Visual Novels Or Nonlinear Storytelling Pt. 2

Last week, we had a blog post about Visual Novels and nonlinear storytelling already and this week, we will go into more detail as far as plotting and mechanics are concerned. After all, there’s more to a Visual Novel than just one, always repeating story.

Nonlinear plots don’t mean that you branch out completely with every decision and are left with a tree of ten or twenty different stories in the end. You can very well pull several threads made by decisions together again at some point (this is most evident when it comes to relationship changes in an otome, those are about earning or losing points, they don’t make a huge difference each), but they must feel and read differently for the player. If the only difference is two lines and there’s no relationship status or suchlike coming with it, players will be disappointed. What you will want to write, is a story with several different endings, some good and some bad, and with several branches which can (and most likely will) come together again. Unlike the classic ‘Fighting Fantasy’ gameplay, though, there isn’t just one way to really get through (the shortest route without ambling along), but there’s several routes which the player can and, most likely, will take. Most players who buy and play a Visual Novel expect several reads through the novel, because they want to take all routes, find all endings, and unlock all pictures for the gallery. This usually reflects on the price of the Visual Novel as well - a lot of high-quality content (CGs, voice-acting, etc.) and a lot of routes and endings will come at a much higher price. That doesn’t mean, however, that a cheap or even free Visual Novel with well-made routes and choices can’t be a lot of fun to read and reread a lot. It’s just that a cheap one will get more leeway when it comes to things like the number and impact of choices.

Nonlinear plotting doesn’t just come in when you are working on a Visual Novel. Fighting-Fantasy-type and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type books have seen a revival in recent years, with software which makes it easy to turn them into e-books for more sales and easier self-publishing. Then there’s the whole gaming industry where stories, if featured at all, have to be nonlinear to allow for players’ choices. So there’s a lot of uses for nonlinear stories - including the classic pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing games. Let’s have a look at the mechanics of those books/games.

Starting off with the classic FF approach, there’s one thing which makes the books differ from regular novels from the beginning and it’s not the choosing-the-next-section part. It’s that they come with stats, which you have to decide on and prepare before jumping into the whole story. Those are, of course, something which came over from the role-playing games which gave birth to the FF series and its contemporaries. There’s the regular strength-agility-luck-money-health group which you will find in the classic FF books. They allow for skill checks and fights and, thus, give the books a little more randomness (luck at fighting or managing a skill check is bound to vary, so not every time you play the game you will be equally lucky on your way through it). Some of the books, like “House of Fear,” have additional stats (in case of the aforementioned book, it’s Fear).

There’s often an inventory, too, in which there can be food or health potions to regain health, torches for dark areas, and other tools or even weapons. Specific objects can fill the inventory as well (“City of Thieves,” the first FF book I even read, has three specific reagents the player has to gather to have a chance against the Big Bad).

The Choice of Games engine is best-suited for stat-heavy work, simply because it has a lot of routines build in which handle stats and suchlike well. One big danger when working with stats, though, is to make too many of them. I once looked into an erotic FF-type book on Amazon and found several pages listing specific skills and other traits for the character you were supposed to choose from. While it’s amazing that they managed to handle that many stats at once, it’s nigh-impossible for a regular reader/player to get through that without help and without being disappointed with their first few forays into the book, because there’s no way to tell which skills/traits are useful and which ones make sense together. You can’t take them all and there’s no help with choosing them.

The lesson from this should be to trim down your stats. Yes, depending on the kind of story you make (FF/CYOA, Visual Novel, Life Sim, Dating Sim), you will need quite some stats. What you should avoid, is making too many. Always ask yourself whether or not you will really make good use of that specific one in the game and whether you can do without. Of course, you need to track relationships in an otome. Of course, you need to track money-making skills in a life sim. Of course, you need to track health and fighting skills in a FF-type story. But try minimizing the amount of numbers the player and the software have to deal with.

Another big part of making a nonlinear stories is to keep your scenes and chapters working. As mentioned above, ‘nonlinear’ doesn’t necessarily mean to make a new story with every choice, but there should be a little branch after each choice. A conversation should take a different direction after a choice is made. A situation should not play out the same way with different choices. The player should be able to tell that this is a different route than the one they’ve taken before. There will still be quite a bit of the story which plays out the same way, a main line which the player will always see. That is why the auto-play function exists in most Visual Novels - you can ‘fast-forward’ to the next choice and will only have to ‘play’ through parts you’ve not seen before. For a considerable part of the novel, you will have the same text every time, but there’s also a good portion which you will only see on a specific route.

Where Visual Novels differ from FF-type stories is when it comes to the ending. For FF-type stories, there’s only hit or miss. Either you finish the story with the only good ending, defeat the enemy, save the populace, become a hero, etc., or you have a bad ending, end up dead, incarcerated forever, cursed, etc.. This means that most players will only look for one ending. They may even cheat (as I did, too, when reading those books) by checking the next scene and then making another choice, if the next scene is a bad one. In a Visual Novel, the players look forward to having several endings, mostly the good ones, but often also the bad ones.

That’s because there’s one more specific mechanic in a Visual Novel: the gallery. Most Visual Novels (especially the high-price ones) include very beautifully-drawn, screen-filling CGs (Character Graphics) within the story. Once the player has unlocked them by reaching them (they are endings and, often, also key points of the story), they are available in the gallery off the main menu to look at again. Players often want to fill the gallery completely, unlock every CG, which is why they will play through all the routes and try all the choices possible. It might also play a role that a ‘bad ending’ in a Visual Novel often is not a deadly bad ending, but more of a ‘doesn’t get their love interest’ or ‘fails at the task’ bad ending.

Overall, the most important thing for a nonlinear story is that you plan it out beforehand. I listed a few possible pieces of software to help with that in the first post, but there’s also simple ways like using a big piece of paper or a cork board, tacks, and thread. What you use is very much up to you. Don’t get too caught up in all the skills and traits and other stats you could put into the story and try to make every choice count, especially if there’s few choices. A dating sim or life sim will have less impact per choice than your regular Visual Novel. FF-type stories also have little impact per choice for most choices, but a big impact every now and then (when it comes to reaching one of the endings).

Also be prepared to write a lot more text than you would for a regular novel - since there’s a good portion of text only going into one specific route and you still will want to make a suitably long story. More text is very important there. Try your hands at nonlinear writing - even if you’re not doing well with it, it might actually help you with writing your regular stories!

Visual Novels Or Nonlinear Storytelling Pt. 1

Today’s blog post is dedicated to a less regular form of storytelling: the nonlinear kind. Usually, a story begins at one point, runs its course, and ends at another. There might be a bit of going backward and forward, to bring in action immediately and explain how it came to that later one, but there’s one story and every time you read the book or watch the movie, it’s going to be the same story. Then the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ and ‘Fighting Fantasy’ books happened. Then computers happened and the Japanese started making Visual Novels. In doing so, they all were bringing in a nonlinear way of telling stories.

No matter whether you make use of a programming-language-based system like Ren’Py or the Choice of Games engine or an outright software like the Visual Novel Maker or the TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio, you will always have to design your story differently to deal with the mechanics of the kind of story you’ve agreed to tell. Unless you’re making a Kinetic Novel, there will be at least one choice within the game and thus at least two different paths the story can take. The Choice of Games engine is specifically designed for a lot of choices and gameplay closer to the traditional FF books, right down to keeping an eye on stats or money.

Choices should always matter, too, just having two different lines after a player made the choice usually makes them rather unhappy with you, because you do not deliver on the promise of them having an impact on how the story plays out. Two lines do not an impact make. Because choices should always matter, you can’t just write a linear story and put in a few choices where nothing really changes the course of the story. You need to design your story as something nonlinear from the very beginning. Actually, that makes a modern Visual Novel even harder to design than the good old FF or CYOA books. Usually, those only have one good ending and several bad (in the FF books even deadly) ones. A good Visual Novel has several good endings - but also a few bad ones, because the player is allowed to screw up, be it by accident or by choice.

Personally, I have more experience with the FF books, because I grew up in 1980s Germany and they came over from England, whereas the CYOA books were produced and sold in the US and found their way to the German market much later. The FF series also is older and was, apparently, created in an effort to show a journalist how role-playing games worked. At any rate, “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain” was, which later on became the first FF book.

As a matter of fact, the FF books are less nonlinear than modern Visual Novels. They are made up of a row of clusters, each of which is, essentially, a chapter of the story. You can move around a lot in one chapter and the chance to die is always high (especially since RPG-type fights also feature in the books), but there are core scenes you will have to hit in order to advance to the next cluster. And there’s always only one good ending (where you win), not several, as is standard for Visual Novels. There are several bad endings, though.

Visual Novels are characterized, apart from being novels, through being a visual medium. There is text, a lot of it in some of them, but there’s also a lot of graphics going into one Visual Novel. Characters, backgrounds, CGs (specific character graphics which are a full picture and often available in a gallery after unlocking), sometimes also objects or special effects. There’s also music and sound effects and, in high-quality Visual Novels, also voice acting and, sometimes, animated movies.

And, as mentioned, there’s choices. Those are what sets a Visual Novel apart from a graphics novel (even though most Visual Novels have a decidedly anime-oriented look, it’s not a necessity). During the course of playing/reading the Visual Novel, the player makes choices which in turn influence the way the story develops. Depending on the kind of novel, the choices can be more or less frequent and the consequences can be more or less severe. There’s otome Visual Novels, often called dating sims, because the goal is for the main character to date different love interests and end up with them - so there is a good ending for each love interest and often also a bad ending for all or, at any rate, a bad ending for winding up alone. There’s life sims, where the player also has to keep up their main character’s general life with learning skills and earning money. And there’s other Visual Novels which might include RPG elements or mystery solving or other things.

In an otome Visual Novel or a life sim, choices are very frequent, so the player has a chance to add to their stats (relationships, skills, money, etc.). Usually, a player has to plot out their week in a life sim regularly, deciding what to do on which day (usually 2-3 things a day), which will then influence them (stress is a regular factor for those who work too much, but skills can only be raised through work and money is often needed as well). The art of getting through a life sim is to balance out the different actions and (mostly) focusing on one love interest early on. In an otome, the player usually gets a lot of interaction with all possible love interests and, since relationships can only change through interaction, has to make a lot of decisions there, often during conversations or regular situations, such as dates.

It is possible to make a Visual Novel with only one or two choices overall, but those usually aren’t popular with the players. Players like to have a lot of different endings and a lot of different endings demand a lot of choices. Those come naturally with simulations, where the player is supposed to make a lot of decisions, but can also very well come with the regular story. They demand, however, a very different kind of plotting. Freeplane is a very good tool for that (and it’s free), Scriver and Campfire can be helpful, if you’re ready to pay money.

More about the plotting in part two - stay tuned!

For this first part, let’s say that it can be very interesting to read a Visual Novel, if it’s well-made, but making it is a lot harder and takes a lot more work than writing a regular one.

My Problem With Faust

Faust is originally a German folktale about a guy who makes a deal with the devil. There’s loads of those and Faust used to be only one of them until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) happened to it. It’s Goethe’s plays which I do have a problem with, not the original folktale, which has Faust strike a deal with the devil about the devil serving him for a specific number of years (time span varies from version to version) and then getting his soul as a payment. Faust is not originally a character who escapes from a deal with the devil (although there are plenty of others in German folklore).

Goethe is one of the most prolific and one of the most revered German authors, playwrights, and poets. Despite holding a day job, too, he wrote a large number of plays, poems, and prose. And among all those, Faust is Goethe’s Opus Magnum. He worked on it, on and off, for sixty years and left three different plays behind in the end: Urfaust, Faust I, and Faust II. The Urfaust was an early version of Goethe’s play, Faust I is a rather regular play, while Faust II is highly complicated to understand and demands a good grasp on several mythologies and, perhaps, a membership of the Freemasons. Faust I is staged regularly in Germany, the same goes for the Urfaust, but Faust II is seldom put on stage. Reception for the ‘easier’ parts of Faust was very good from the beginning and several lines of the text have found their way into regular German, such as ‘des Pudels Kern’ (the core of the poodle, referring to the first meeting between Faust and Mephisto, the devil in the piece). So much about the plays as a such and their reception.

Let me give you a short rundown on those parts of the two plays (Faust I and II) which are important for my problem with the story.

Faust I starts with a wager between God and Mephisto, in which they bet that Mephisto will not be able to dissuade Faust from his thirst for knowledge and make him content with where he is and what he’s doing (to long-time Freemason Goethe, striving for knowledge was more important than piety, obviously).

Mephisto takes the bet and goes to earth to meet with Faust, who is seriously frustrated, because he wants to understand the secrets of the universe - something his human mind simply can’t comprehend. They make a deal that Mephisto will serve Faust and show him whatever he wants and will only get Faust’s soul once Faust is content and satisfied. There’s a very nice, rhyming passage about it, but I’m not citing it here, for I would have to translate it, which would then destroy the rhymes.

First of all, Mephisto takes the old man Faust to a witch who gives him a youth elixir - since a lot of the fun things Mephisto will show Faust are not fun for an old man. Then, to put it in a more modern way, they go partying like no tomorrow. After a lot of carousing, fighting, and other things which Faust probably didn’t even do in his own youth, Faust happens to see a young woman - Gretchen. It’s lust on first sight (surely not love) and Faust insists he has to have her. Since Mephisto is bound to serve him, he does his thing, enlisting the help of Gretchen’s aunt and giving a lot of expensive gifts, too. In the end, Faust gets what he wants: he gets inside of Gretchen’s bedroom and it’s everyone’s guess what he and Gretchen are doing there.

Unfortunately, when leaving said bedroom again, Faust is faced with Gretchen’s brother, a soldier who has come home on leave and isn’t happy to see a stranger come out of his little  sister’s bedroom. As wasn’t even uncommon in Goethe’s time, he demands satisfaction, challenging Faust to a duel - which Faust only wins with Mephisto’s help. The brother dies, Gretchen’s mother comes outside, sees her dead son, and dies of shock and a broken heart. Faust has to escape, of course, leaving Gretchen behind and continuing his fun-having and partying.

Gretchen, erstwhile, hasn’t just lost her whole family (Gretchen’s father isn’t mentioned at all, so presumably dead), she’s also pregnant. Given how little interest she had in Faust at the beginning and her overall behaviour, it’s safe to presume that she’s pregnant with his child. All alone in the world (her aunt clearly isn’t much help), she finally does the only thing she thinks she can do: she gives birth to the child in secret and drowns it right afterwards. She’s caught, though, and sentenced to death as a child murderess.

Faust is only reminded of the woman he used to obsess over when he sees a woman who resembles her at a witches’ gathering and learns about her fate: she’s to be executed the very next day. He orders Mephisto to take him to Gretchen’s cell and the devil does as ordered. There, Faust offers to take her away to safety, but Gretchen, seeing through him and Mephisto, rather entrusts her fate to God and, while executed for her crime, goes to heaven. End of Faust I.

Faust II is mostly made up of Faust travelling wherever his fancy takes him and ending up as some sort of Emperor of Earth with the most beautiful woman of all times, Helen of Troy (Goethe was an author of the German Classicism, after all), by his side. This is where he, finally, is too content and decides he wants for things to stay the way they are - deal done, one soul for hell, right? Wrong. Because, as Mephisto drags Faust’s soul to hell, Gretchen’s soul turns up and takes Faust to heaven. End of Faust II with one cheated devil and one lucky Faust.

It is the end which simply doesn’t make sense to me. Gretchen is, when all’s said and done, collateral to Faust’s new experiences with fun and not having his nose in a book at all times. Her fate is tragic, but resolved at the end of Faust I with God taking mercy on her soul and her entering heaven, her sins forgiven. There is no reason why Gretchen should have had any interest whatsoever in saving Faust. There was no love between them to begin with, not in any emotional sense, and she sees right through him before her end, turning her back on him and any possibility of being saved, trusting God more than Faust - and rightfully so, too.

In all likelihood, Goethe had written himself into a corner with his Faust. The whole ‘you can go on as long as you’re not satisfied’ deal, when coupled with human nature (which is rarely really satisfied), could have made Faust wander earth eternally, looking for new stimulation, - or Mephisto just rage-quit the wager, admitting that God had won. The Deus Ex Machina of Gretchen’s intervention at the end is just slightly less annoying than God taking a hand in it himself would be. Clearly, Goethe wasn’t going to let Faust end up in hell, even though that’s what all folktales about Faust do (and most modern interpretations of the tale as well). And as Faust I was already out and staged at the time he finished Faust II, he couldn’t go back and change the relationship of the two from the beginning, giving his end more sense.

Let this be a lesson to you. If a prolific and highly successful author can write himself into a corner and come up with something rather stupid to resolve his problem, you don’t have to be ashamed of the same thing happening to you. Try to avoid the Deus Ex Machina solution, though, rather go back and make changes or accept that you won’t get the ending you were aiming for.

Lord Darcy - A Working Magic System

Randall Garret invented his detective Lord Darcy (who is clearly from the Holmes blueprint) in the late 1970s and wrote a couple of short stories and a novel (“Too Many Magicians”) about him. Later on, Garret’s friend Michael Kurland added two more novels to the collection (“Ten Little Wizards” and “A Study in Sorcery”). All are set in the same alternate reality of the late 1970s and the 1980s. And that alternate reality is what I want to talk about, because it comes with a rational magic system which presents a backdrop without getting in the way too much.

In Lord Darcy’s version of the world, two things happened in medieval times which changed the course of history:

Richard Lionheart survived the battle in which he died in our reality, found the time to re-evaluate his life, and returned to England to rule for twenty more years, surviving his younger brother John (who this way never got a chance at proving how bad a ruler he was) and leaving England in the capable hands of his nephew Arthur. As a result of this, the Plantagenets still rule and a sizable portion of Europe is part of the Angevin Empire, which encompasses France in addition to Britain and has a strong influence on other western European countries.

In addition to that, a monk discovered the rules behind magic, which allows for everyone with the Talent (the inborn ability to use magic) to be trained as a mage of some kind. This has changed the development of technology severely - many modern ‘inventions’ such as refrigerators or telephones exist, but they run on magic instead of electricity.

As a result of both changes, the world is very different from the one we know - the society is much more based on old feudal systems, magicians are their own class, healing is a topic as well, and things seem quite fantastical to the reader.

Randall Garret could have let his imagination run amuck with all of this. He could have told stories of how magic made solving crimes so much easier. But he didn’t - and with good reason. Where would the ‘mystery’ in ‘mystery story’ be, if a magician only snapped their fingers and everything was cleared up? Nowhere, that’s where.

By giving clear limits to magic, both on moral grounds and on actual technological grounds, he made it clear that magic is not solving all problems in this world. Master Sean, Lord Darcy’s assistant, claims often enough that he’s a sorcerer, but not a miracle worker. It’s Darcy’s little grey cells (to quote another detective) which solve the case, not the magic. The magic assists, very much the same way as science assists in our world. Master Sean as a forensic sorcerer can tell how long a body has been dead, identify poisons, tell whether a bullet came from a specific weapon. He can’t just conjure up a picture of the murderer or revive the body to ask it (unlike a certain Mr. Johannes Cabal, but I’ll talk about him in another post).

And magic in the world of Lord Darcy is complicated and hard. Sorcerers and witches need a lot of material, such as different wands, different parchments, different inks, a lot of tools which are expensive. Magical spells can take hours to weave and often come with complications - some demand far more than one sorcerer to work out. Magic is a full-time job with a long training phase.

Since most people do not have the Talent, however, most crimes committed in the world of Lord Darcy (who is a detective by profession, not an amateur) are committed without the use of magic, so Lord Darcy (who doesn’t have an ounce of the Talent himself) is very much suited to solving them. Master Sean provides him with information, as a forensic scientist in our world would, and sometimes provides a sounding board for his colleague and friend.

What magic provides in the stories is not the solution to the case, but the backdrop. The immediate reaction of witnesses to ‘locked room mysteries’ in a magical setting is ‘a sorcerer did it.’ Then, without fail, Lord Darcy proves that a sorcerer had nothing to do with it and it doesn’t take magic to commit a crime the way it was committed.

But magic is there, the past has shaped a different present where there’s no cars, where the train is still the best way of travelling, where people are living in a much less stressful and much less enlightened environment, where it’s perfectly normal to assume that the gentry knows what they’re doing (not Darcy, though, despite being gentry himself). The world is close enough to reality (at least if you were alive and conscious during the 80s) to be recognizable, yet unrecognizable enough so it feels like taking a break in another world entirely. As a matter of fact, this magic-based, late-20th-century world has a striking resemblance to Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian age (but with magic and without Queen Victoria, of course).

The magical backdrop in the Lord Darcy stories works, because it is only a backdrop. The rules of magic, the complicated rituals necessary to use it, the limited pool of people who can use magic at all make sure that despite the whole ‘magic is real’ part of the setting there’s never a simple solution through magic. It’s Lord Darcy’s talent (which his friend and colleague is sure has to be magic as well, in some way) to get from the problem to the solution which saves the day, no matter whether it’s in a short story or a novel, no matter whether it’s an original by Randall Garret or a pastiche by Michael Kurland.

With interesting cases, recurring characters, and a world which is both recognizable and unrecognizable, the Lord Darcy stories (the originals are available collected in one volume, both novels by Michael Kurland are also still available) are still a good read many, many years after they were written - and, sadly, many years after their creator left this globe.