Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 178

King of Dragon Pass is different because instead of the player going to find adventure,
the adventures come to her. The player does not have an avatar who moves around, but
events happen to her all the same. The game maintains a huge database of character-
agnostic situations, and a separate database of Elders (and potential replacement
Elders). Situations arise either at random or in response to earlier events. When a situa-
tion occurs that requires an Elder's attention, the player must choose which Elder will
deal with it. The storytelling engine reads the Elder's attributes and computes an out-
come from them. It narrates this outcome to the player and, if appropriate, triggers
another situation that was caused by the first one. (The database of situations in King of
Dragon Pass does not look like an ordinary story; rather, it is code written in a special
programming language devised just for this purpose.)
This design has two benefits. First, because each situation is character-agnostic, an
Elder may die with no harm to the story. That NPC simply gets removed from the data-
base of Elders and cannot take part in any future events. There is no problem of a
combinatorial explosion.
Second, and even more important, the outcome of a situation not only changes global
status attributes such as the state of the tribe, it can also change the attributes of the
Elder who was involved. The player's choice of Elder influences the outcome of the situa-
tion, and the situation in turn may affect the Elder's personality: making a callow young
man more wise, or humbling an arrogant warrior. This, then, may influence subsequent
situations that the Elder is involved in. Just as in presentational fiction, there is an inter-
play between characters and events that changes both.
As a result, the game can be very different every time the player plays. The Elders she
chooses to surround herself with can produce much more varied results than we see in
the usual RPG. The player must be a good judge of character to know which Elders to use
for what missions. For this reason King of Dragon Pass might best be characterized as a
leadership simulator —but so far, it is the only one known.
Endings
Readers find the ending of a story one of its most critical emotional moments.
Storytellers craft their endings to evoke specific feelings in the audience—some-
times even in the very last sentence. But an interactive story can have multiple
endings. How many endings should your story have?
Include multiple endings if you want to give the player an outcome that reflects the
dramatic actions he took throughout the story—those actions that actually matter
to the story, as opposed to actions irrelevant to the drama, such as reorganizing his
inventory or buying nicer clothing. However, the player's desire for an outcome that
reflects his actions varies somewhat depending on what those actions were. Players'