Meaningful Choices

In narrative games like Empty Earth: Brockton, many players (myself included) want narrative choices to matter—that is, choices that will impact the story moving forward. Tabletop RPGs are the gold standard here, because your choices are limited only by your DM’s ability and willingness to accommodate them. Want to leave the tavern and wander off into the woods? By all means, though you’re going to miss a lot of the fun the party has. Want to tell the king to stuff his dragonslaying quest and try to make a living as a simple peat merchant? Sure, though you’re liable to see your village fried by a marauding dragon.

In a DM-less medium, the options narrow. The world, however big, has to exist within a set of walls. We can still have a strong feeling of cascading choices within those walls, but each genuine choice adds a multiplier to possible outcomes, and each possible outcome has to occupy physical page space and development time. Say you start by making one of two branching story choices, which leads to game state A and game state B. If each of those game states eventually branches into two more choices, you now have game states A1, A2, B1, and B2. If each of those leads to two further choices, you’re up to eight, then 16, 32, and so on. Even in this simple example, where every choice is binary, you’re looking at over 1,000 game states by the time you get to 10 genuine “choices that matter” over the course of a campaign. There are some shining examples of “choices that matter” in video games, where physical space is not a limiting factor, but you don’t see thousands of truly different game states at the end of the narrative.

Branch after branch...

And players don’t generally need or expect that. Narrative designers can use lots of tricks to make sure that players feel like their choices matter without writing thousands, or even dozens, of different stories. Branches diverge and merge, multiple smaller story trees grow in parallel and join only at key tangents, choices accumulate rather than bifurcate, and when you have to resign yourself to hopping onto a railroad at some point, you also get to man the switch when the tracks diverge.

I’ve really tried to emphasize player choices in Brockton. Through lots of gears and levers and mind-numbing tangles of narrative thread that, from the player end, hopefully just look like “If you did this thing, check this box,” I think I’ve accomplished that. For the bulk of the game, you get to play Scenarios in the order you choose. When you do those Scenarios, and what you do in them, may impact what you can do in later ones. (Did you manage to steal the Stryker from Letterkenny? Good, now the Marauders won't have it.). You get to meet new characters and unlock new locations by exploring the world—and there are some you’ll never find if you don’t explore. You get to interact with those characters and build rapport or fail to, and if you build enough rapport, maybe they can become your Allies, and if you don’t, well, maybe you didn’t want them around anyway. In short, you get to make choices that change the story in ways big and small.

I’m aiming to launch Empty Earth: Brockton in Q2 of 2027. If you want a game with real narrative in addition to fun, crunchy mechanics, join the mailing list! If you want to test it, try the tutorial on TTS or Tabletopia (coming soon!). If you want to see examples from Brockton of how I try to design dynamic Scenarios that include just the kinds of changing game states and meaningful choices I’m talking about, check out this [link coming soon!] dissection of the tutorial Scenario.