Re: Working away...
Tue, 27 Jun 1995 11:50:57 -0400
nstn1433@fox.nstn.ca(Jean-Henri Duteau) writes:
> How do you force a IF player to do something without making him realize
> he's being forced. Without spoiling my game too much, you make your way
> to a tribal area (the prologue). While there you get to see the reason for
> the whole game (the catch). In a real piece of fiction, I would have the
> main character simply say, "By golly Chief, I'll gladly go out and risk
> getting skewered to help you and your tribe even though I've known you for
> only 2 hours." and that would be that. But since this is IF, I can't the
> force the player on to the next part of the game. Maybe it's the way I
> scripted everything -- prologue, middle game, epilogue -- with each major
> part being broken down into smaller story elements. But I didn't allow
> for a story element to be reentered.
>
> Should I have? Should I allow the player to reenter the maze he just got
> out of? Should I allow the player to go back to the town and get drunk?
> I hate using the score as a means, I'd rather have a logical consistency
> to a player's actions. But how do you do that without having desciptions
> like "Sorry, the forest ends abruptly and you can't go any further." etc.
The Its-A-*Story*-You-Idiot method: "You just got through that forest!
It would be a waste of time to go back in."
The Nasty Game method: You *can* go back in. Nothing happens in there.
You can wander around as long as you want. Eventually the clever
players will realize that they have to explore more.
The Blunt Game method: If you back into the forest, bears devour you.
The Clever Author method: design the story so that failing to go on
really is disastrous, for some reason which makes sense in terms of
the story.
The game I'm working on now is a combination of 1 and 4. It's taken a
lot of thought, and this is a small game (ten rooms or so). I'm not
saying it's an easy problem.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."