I’m working on a choice based narrative game set in an alternate history version of the Diadochi Wars with some isekai elements. I’m trying to figure out how to handle branching paths in a way that gives the player real agency without causing the entire story to split into a hundred different directions. I want freedom without losing control of the plot and character arcs.
For example, I have a character who historically dies in 319 BC. In my story, he is also one of the main point-of-view characters. I created the possibility for him and around seven other characters to survive and go down alternate paths if the player makes the right decisions. But if he dies, the game still continues normally. The problem is that every time a character like this survives, it creates a new timeline and I am worried that I am creating too much extra work.
The game also has strategic and tactical elements where troop placement and movement matter. If the player loses a battle the character historically won, I don’t really want to rewrite the entire storyline to account for that change. But I also don’t want to just give a game over screen. So I’m considering making those battles replayable until the player gets the intended outcome. I’m not sure if that is the best solution though.
Another issue is that some characters surviving completely changes the last half of the story. The game is episodic, broken into seasons. The final season basically does not happen if certain alternate routes are triggered. So I am unsure if I should remove those alternate routes entirely. But if I remove them, it feels like I am taking away meaningful player agency. I want the game to be replayable with different outcomes, but I also don’t want the narrative to collapse under branching.
So I’m asking: in your own projects, how do you keep branching under control? How do you allow the player to make significant choices without letting the entire story fall apart? How do you keep the narrative on rails while still making players feel like their choices matter?
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If you want choices to be meaningful but not branch into a completely separate story each time, you need some sort of mechanical basis for modeling the state of the world, in such a way that you can fit the impact of any individual story beat into somehow impacting that world model. The most straightforward way to do this would be through some set of numerical stats chosen to be relevant to your story.
So, maybe “military strength” or “territory controlled” or “influence with X faction” are stats in your story, and winning or losing a battle affects those stats, and later events in the story can be affected by the state of those stats, but you should deliberately set things up in such a way that you don’t always have to consider how each specific, individual battle affects each other subsequent plot point.
See e.g. this blog post about doing this in the choice-of-games setting.
See also this well-known blog post about common ways of structuring a choice-based game. You might be interested in e.g. the “branch and bottleneck” pattern. Note the comment: “To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-tracking (if a game doesn’t do this, chances are you are dealing with a gauntlet).”
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The ‘floating modules’ structure would also seem useful for an episodic narrative.
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LEAD ME NOT UNTO TEMPTATION !!!
'nuff said, for an military and naval historian, the temptation IS strong, and I have already too many WIPs in my hand…
seriously, the best handling of your issue is caring that the branching is convergent (what I call “diamond” pattern:
that is, the branch converges into one or few endings…)
HTH, and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
p.s. 'fessing up again, I once (1990s) dabbled into (fortunately NOT interactive…) science fiction, around the canonical time travel interfering plot: kill with extreme prejudice in advance a certain austrian madman; the main theme was the fate-free will-karma triangle and in the end the protagonist after a 40-year sequence of failed attempts from Vienna in the 900s to the ruins of Berlin in 1945, came to understand said triangle, but his attempts unwittingly improves the lives of individuals which has come in contact… with interesting outcomes.
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Okay those are some great resources. I was curious if I would need to use larger numbers. I am currently using a 1 to 5 scale. I do not want people to save scum or try to game the system to get one perfect route.
The gameplay uses a deck of cards similar to Story Nexus, but the cards are used more like Cultist Simulator and sultan’s game . The player draws cards from different categories, and each card represents a type of action or decision. There are cards for making strategic moves, emotional responses, diplomatic choices, moral beliefs, and character relationships. Every card has a tier from 1 to 5 that shows how strong or impactful the action is. When the player chooses a card, it changes their personality traits and relationships over time instead of branching the story. This means there is no single best path, and no perfect answer. The cards shape who the character becomes, rather than what ending they unlock. The story always moves forward, and the player expresses themselves through the choices they make.
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