyone likes the space chicken. Now, we’ve been talking a lot about choices early in the game, so it might be worth looking at how do choices pay out at the end of the story. And it’s really interesting to me to see how different games do it. Usually they try to collapse your choices down into roughly the same ending with a few changes because again, they don’t have time, right? They can’t make a billion different endings. But with the exception of Rogue Trader, again, because Rogue Trader’s endings are a bunch of texts on cards, so it’s a little easier.
Ari: Yeah. They can write a lot of those.
Oren: Although they do bug pretty badly.
Ari: Oh yeah. They don’t always make sense, but they do have a lot of them. Characters are both very alive and very dead at the end of my Rogue Trader games, according to the end cards.
Oren: Yeah, but most games don’t do that, and so they have to give you an ending where it at least feels like your choices line up. Baldur’s Gate is okay at that. I think Fallout: New Vegas is actually probably one of the best ones.
Ari: I’d agree with that. Fallout: New Vegas also does a combination where they have the final action climax of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, followed by the end cards. I love the end card system. I love it so much. I used it in my cursive drive game for my post game credits that I did for my group. I think that with the limited time and budget they had to do a lot with a little, and I think that was a very smart use of the resources they had.
Oren: Yeah, I think that you’re ending at the same battle regardless, but which side you’re on makes a big difference. And then what you do when you win, that makes it feel like your ending choices matter quite a bit. Baldur’s’s gate 3 ending is fine. The big choice you make at the end there is independent of the other choices you’ve made.
Ari: Yeah, you fight the big brain and then you’re kind of allowed to do almost anything regardless of what you’ve been saying you’ll do leading up to that, which isn’t my favorite method. It is nice to have some level of freedom. You’re not just completely locked in from a choice you made eight hours ago, but the other side is, why did I make all those choices if basically just comes down to the dialogue tree right at the end?
Oren: Yeah. You’ve been rejecting mind flayer powers this entire time, but now you can become the elder brain if you want to.
Ari: Yeah, on reflection, I would love to be the elder brain. You know, they make a good point. So yeah, let’s sign me up. Let’s go.
Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize that’s where this was going.
Ari: That was so sweet. And then you have like Mass Effect 3.
Oren: Oh boy.
Ari: Oh boy. What Instagram filter do you get on your cinematic right at the end?
Oren: Yeah, I mean, that one is pretty infamous. It’s interesting to see with Mass Effect 3 less the choices at the very end and more how the choices that they gave you in Mass Effect 2 create problems for 3. Because in theory, you can start Mass Effect 3 with most of your party dead. If you fail the end, especially if you take Jacob’s advice in Mass Effect 2, most of your party will not survive the final level, and so you have to be able to play the game with almost no companions from the rest of the series.
Ari: Yeah, everyone’s just gone.
Oren: Which is why they suddenly introduced several new ones.
Ari: Yeah. Hot take, Mass Effect 2, I think, does the series dirty. There’s a lot of problems that come from Mass Effect 2. I know it’s the darling for a lot of people.
Oren: Well, I mean, it’s the best one, but it is the problem child.
Ari: Although I would argue gameplay wise – it’s not what we’re talking about, but it did suffer the worst from the remake. So if you’re replaying the trilogy, don’t be surprised if Mass Effect 2 feels kind of the odd one out in the gameplay department.
Oren: Little clunky there. I was gonna move on to talking about tabletop games.
Ari: Yeah, sounds great.
Oren: I figured it would be useful to talk about choices in tabletop games because that’s the other place where they tend to come up a lot. So how do you approach that? Because you run D&D, which is very different from the freeform, go with your feelings kind of games that I tend to run.
Ari: Yeah, these touchy feely games. Not for cool math nerds like me.
Oren: Yeah. The namby-pamby hippie games. That’s right.
Ari: So for me, I have a couple of general story beats in mind, especially if it’s something I’m working on completely custom. I did a campaign called The Undiscovered Country, just completely my own creation. And I tried to create a cast of characters that would all spend the first act, I guess, of the game, meeting the party, and then seeing who does the party like, who do we vibe with here, and then their level of importance would be adjusted accordingly. That way it felt like I didn’t have to put a ton of work into all these characters and then just hope I guessed right as to who the characters would choose to interact with. And then once I knew that, then it would become a lot easier to shape the major story moments that I had thought of, for each of these characters to be central portions of the game.
Oren: Honestly, I use a pretty similar strategy. The way I see it is that there needs to be a balance between player choice and what the GM wants to do. Assuming you’re doing a kind of traditional GM tells a story to the players and then takes the players into account when making the story, right? So there are interactive concepts out there if you wanna play a GM-less game, or one where the game is governed by a flow chart or whatever. But if you’re playing a more traditional RPG, there has to be give and take on both sides. If the GM is like, hey, we’re doing a paranormal investigation game in this town that I made, players should not be making the choice to not go to the town.
Ari: We’re moving to Chicago. That was in the Dresden Files, so there’s probably some stuff over there.
Oren: Yeah, you have to be willing to buy in that amount. This is kind of Roleplaying 101 stuff, and you either do it with a session zero or you can just kind of intuit it if you know your players really well. But within that, I try to make it so that my players can make the choices that they want within reason. I have certain players, who will remain nameless, who sometimes try to find the not-viable choices to see if I’ll let them make those.
Ari: Yep. I’m familiar with those types of players.
Oren: Yeah, and you know, I love them, but that can be a little hard to deal with. [laughs]
Ari: Sometimes my strategy has been terrible panic as I realize that I’m playing a prebuilt module that didn’t actually give the players a reason to do the story, and I just have to rely on my players’ goodwill to descend into Avernus. The game doesn’t give you a reason to go to Avernus, which seems kind of important because you’re literally going to hell. I just have good players who were like, yeah, okay, we’re going to hell. I guess this otter wizard told us to, and I very quickly had an NPC who the characters had developed some attachment with saying, I have a reason to go to hell. I’m gonna go there and die if I have to. So the players are like, okay, we’ll go with that. Sometimes the game you’re running, especially if it is pre-made, doesn’t have good decision points built into it because it doesn’t provide your players with anything to work with. Be aware of that, especially if you’re running prebuilt adventures.
Oren: Yeah, definitely read the prebuilt adventure ahead of time. You don’t know what it’s gonna do. It could be weird.
Ari: I just assumed they had a reason and it wasn’t until we got to that session, where it was like, oh no.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve been on the other side of this, where the GM clearly expects me to make a choice to continue the story that doesn’t seem good to me. At the risk of a cliché, it does not seem like something my character would do, and I do my best to try to make my character the kind of character who would do what’s necessary for the plot. But players don’t like being humiliated, so if you require them to kiss a bunch of boots to continue the story, they’re probably just not gonna do it.
Ari: Yeah. Why am I asking them to go jump through these hoops of feeling very uncool to get to the fun part?
Oren: There was a Firefly module that a friend of ours tried to run in college, where you land on a planet and everyone’s really rude to you at first, and what you’re supposed to do is do unpaid jobs for them and you’ll be then paid in exposure and eventually you can build up enough reputation to get paying jobs. We came here on a spaceship. We could just go somewhere else. Especially since not knowing that this was the premise, I made a character with the rich trait, I think it’s called Moneyed Individual, but it’s the trait that means you’re rich and it’s actually very cheap – which is sort of a problem in a game where you’re supposed to be a hard scrabble trading vessel – but that’s a different question. So as a result, it was just really hard to get into the head space of we gotta do these crappy exposure jobs to build up to the paying ones, you know?
Ari: Yeah. I had that problem as a player as well, where this world that my friend made for us where every NPC was a jerk to us, regardless of what level we were and what we had done for them. Late into the campaign, we were level 14 or 15 or something, and you’re kind of a big deal at that point. These people are still just mouthing off to us the whole time, and it made me like really frustrated and I didn’t even wanna work with these people. It became really hard to, like you said, get into the head space of we’re cooperatively building this story. Like, I don’t wanna work for these jerks. They’re all being unnecessarily rude when literally all we’ve done is help them. I don’t really wanna interact with them anymore. So I just sass them and then go and do the quest because I wanna fight something, which is not where I want to be as a player in D&D.
Oren: Alright, there’s one more thing I wanted to talk about, which is how do you feel about games that have a roughly good run and a roughly evil run? And the evil run is always underdeveloped.
Ari: They have to be, if you have a run where you are guessing more than half of your player base is just never gonna see the evil content. You don’t have infinite resources, no matter how big your studio is, and when you could make a better good run at the expense of your evil run, yeah, do it. I think Rogue Trader is the most likely to have your player at least trying chaos, because chaos is a fairly popular faction in Rogue Trader, and also it’s fun. Everyone’s a jerk in Warhammer, so it feels less bad that you’re the biggest jerk, but I think it’s worth it if it gets you a better campaign that the majority of your audience is going to be engaging with. Myself included. I am totally fine that Caesar’s Legion has way less content to it because I don’t wanna play those people. They’re awful. I feel bad whenever I talk to them or have to interact with them. So get rid of it.
Oren: I feel for players who see, oh, there’s an option for an evil run, I’ll try that, and then they feel punished because the evil run is just not well made. I understand why that is really frustrating. By the same token, if we’re dealing with a limited pie, I want more of the pie and I’m only ever playing the good runs. So.
Ari: I’ve seen it discussed that, oh, just don’t have one. Don’t have an evil option. But then I also see people complain about that, and it’s the same people. Yeah, it does stink that one of these has less content. In a perfect world, they would both have the exact right amount of content to be the best stories they could be. But I think the inclusion of evil options is almost as valuable as actually building out those evil options. Knowing that you could have been a big jerk, but you chose to do good, I think is a valuable and necessary portion of a lot of games. That is what that’s doing. Because if you took it out, it would feel like you weren’t making choices at all.
Oren: Alright. Well, I think that is a good place to end the podcast on. For those of you playing the good run at home, you can make the choice to pledge to our Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
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