Are you Male, Female, or bot? What is your preferred sex? Male, female, bot? What type of skin do you have? How tall are you? What is your personality? Are you a stud, bombshell, a noob, or bot? ... Once in awhile I will see a story where the author has many choices to build characters then if the author isn't exhausted starts to write a story with substance after all the character building. While I have never gone this route out of the fact that for me it seems like a lot of adding for very little to create a chapter. Wasting valuable time for a descent story that might be 100 chapters deep before the true story begins. What are your thoughts?
I think characters should have personality. Writing in a zillion features makes it very difficult for a character to have their own personality. Some CHYOA stories, in the spirit of it being Choose YOUR Adventure, go for a very self-insert style of main character that allow you to customize your name and features. I can respect that impulse. But in the end, in practicality, to me, it's a cute idea that actually means little to me as a reader, and again can take away from the author creating personality.
It doesn't make much sense for me as it will be impossible to flesh out only a fraction of the starting points. Though for some people it might be a way to determine what people would like to see most, using the structure as kind of a poll. I think it can work for game mode stories, though it isn't quite necessary to start with the character creation but let the reader choose his character traits gradually. So if the reader plays "himself" or a role, they already have a character they represent and the focus should be more on the reactions of his environment to his personality.
I found this interesting once, but quickly understood how un-interesting is from the writer prospective. It's almost impossible to do it right, even by just tanking into account physical traits and not personality or backstory. I wouldn't like that. Either it's open to customization (as said almost impossible) or i'll go with my idea and minor customization. In a way it could be amusing to follow a poll once, just as an exercise for creativity tough. It's a trap! Seriously, it's just a waste of time.
That I can understand. Slow process helps form the character over a period of time. That could be fun to see
Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy-style approach of frontloading "character creation" would be an approach, but is a little tricky with the existing CHYOA format - although not impossible. It would involve things like "If you are Blonde, go to X" or "If your breasts are B cups or less, go to Y" - and that's a bit more planning than I think goes into the formatting on many of these stories, which are usually fairly off-the-cuff.
Do you mean for creating characters at the beginning or without saving the character traits in any way?
You could, if you chose to code it, save those character traits and refer and modify to them throughout the story (game mode); or you could have the reader record and keep track of their own stats on their own character sheet (as in the game books, for which coding was not an option). You're familiar with Lone Wolf?
Well, no... though I had some gamebooks in the past. So keeping a character sheet like in gamebooks answered my question.
It doesn't seem too much to create a gamebook in the code of chyoa. If one can create personal names then a gamebook should work the same way under the code. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Currently, you can't do everything you could do within a gamebook. No chance to achieve "roll a D6, add 2 and reduce the enemy's health points by the result." Also "add the value of Variable2 to Variable1." is impossible. But you still can do a lot of things with game mode.
Personally I write characters and their descriptions a little vaguely. Y'know, so the reader can fill in the gaps, obviously I'll describe things that are "important" to the character, like what they're wearing, hair colour blah blah blah. But I'm not about to go into extreme detail to the point that the story is shorter than the character building. And besides, it lets me add anything else later on when I think it's important.
As far as I've seen having a too long character edition or selection of the story tends to create a more dificult reading and writting process. When you read those stories most of the times you will found yourself choosing a bunch diferents starts with almost no diference between them that lead nowhere.
I would always prefer a very well thought out developed character process rather mindless sex any day
