Candle Craft 9: Tactics & Strategy

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 ninth 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.

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In the previous Candle Craft, we discussed what makes a Good Choice. We landed on the following definitions:

• A Choice is a menu of available reactions to a presented situation. 

• Good Choices clearly communicate how the reader/player will move into a new presented situation and are fun.

• Fun Choices are Good Choices that avoid reaction overlap among menu options and instruct for divergent tactical behaviors.

Ultimately, this definition describes good choices as both emotionally and intellectually tactical – good choices are concerned with allowing players to select the “how”.

Good Games take this idea further, allowing players to additionally and often simultaneously select from among longer term strategic objectives.

Tactics vs Strategy

For those unfamiliar with the terms, let’s brush up on what exactly tactics and strategy are.

Strategy is the long-term, high-level vision and the overall plan for achieving a significant goal.

Tactics are the specific, short-term actions and methods used to implement the strategy and achieve immediate objectives

Okay, clear enough. So if Good Choices are expressions of tactics that a player might weigh, then what exactly makes up strategy?

Strategy In Narrative Games

There are two answers to this. 

The first answer is usually just the overarching goal of the narrative. This goal is often rigid, and the player is usually allowed minimal or no say in that goal or the high-level events that push toward it.

In Batman: The Telltale Series, Batman will always try to stop the Children of Arkham from taking over Gotham. Regardless of their choices, the player will see the same or similar major moments on the way to reaching that goal. Tactically, the player choices in service of this goal indicate how they want to go about achieving it in the moment.

The second answer is more squishy – and it's where players are usually provided with the most freedom to influence events. This answer is “how the characters in the narrative (or the world) emotionally react to the events.”

In Batman: The Telltale Series, the player can have Batman perform actions like a noble hero or a brutal vigilante. The cumulative result of these choices, across the whole of the games, determines whether Joker becomes a vigilante anti-hero or a true villain.

Neither of the systems change the major events that happen, but they do change how the characters you interact with react to the idea of Batman and what he means to important characters and the city as a whole.

• Butal vs. Merciful

• Cunning vs Honest

• Pragmatic vs. Compassionate

These additional systems make nearly every choice both tactical and strategic, emotional and intellectual. Players must weigh how they want to behave in the moment with their longer-term objectives for Joker and other characters. 

This powerful layering of strategy and tactics gets you deliciously idiosyncratic outcomes like this:

And then this:

One last thing…

Romance

Narrative games often include romance options for similar reasons. Choosing a relationship with Shadowheart or Astarion does not adjust the primary narrative of Baldur’s Gate III much, but it greatly impacts how that character feels about the player character – and that can’t help but influence how the player feels about the game. 

Who a player chooses to romance, and how they choose to pursue that romance is strategy in action!

Now that we’ve taken a high-level glance at Tactics & Strategy, we’re going to swing by choices again for a second look. The reality is that not every choice in your game can be a banger. So… how do you make an “okay” choice a little bit better?

Until then, do you agree or disagree with what I’ve written here? Why? And what are your favorite strategic mechanics in games?