Candle Craft 10: Okay Choices
By Royal McGraw
Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.
Welcome! This is the tenth installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.
In the previous Candle Craft, we discussed Tactics & Strategy. We learned that layering high-level strategic objectives on top of tactical choices yielded more emotionally resonant experiences for your player.
In an ideal world, every choice (and its consequence) would be deeply meaningful, yielding surprise, delight, and impactful dramatic consequences. Every choice would be a Good Choice. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Not every choice we write will be an absolute banger. But that doesn’t mean that all of our choices can’t serve some greater purpose.
Today, we’re going to learn how to make sure that all of the choices that we write – even the ones that are just okay – work together to create something greater than the sum of their parts.
Patter
In stand-up comedy, there is a concept of patter. Patter exists as the connective tissue between jokes. Patter often has the rhythms and the cadence of comedy, but rarely is comedy. Instead, it serves to bridge the gap between jokes with repetition, variation, and thematic overlap. Here’s the kicker: even though patter is not telling jokes, if you remove the patter, the jokes don’t land nearly as hard.
Good Choices are like jokes. Okay Choices are like patter.
Defining Okay Choices
Previously, we defined “Good Choices” as being both fun and moving the player into a new situation. Okay Choices still do both, but they strongly favor just one of the requirements.
Most commonly, Okay Choices are “scene filler”. In these types of scenes, the player is allowed to react multiple times in a single conversation. Expertly done, the conversation is constructed with distinct phases that the player moves through – with each choice clearly setting up a new state to react to tactically.
But sometimes, the scene just can’t be that expert. Maybe we’ve got to cover some crucial plot information. Maybe the scene is intended to highlight a specific mood like tranquility. Maybe the goal is a cumulative result.
In these cases, our ability to let each specific choice shine is hampered, and we need to work toward a greater goal – in other words: patter.
Telltale Games: The Walking Dead
Leaning On “Fun” in Okay Choices
As we noted previously, Okay Choices often appear in groups within lengthier conversations. These choices do not really alter the flow of the scene in immediately obvious ways. As the narrative option to “move the player into a new situation” has been reduced, that leaves “fun” to lean on. Here, emotionally tactical options are paramount, but perhaps more importantly, these choices need to showcase skillful writing – funny or unexpected or heartfelt.
Generally, I find that there is less agreement about what constitutes success for players in these execution-dependent sequences. A clever line that makes one player guffaw can fall totally flat for another.
If you find that your game contains a lot of these scenes, I would recommend adding a strategic layer – a “relationship score”, a “social score” – just something that can visually increment and imbue each Okay Choice with minor mechanical significance.
Cause of Death: Can You Catch the Killer? - Detective Score Up!
Leaning On “New Situations” in Okay Choices
It is less common to see Okay Choices that move players into a new situation. This is because most choices that do so either rise to the level of being a Good Choice or are simply not fun enough to be just Okay. The very worst of these choices manifest as:
Go right
Go left
Go straight
Stay in the kitchen
Typically, you should avoid choices like these in your work. If you must include them, you can improve them significantly by layering on an emotionally resonant description.
Comfort the orphan in the playroom
Investigate the screams of terror in the cemetery
Visit the library to read a forbidden tome
Scavenge for food
These modified options allow for some light roleplay in decision-making. Instead of merely asking for directional guidance, we’re now performing a quick personality test on the player that leverages Patriarch, Matriarch, Scholar, Fool.
As with Okay Choices that lean on “fun”, if your game contains a lot of these, I would recommend adding in a strategic layer. That little stat bump goes a surprisingly long way.
Telltale Games: The Walking Dead
Recap
Not every choice can be a Good Choice, but every choice can be Okay. Understand what your scene allows and disallows, and then play hard to what you can do. When all else fails… add a strategic layer that can be visualized for the player.
In Conclusion
Thank you for following along with Candle Craft. Looking ahead, Candle Craft will step away from its “10 Tips” structure and move toward something much more freeform. As part of that, I’ll cover topics that strike my fancy, but more importantly, I’ll cover topics that are important to you.
So this is where I ask you a favor. If you have been enjoying this series, please send in a question! I’ll do my best to answer the most frequently asked and most interesting submissions.
In the meantime, next time we’re going to jump back into theory with a discussion of But, Therefore Storytelling. See you then!