I was wondering how do you guys feel about putting sometimes fake choices along the path of a thread. More in general, I'm interested in knowing if you feel every time a chapter ends you have put there a question to leave things open for further options even if you can actually think of just one possible development. Should all chapter breaks be meant for an eventua future branching? I was writing something and I decided I wanted to close the chapter with a little cliffahanger, a character reavealing it's true identity, but I realized I couldn't fathom anyone else behind the mask save for one person, so why even put the question there? Just to build tension? Am I cheating my readers?
I think it's fine. Even if you can think of only one option, someone else might come up with something else. And even if they do use the same option they will likely write a very different chapter. They might also end the following chapter at a different point, allowing for different options.
It’s fine. The only time I’ve participated in a story that was strict about ending each chapter with branching paths was a Chyoa NaNoWriMo project. I enjoyed the challenge a lot, collaborating with other writers and structuring each chapter with a hook at the end, but the constant expansion of the story gets out of hand quickly. Allowing for linear chapter sequences helps to keep the scale of the project manageable.
Building tension sounds good. You could even slip in a chapter that doesn't reveal the person behind the mask but lets the character speculate about who it could be, either giving hints at the actual person or misleading them.
Yes but, shouldn't we then just merge a long streak of linear chapter into a big one? Wouldn't it be best? I'm just wondering. I thought so, I was not just as sure after reading Outcome Paths vs. Choice Paths Can't do. It's a two people confrontation, one is in chain the other one is the jailor. I'll keep that in mind for the future.
You can do a sort of “random” option by obscuring the options behind nonsense. What I did was have various doors with symbols which redirected to the actual titled pages in case someone doesn’t actually want to know what’s going on.
As someone who is writing a story with lots of branching paths...it does absolutely get out of hand. If you take the original Choose Your Own Adventure books as an example, most of the chapters don't have branching paths: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cyoa-choose-your-own-adventure-maps Fake choices in the sense of "all choices lead to the same end," are frustrating for readers because they like choices to have meaning. That doesn't mean that every chapter has to have multiple choices, or even that two branches can't converge - there are plenty of way s for different actions to lead the protagonist to the same narrative place. But it's the kind of thing which if done too often feels like it cheapens the story by not giving the reader any real narrative freedom.
I like this. I think in the past I have sometimes hidden choices behind seemingly unrelated options like, go right/go left, choose the first door, etc. Not sure if it is the same though. Yeah, your story is crazy Often I have desired to make two or more branches converge, but I have really hard time doing it in practice. I'm very strict with keeping my continuity, and I'm always under the impression that if you want to merge two branches you are force to became a lot more vague in the following chapters, to avoid making a reference to something different among the two alternate branches. For me, the only place to do it safely would be after a sex sequence branching (blowjob/fuck , pussy/ass, be rough/be gentle) and even in that case, after that point you would be forced to thread super lightly when mentioning the occurrence. Heck, you woulnd't even be able to freely write "that time we fucked" anymore, if one of the options wasn't a proper fuck. Then again, in a more "gamish" environment, I can see that work.
3,916 chapters strong...and growing! It's a little easier in a game environment because you can use variables to constrain choices and outcomes, or even subtly replace sections of text based on, say, whether a character has an intact hymen or has had anal sex before. But getting paths to converge really requires a certain level of planning out the story before it's written, which can be very tricky for writers who are used to more spontaneous plotting.
Fair warning, this doesn't address your exact situation, but I find that 'fake choices' in general don't necessarily need to leave the reader feeling cheated. For instance, in the middle of a sex scene, the reader might be provided with a choice between two sex positions. Obviously, this isn't likely to impact whatever happens after the sex scene, and so the reader will expect as much. Nonetheless, it's still a meaningful decision, as readers will often have a preference one way or the other, and if they don't, they're still radically changing the content of that scene in particular. The impact of a choice doesn't need to be longlasting to be effective. This idea can be extrapolated to a variety of scenes: which route to take to a common destination, what topic of conversation to raise, etc. can be made interesting enough with careful thought. On another note of limited relevancy, in game mode, I've been testing another, more compelling method of breaking up linear chapter choices using these fake choices. Where you feel the story has gone on long enough without any reader interaction, you insert a choice with no impact other than a brief section with different content, I'd say up to a maximum of one chapter. Hide a completely unrelated variable in this choice that does absolutely nothing for a while, perhaps around 10, 15, 20 chapters down the line, depending on the scope of the story. You can then use this variable to simulate a pseudo-random outcome. For example, the innocuous question, "What's your favourite animal?" with a list of 6 unremarkable options could be used to save a number from 1-6; a while later, the player is in some sort of strip game, and this number is used as the result of a die roll. With one choice it's crude, but this technique could be made into a larger system with several choices. A series of n binary decisions at the start of the story will generate 2^n possible outcomes that, if you're careful to be neutral with the fake options you give, are very close to being equally likely to occur. I'll admit such an idea is a significant digression, though, and not something most authors will use.
This. Replacing text based on variables. I've got mad for it once understood how it worked. In fact I have this grand project about group of adveturers in a fantasy setting that should make exstensive use of this feature... only it is still on the high seas Yeah, that's me. I'm more of a "butterfly effect" type. Agreed. I like this very much. In general, I like the concept to store decision as a variable and pull that out many chapters later, be it hidden or not. I think it's a really clever idea, only it would probably result as a little clunky once set in practice. Imagine having to go through a long series of apparenly meaningless decision at the start of a story: wouldn't it annoy you?
That's true, and it's where skill and subtlety would go into placing the fake choices. It'd be ideal to intersperse them with other, 'real' choices, but to get to a decent level of accuracy at that rate you'd want to be writing a very, very long story. If you alternate real and fake decisions, with n=4, you'd be left with a minimum of 7-8 decision points before you can start using a randomness figure of range 1-16 with a precision of 6.25%. And that's not even considering how you'd implement the figure effectively... there's a reason I say 'testing'. Maybe I'll look deeper into it when I finish my current (non-game mode) story.
I love the concept Insert Name here is proposing. Definitely might use that in the future. I have already implemented a ton of seemingly innocusous choices that have greater impact then the player might realise and a lot of seemingly unimportant choices that actually have very important impact later. For instance in Dustbin there's an option that results in the player getting attacked and struck in the eyes. The attack is quickly stopped and the story carries on as normal with the slight mention that the characters vision is slightly blurry. That blurred vision has one very important effect later down the line, but only if the player takes a very specific path after that and pretty much locks them into a choice that would otherwise have been rather open ended and can in some cases force a bad ending down the line. Which is one way I like to play with variables, but the idea of making an innocuous choice be a way to do random variables since this system doesn't allow for random variables is super clever. Also while I know it isn't the type of false choice you're talking about... I do like sometimes where player choice is intentionally a lie. A scenario like... The player is in a situation where they are about to have dubiously consensual, or definitely non-consensual sex with a domineering partner. A choice is offered to the player of whether they'd prefer anal or vaginal, however whichever choice they give the result ends up being vaginal, because the domineering partner decides they'd prefer vaginal regardless of the character (and the player's wishes) which grants a bit of immersion at least into the sense of helplessness the character is feeling.
