To start with, the CYOA format for me fills a niche somewhere between novel-writing (which I'm not good at) and DMing (which I'm okay at). What I enjoy is worldbuilding and character interactions, moreso than the craft of writing or the gameplay of a tabletop game. With DMing, people bring their own characters and will be (justifiably!) upset if you start role-playing their character. Or if you need to kill someone off for dramatic effect. With novel writing, there's a tremendous upfront time investment, and you've just gotta hope that when you're done, people will be interested enough in what you've done.
CYOAs are more like writing episodic TV. Your goal isn't to necessarily have a story planned out from start to finish, it's to seed things that you can use later, and tell the most interesting story you can based on where you're starting a scene. Like, if you look at Star Wars: A New Hope on its own, it's abundantly clear that Darth Vader was not conceptualized as Luke's father. But when you're getting feedback between episodes/posts/movies, you can see where people want the story to go.
My feelings on it are pretty much the same as @Delzhand
I don’t exactly have ‘tips’ but I’d say being able to discreetly drop something and keep going is the best way for a CYOA to survive. A Peaceful Time was initially going to have more farming sim aspects, but I quickly realised an adventure was more engaging and created more meaningful votes than hashing out the exact location to plant crops.
I had more of what was going to happen in my head from the start than I suspect folks realised, but I kept an open enough mind that it could have gone anywhere at all. Some of the best parts were from the participants though!
I think introducing an ‘X’ option helps the audience get invested and made the whole thing feel infinite, even if it wasn’t. You don’t have to include a write in vote for every point of the story, but it helps freshen things up. If you’re clever about it the X option that ends up winning will be an obvious choice.
Another thing is not writing too much per post. I tried a CYOA before A Peaceful Time called Absolute Wrestling Eternal which had a great premise, but wow, I put so much effort into each post it simply wasn’t sustainable. Keeping it casual works both ways, as smaller posts are easier on the audience’s attention span and memory.
Just a side note: I have so much genuine affection for A Peaceful Time. It’s not well written if you were to just sit down and read the thread, but damn, it’s got heart. From me and the participants.
Lastly, I do think luck has to be on your side. I allowed the potential for the Farmer to be bloodthirsty, selfish, or even boring, but in the end the audience wanted them to be pretty heroic and cool. A few wrong choices along the way and the thread might have fizzled out.
I think most people on this forum, raised on videogames, are probably going to steer characters towards "heroic and cool" most of the time anyway. Since Ardor was JRPG based, that was sorta baked in by design, and I didn't provide a lot of options that would have caused characters to deviate too far from that. That made it a little less gonzo than A Peaceful Time and I think it did cost me a few participants that were heavily into APT, but I knew what kind of story I wanted going into it, more or less. I think you can be successful either way.
Something else that I enjoyed immensely was really diving into the mechanics of simulating an actual RPG, not just telling a fantasy story. I think it's neat to see the evolution of the status screen from a text-only description of the characters to a full-blown combat simulated JRPG engine, and I'm really glad I preserved each post in time instead of updating them in-place.
I do think that I lost some people when I introduced the dungeon mechanic. It wasn't well thought out, and I'm glad it happened when the finale was already imminent. I don't think it translated well to a CYOA format.
I think I'm probably an outlier, though - unless you've already got some programming skills, it's probably safer to err on the side of just telling the story and letting it get a little wild. That said though, if you want something that's a little more game-like, automate if you can. Relying on geth's dice rolls, manually looking things up, and editing posts gets tedious fast. Even if you don't have programming skills on your side, keep dice and a notebook handy if you're tracking anything meta.
For my next project, I'm trying to get all the tools built ahead of time. I learned a lot from Ardor, and I've learned a lot from the upcoming Secret Project, so Ardor's follow up is going to be a lot less "first-draft-y". I also felt a bit limited by the forum's formatting and voting tools, so I've been building a custom solution.
@Delzhand
I’ll catch you properly tomorrow, but have you considered straight up making a narrative video game? Like a significantly shorter Disco Elysium?
Personally, I got lost in APT when it went to character: action and with the dungeon creation.
So I'd steer away from such heavy mechanics in a CYOA, or make them optional.
For instance, maybe keep Attack/Defend/Tech/Move but weight each character's chance of taking the action based on their proficiency in the relevant skill, so the healer is unlikely to take an Attack action and wreck the party's chance of dealing damage.
Or do the same, and allow people to nominate characters to actions if they want.
Or go bananas, and create skill trees for the characters that people can directly nominate, while still allowing other players to just submit Attack/Defend/Tech/Move.
The dungeon building was also hard to grok quickly, and frankly I thought the enemy buffs on the rooms implied that we were going to encounter our level + 1/ + 2 etc in each room with a buff.
Might've been better to unroll the dungeon over multiple posts (with choices between next room), or have the mechanic introduced earlier in the story so we could see how the mechanic worked before the finale.
Overall, I was not able to put in the time to do these mechanics justice, so I didn't engage with them at all.
Which was a shame, because I otherwise enjoyed the ride.
Well, character:action is definitely returning for the followup, but the combat log is going to be more of a visualizer - so it'll be clearer who is doing what, and also everyone has their own HP bar.
The dungeon stuff I'm dropping entirely. Even with actual playable JRPGs, I think nobody actually likes dungeons, you just do them to get to the next bit of story or the cool boss fight at the end.
In general I'm going to try to be more conscientious about making the voting options more distinct. That did get a little harder as the story became more solidified. I think giving myself a little more time between posts will help as well.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Interesting stuff. I like how diverse these things always end up being
I think I quickly realised that I didn't like the combat votes (I couldn't see how the votes translated to a meaningful difference in the result, so I picked randomly but then questioned why I was just providing input noise) and once I started skipping those I personally lost investment
The status screens were lovely. I'm a big supporter of those making a come back.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
I appreciate the feedback on the combat stuff. I'm spending a lot of time on that, so I'll definitely beta-test the new version here separate from any story stuff. At the moment I'm working on an old-school FF style combat screen where the party lines up on one side and enemies on the other, and they step forward to whack at each other.
I’m still considering the following, but I don’t have any spare time right now:
1. Party of 4 are on a road trip through a modern high fantasy world.
2. A supervillain tries their best.
3. A primitive tribe grows over generations; every vote create a tradition, law or taboo etc.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I’m still considering the following, but I don’t have any spare time right now:
1. Party of 4 are on a road trip through a modern high fantasy world. 2. A supervillain tries their best.
3. A primitive tribe grows over generations; every vote create a tradition, law or taboo etc.
Supervillain sounds fun. I remember way back there was an attempt at the primitive tribe one, but it kind of fizzled out.
The next CYOA is starting to come together. It's going to be a new story with new characters, but it's gonna be a bit more JRPG-ish. Airships and crystals and shit, you know. A little less Matsuno, a bit more Sakaguchi. I'm going to be hosting the story bits outside the forum so I get more format control beyond links and images. It's going to retain combat encounters, but I said I'd beta test it out here, so I'm gonna light the @-signal for the A&O peeps to see what you guys think.
Built a website for it. Still filling things out, and I'm not 100% on the name. I want something that's kinda basic, but gives an indication what it is, you know?
Built a website for it. Still filling things out, and I'm not 100% on the name. I want something that's kinda basic, but gives an indication what it is, you know?
The next CYOA is starting to come together. It's going to be a new story with new characters, but it's gonna be a bit more JRPG-ish. Airships and crystals and shit, you know. A little less Matsuno, a bit more Sakaguchi. I'm going to be hosting the story bits outside the forum so I get more format control beyond links and images. It's going to retain combat encounters, but I said I'd beta test it out here, so I'm gonna light the @-signal for the A&O peeps to see what you guys think.
When a character's turn comes up, they'll randomly select an action from their pool, which is dependent on votes received. A character who gets no votes has an ability pool that looks like this: [attack:100%, ability1:0%, ability2:0%]
If a character gets votes to use an ability, it increases the percentage chance of that ability being chosen. Saoirse has two abilities: Thrust and Flank. If she gets 3 votes for thrust and 2 votes for flank (you can't vote for basic attack), her ability pool looks like [attack:17%, thrust:50%, flank:33%]
Actions are no longer simultaneous - it's a turn based system now, though most units have a reaction ability when they're targeted that will fire.
Posts
I'd be keen to your and @Delzhand 's thoughts on running these games. I like seeing behind the curtain.
To start with, the CYOA format for me fills a niche somewhere between novel-writing (which I'm not good at) and DMing (which I'm okay at). What I enjoy is worldbuilding and character interactions, moreso than the craft of writing or the gameplay of a tabletop game. With DMing, people bring their own characters and will be (justifiably!) upset if you start role-playing their character. Or if you need to kill someone off for dramatic effect. With novel writing, there's a tremendous upfront time investment, and you've just gotta hope that when you're done, people will be interested enough in what you've done.
CYOAs are more like writing episodic TV. Your goal isn't to necessarily have a story planned out from start to finish, it's to seed things that you can use later, and tell the most interesting story you can based on where you're starting a scene. Like, if you look at Star Wars: A New Hope on its own, it's abundantly clear that Darth Vader was not conceptualized as Luke's father. But when you're getting feedback between episodes/posts/movies, you can see where people want the story to go.
I don’t exactly have ‘tips’ but I’d say being able to discreetly drop something and keep going is the best way for a CYOA to survive. A Peaceful Time was initially going to have more farming sim aspects, but I quickly realised an adventure was more engaging and created more meaningful votes than hashing out the exact location to plant crops.
I had more of what was going to happen in my head from the start than I suspect folks realised, but I kept an open enough mind that it could have gone anywhere at all. Some of the best parts were from the participants though!
I think introducing an ‘X’ option helps the audience get invested and made the whole thing feel infinite, even if it wasn’t. You don’t have to include a write in vote for every point of the story, but it helps freshen things up. If you’re clever about it the X option that ends up winning will be an obvious choice.
Another thing is not writing too much per post. I tried a CYOA before A Peaceful Time called Absolute Wrestling Eternal which had a great premise, but wow, I put so much effort into each post it simply wasn’t sustainable. Keeping it casual works both ways, as smaller posts are easier on the audience’s attention span and memory.
Just a side note: I have so much genuine affection for A Peaceful Time. It’s not well written if you were to just sit down and read the thread, but damn, it’s got heart. From me and the participants.
Lastly, I do think luck has to be on your side. I allowed the potential for the Farmer to be bloodthirsty, selfish, or even boring, but in the end the audience wanted them to be pretty heroic and cool. A few wrong choices along the way and the thread might have fizzled out.
Something else that I enjoyed immensely was really diving into the mechanics of simulating an actual RPG, not just telling a fantasy story. I think it's neat to see the evolution of the status screen from a text-only description of the characters to a full-blown combat simulated JRPG engine, and I'm really glad I preserved each post in time instead of updating them in-place.
I do think that I lost some people when I introduced the dungeon mechanic. It wasn't well thought out, and I'm glad it happened when the finale was already imminent. I don't think it translated well to a CYOA format.
I think I'm probably an outlier, though - unless you've already got some programming skills, it's probably safer to err on the side of just telling the story and letting it get a little wild. That said though, if you want something that's a little more game-like, automate if you can. Relying on geth's dice rolls, manually looking things up, and editing posts gets tedious fast. Even if you don't have programming skills on your side, keep dice and a notebook handy if you're tracking anything meta.
For my next project, I'm trying to get all the tools built ahead of time. I learned a lot from Ardor, and I've learned a lot from the upcoming Secret Project, so Ardor's follow up is going to be a lot less "first-draft-y". I also felt a bit limited by the forum's formatting and voting tools, so I've been building a custom solution.
Here's a sneak preview:
I’ll catch you properly tomorrow, but have you considered straight up making a narrative video game? Like a significantly shorter Disco Elysium?
So I'd steer away from such heavy mechanics in a CYOA, or make them optional.
For instance, maybe keep Attack/Defend/Tech/Move but weight each character's chance of taking the action based on their proficiency in the relevant skill, so the healer is unlikely to take an Attack action and wreck the party's chance of dealing damage.
Or do the same, and allow people to nominate characters to actions if they want.
Or go bananas, and create skill trees for the characters that people can directly nominate, while still allowing other players to just submit Attack/Defend/Tech/Move.
The dungeon building was also hard to grok quickly, and frankly I thought the enemy buffs on the rooms implied that we were going to encounter our level + 1/ + 2 etc in each room with a buff.
Might've been better to unroll the dungeon over multiple posts (with choices between next room), or have the mechanic introduced earlier in the story so we could see how the mechanic worked before the finale.
Overall, I was not able to put in the time to do these mechanics justice, so I didn't engage with them at all.
Which was a shame, because I otherwise enjoyed the ride.
The dungeon stuff I'm dropping entirely. Even with actual playable JRPGs, I think nobody actually likes dungeons, you just do them to get to the next bit of story or the cool boss fight at the end.
In general I'm going to try to be more conscientious about making the voting options more distinct. That did get a little harder as the story became more solidified. I think giving myself a little more time between posts will help as well.
I think I quickly realised that I didn't like the combat votes (I couldn't see how the votes translated to a meaningful difference in the result, so I picked randomly but then questioned why I was just providing input noise) and once I started skipping those I personally lost investment
The status screens were lovely. I'm a big supporter of those making a come back.
https://delzhand.github.io/vrpg/combat.html?data=0
Edit: Have more thoughts this morning, but I'm gonna move it to the game design thread since this is a little less about the CYOA aspect
Edit much later - I broke this during dev, ignore it
1. Party of 4 are on a road trip through a modern high fantasy world.
2. A supervillain tries their best.
3. A primitive tribe grows over generations; every vote create a tradition, law or taboo etc.
I loved the art for one
Supervillain sounds fun. I remember way back there was an attempt at the primitive tribe one, but it kind of fizzled out.
I really enjoy the mix of the unknown (why is the world this messed up? Who knows, and it's not important) with a belief in getting better.
Your musical selections are on point, too.
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
It won’t be soon.
It will be called The Ponente Papers.
It will be very short.
Status Screen
A story scene
A graphic that would be posted alongside the poll
The resulting combat (from preset vote results)
@mrpaku
@see317
@Mojo_Jojo
@Endless_Serpents
@discrider
@zekebeau
@Tiphareth
I'm still working on the glue that will hold it together and explain things, but I think all the major pieces are ready.
Rejected names:
Vote JRPG
Vote Adventure
CYOA JRPG
Poll JRPG
Poll Fantasy
Chaos Quest just popped into my head, and that might actually be the most decent of the bunch? It's a little less abstruse, at least.
Chaos Quest is cool. My heart says it should be an obnoxious PS1 era style name, like Xaos Option: Our Infinite Phantasy.
Only thought was it wasn't obvious what was causing the ability order.
They don't appear to be simultaneous like in the previous game?
When a character's turn comes up, they'll randomly select an action from their pool, which is dependent on votes received. A character who gets no votes has an ability pool that looks like this: [attack:100%, ability1:0%, ability2:0%]
If a character gets votes to use an ability, it increases the percentage chance of that ability being chosen. Saoirse has two abilities: Thrust and Flank. If she gets 3 votes for thrust and 2 votes for flank (you can't vote for basic attack), her ability pool looks like [attack:17%, thrust:50%, flank:33%]
Actions are no longer simultaneous - it's a turn based system now, though most units have a reaction ability when they're targeted that will fire.
Thinking of busting out a very old game I invented called Two Drink Tea on Mount Komaki.
I look forward to it; I always enjoy your games.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/243921/cyoa-a-hike-across-the-rainlands/p1?new=1
Perhaps the most CYOA, if not the best. I have nothing made up for this. Participate if you want a hand in making the whole thing up!
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/246087/cyoa-exo-dust#latest
It’s cyberpunk.