Exposition Tools in Solo Adventures

Solo play exists on a spectrum. At one end is free-form play, usually with random tables that generate encounters. The player creates a story to reflect the tables’ results and to determine which tables to roll on next. At the other end are gamebooks, narrative-focused text-based adventures that preformulate each route. Many solo systems exist somewhere in the middle, drawing elements from both.

I write gamebooks. In part, this is because I want my work to be accessible—I want to include players unused to juggling the various tools at the free-form end of the spectrum. More importantly, I write gamebooks because I want to share particular stories. This is where my exposition problems begin.

I hesitate to write about this because I’m deeply affected by exposition problems. This would be an easier topic if I had fully implemented these “solutions” and seen proven results. I don’t have any great examples to point to yet. Perhaps my solutions are misguided—feel free to argue with any of them. Writing on this topic is how I commit myself to work on the problem.

Story Context (Prologue)

Gamebooks share the same exposition problems as novels. These problems begin in the beginning. Wherever you choose to start the story, some prior events are important for context. In most cases, this means a prologue.

Fantasy prologues are often more bloated than fiction prologues. Fantasy calls for an entirely separate exposition layer called “worldbuilding.” These details are additional to the events and fact patterns of normal exposition. They often bloat an already-large prologue.

I have the benefit of writing D&D gamebooks. D&D fantasy is its own genre, one that contains a lot of assumptions. Because I assume a degree of familiarity with D&D tropes, I accidentally under-exposit these things, meaning I only need to deal with the normal problems of bloated prologues. This article is about gamebook exposition, not traditional exposition tools, so I’ll skip to the relevant parts.

Here’s what I’ve learned by watching recordings of people playing my gamebooks.

A gamebook prologue does almost nothing. At this stage, the player will only retain a vague remembrance of the events you describe. Your prologue can set the scene and foreshadow things to come, but it struggles to create actionable memories. By this, I mean you can’t easily provide clues for future decision-making.

For example, if my prologue says the protagonist must journey south, players aren’t going to remember that when they find a crossroads and need to decide a direction. Without a lot of emphasis (or a map), the prologue’s instruction to go south isn’t memorable and thus isn’t actionable.

The normal solution for a bloated prologue is to shift that exposition into later parts of the book. That raises the question of where that exposition should go.

Story Signposts (Actionable Details)

The reader of a novel can forget some important details. This does not prevent the reader from continuing to read. In a gamebook, things are different. Some sets of options have an authorial intention that the player decide in the context of an actionable detail. Forgetting that detail changes how the options are interacted with. It can make story route random where that’s not intended. Some people might say that remembering (and note-taking) are part of the solo experience. That’s a fair sentiment, but I want all players to be equally situated at some decision points.

I’ve tried various exposition tools, including images of maps and handouts (rarely studied or referenced) with mixed results. I’ll go through a few of them here.

Emotional Pairing

The tool that worked best for me is emotional pairing.

The failing of prologues is the lack of player investment at that point of exposition. There isn’t yet that sense of danger or wonder that comes from immersive play. The player won’t feel threatened or intrigued at that point. Tension is low.

Emotional pairing comes from the screenwriting tradition. It suggests expositing the most-important details during the film’s most-emotional moments. This sears that detail into the brain. In cognitive psychology terms, it creates a “flashbulb” memory.

This sounds great, but it’s not easy to do. It requires that you heavily outline the story, particularly the points where your narrative branches. It also requires you to think of your exposition in terms of importance, at least the exposition that you think is critical to have at various decision points.

I’ve taken to creating an exposition list for my stories. This is separate from the outline. It’s like a menu of details, from which I can see what’s most important. It also lets me check off things I’ve already included and to make sure that there are no routes that can miss the acquisition of the game’s most important information.

Optional Exposition (Nodes)

Different players have different capacities to absorb exposition. People usually read novels because they like to read. Players of gamebooks like to play—they might not be used to absorbing information from the page. Some have developed strategies for skimming the text and skipping to the “important” parts, the decision-making and dice-rolling. Different people enjoy different parts of the adventure to different degrees.

One way to manage exposition is the use of nodes. Imagine a conversation with an NPC. After a brief dialogue covering the critical details, the options allow the player to ask for more information about one or more topics. Players that don’t want to do more reading can skip the deeper dive (the less important details) and continue along their way.

Nodes are also useful to preserve the agility of additional playthroughs. Second-time players often skip a lot of text, relying on their memories of the first playthrough. A player that reaches this conversation node can skip the deeper detail options if she read them last time. Alternately, a player that skipped them might opt to find out more on this second playthrough.

Nodes like this don’t need to be conversations. For example, you could write a library scene where the critical information is in the first “research” done, and additional reading is allowed (or even gated behind ability checks to find).

This illustration of three nodes shows how they present short-term diversions from the central route of the story. Some nodes can be quite deep, but they always return to the original route.

Referential Exposition (Lore Appendix)

A lore appendix is a tool I’ve used with mixed results. The player encounters a piece of optional information (sometimes gated by an ability check). When the lore is accessible, the details aren’t written in the same entry. Instead, the player references a separate appendix entry.

An analog to lore appendices is the monster codex you can find in so many video games; after encountering a monster, the player can repeatedly check a menu of monsters to read about it, perhaps to remember its weaknesses.

The lore appendix has several advantages. It allows the player to check the information at any time in the adventure, and to check it repeatedly. You can use it for actual lore, and you can use it for game details like sidekick stat blocks and the descriptions of nonstandard equipment or magic items.

The disadvantage of a lore appendix is that it’s cumbersome to keep your place in the book while checking another page. (You can’t hyperlink away from the lore page because you don’t know where players will be when they check that page.) Players might also forget to make a note of the lore appendix page, and thus may lose the ability to access that page.

By watching playthroughs of my gamebooks, I’ve learned that lore entries are referenced less often than I imagined they would be. They should never be used for critical exposition because a player might not ever read them.

Outside Research

The final piece of exposition I want to mention is outside research. For most writers, this isn’t a thing. However, I’m writing a series set in the Forgotten Realms, a setting for which bajillions of pages have been written, and for which many details are available on wikis. If I write about an institution, even a rare one from an old edition, I know that some players are going to put down the book and look it up on the Internet. This is not the sort of exposition you need to worry about injecting—players who do this already have the capacity and desire to grab every piece of information they can. However, it is a warning for writers to try to remain consistent with established details. Some people are out there giving themselves “bonus” exposition, so be sure to write with that in mind.

Conclusion

Go and write! Learn from my failures and tell me about your successes!

Locational Mapping and Timed Events

This is an article related to the creation of gamebooks but it applies equally to other mediums for interactive storytelling.

Locational Mapping and Timed Events

Locational mapping is a technique used to describe a geographical region, like a dungeon divided into rooms or a set of forest clearings connected by paths. The style exists to allow free, repeatable exploration of the area’s locations.

In locational mapping, the player may repeatedly read the same entries to simulate navigating back and forth between locations. Veneers parse the one-time events local to each location, so that returning to a location doesn’t feel like entering a time loop.

To talk about timed events in locational mapping, we must first revisit the concept of veneers.

VENEERS

If a one-time event can occur in a location, the first entry for that location is a veneer that checks the state of that room (asks for an event code) and directs the player to whichever entry describes the correct state of that location.

Example. The protagonist is in a room with Four Doors.

By going east, the protagonist reaches the intervening East Door Veneer that checks for an event code. The player hasn’t noted that event code so is routed to the Pre-Fight East Room, where an ambush occurs. The protagonist fights the monster and gets the room’s event code. After the fight, the protagonist can explore (the Post-Fight East Room), then return to the intersection of Four Doors.

Later, the protagonist returns to the room with Four Doors and goes east again. This time, when the East Door Veneer asks for the event code, the player has it noted; the veneer now points to the Post-Fight East Room, skipping the fight.

TIMED EVENTS

Locational mapping has difficulty with timed events. This problem appears in several ways and has several possible solutions.

Imagine this scenario. Wandering through a woodland, the sun sets when the protagonist reaches an entry representing the middle of the forest. However, the area’s locational mapping layout means the protagonist may leave and later revisit that location. Because the location’s entry describes a sunset, the sun sets each time the protagonist goes there.

A player might ignore the repetition if the sunset only has a story effect. Sure, the rising tension is diffused by the repeated experience, but story timing in locational mapping inherently bows to the player’s chosen pace of exploration. Bigger problems occur when the player must deal with an important story event or a mechanical change.

For example, if the sun sets, the protagonist must thereafter deal with mechanics related to darkness. If the protagonist returns to the earlier locations of the forest, does darkness apply? Should it only be nighttime in half the forest?

Solution 1: No Timed Events

If the story isn’t one with a deadline, you can completely omit the notion of time passing, putting such events before the story transitions into locational mapping or after it transitions back from locational mapping. The protagonist isn’t trying to catch up with a kidnapper and has no one waiting on the far side of the forest; it doesn’t matter how long things take.

The drawback here is that unlimited time is non-immersive, and exploration without timing lacks an essential tension. It also reduces replayability; the player has already seen every location in the area.

Because I write for D&D characters, I’m also concerned about balancing difficulty when the protagonist has unlimited resting potential. To some degree, I can balance unlimited rests with a chance for a random encounter; resting has a chance to be counter-productive.

Solution 2: Bottleneck

Halfway through the forest, the sun sets at a “bottleneck” location. This entry serves as a one-way door separating the earlier locations from the later locations. No post-bottleneck location gives an option to return to any pre-bottleneck location (or to the bottleneck itself). With the sun having set, the post-bottleneck locations all have darkness penalties.

The disadvantage of this method is that the protagonist can no longer return to earlier areas. Many players want to see as much as possible, exploring every room, and may not like stumbling past an arbitrary point of no return. Therefore, the bottleneck should include a one-way environment the player can choose to engage with. Climbing down a cliff, getting on a raft and going downriver, or passing through a door that has no handle on the other side are good examples. There should be some signal that the player won’t be able to explore areas that were left behind.

Solution 3: Brute Force

The adventure tracks time separately. For example, the player is instructed to make a hashmark each time a location is entered, until 15 marks are tallied, after which the sun sets and darkness mechanics apply everywhere. This instruction occurs at the start of the locational area and requires the player to apply the mechanics without being prompted by each location’s text.

The disadvantages here are several. The player must meticulously track time, must notice when the timing threshold is reached, and must remember (or have noted) the new mechanical effects. It’s a lot of note-taking.

BLENDED APPROACH

The following approach is a version that incorporates multiple techniques. It’s from an upcoming book in the Eight Petals Argent adventure set. [Map by Dyson Logos, with some alterations.]

The map below is color-coded. If you can’t distinguish these, the northwest-clustered routes are blue, the north-central-clustered routes are purple, and the southern-clustered routes are red. The green northeast cluster is the smallest (destination) cluster.

The protagonist is leading a column of mercenaries and supply wagons east through a jungle. The only river crossing is on the far side of an abandoned, overgrow city. The protagonist will enter from the northwest (blue route cluster) or from the south (red route cluster), depending on a major split chosen in the prior chapter. The goal is to reach the river-crossing in the northeast corner of the city. An army of zombies is slowly sweeping eastward after the group.

The initial roadways can be explored freely within their clusters (red or blue). However, at any intersection that transitions into the purple cluster, the description of that area includes a clear view of the approaching zombies. The threat is still distant but it justifies me not giving the option to return to the earlier cluster, back toward the undead. The caravan must progress toward the bridge to stay ahead of the threat.

No Timed Events: I don’t use descriptions mid-area to describe timed events. The sun doesn’t set at any point, nor is the city overwhelmed by the approaching zombies. The zombies don’t take the city until the protagonist is over the river and out of the locationally-mapped area.

To maintain some tension, I still describe the approaching undead. But these descriptions are vague. The real events won’t occur while the protagonist is inside the locationally-mapped area.

Bottlenecks: I don’t let the player return to an entry cluster after getting to the purple routes. These intersections aren’t technically bottlenecks. The protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to visit a particular one of them and can revisit those intersections. However, I do use those points to prevent backward travel. Instead of timed events adding tension, the player can see the zombies while in those intersections, looking down the long streets of the city. There is a repeatable reminder of the threat there. However, the zombies are always approaching, never arriving. I simply use these transition points to omit the option to go backward toward the threat.

Tracking Time: I don’t track time, per se. But the protagonist has a limited number of soldiers. Ambushes occur on some roads, costing soldiers. Although the column can return along some of those roads safely (using veneers), each loss of soldiers represents a countdown until the mercenary company is depleted to a minimum number that is checked periodically. Excessive exploration means more encounters and fewer soldiers. Reaching the minimum company size ends the chapter immediately in an unfavorable way.

CONCLUSION

Locational mapping allows the protagonist to choose the order of exploration, perhaps missing some areas, thus granting greater agency to the player. The right tools let us provide this experience in ways that don’t read as redundant or risk the protagonist falling into a time loop. Although it can be harder to create, locational exploration is one of the joyous parts of a good gamebook. It should be embraced whenever and however you can make it work.

Reputations in the Solitaires Method

This post describes my approach to numerical reputation scores as they appear in the Solitaires Method. These opinions are based on my personal experiences of designing and implementing relationship mechanics in text RPGs. My approach is also influenced by the broader discussion of numerical reputation happening in the video game space for the last 30 years.

Renown is an optional mechanic described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. It gives the party a set of faction-specific numerical scores starting at 0 and rising as high as 50. Faction quests (and downtime actions) affect these scores. With higher numbers, the party can win titles and support from the factions they help.

The Solitaires Method varies this system in a few ways. It allows the score to drop into negative numbers that represent lower-than-neutral reputations. It also abandons the 50-point maximum in favor of a scale that better matches a single-player, multi-book campaign.

If you are writing in the Solitaires Method, or you are interested in using reputation scores in your own text-based RPG or solo gamebook, these systems can help you extend choice-based consequences into the future. Importantly, they are one of the tools you can use to empower players to change the story as they go.

Why Renown?

Although the renown system tries to enforce consequences, it also tries to be realistic. It is not a piety or karma system because it doesn’t tally every good or bad action. Renown is a system by which the player’s deeds—when witnessed and passed on—alter faction reactions in some scenes.

The Solitaires Method also prefers reputation (renown) over karma for the reliability and realism of it. Reputation does not assume that every “good” action will accrue adjustments. Instead, these actions must be witnessed in a way that will spread among the relevant factions. Players should be able to rely on their ability to get away with various misdeeds if those go unseen. (See also, Simulationism.)

Another reason for reputation is that its adjustments can be subjective. This serves as a safety net for when—inevitably—the protagonist gets an adjustment that wasn’t earned or deserved. Perhaps the player’s route to that point in the story only marginally touched upon the relevant event or moral question from whence came the adjustment. Perhaps—in the player’s mind—the protagonist only rescued the kidnapped orphans to get the reward. When an unearned adjustment occurs, it is the NPCs’ misperception of the character’s actions that triggered it, not the writer’s inability to equally weight the consequence of every story route or failure to see into the protagonist’s heart.

From Simple to Complex

Early video games used simple reputations scores that went up and down. However, even simple video games now tend to track reputation along dual axes. Rather than a single number, computer games can track good and bad deeds separately. A character with good deeds and bad deeds is treated separately from a character with all good deeds or all bad deeds. Unfortunately, this abstraction doesn’t go much farther than a jump from binary to trinary results, letting factions have a good, bad, or “mixed” reaction to the protagonist.

In the Solitaires Method, renown scores remain numerical along a single axis. When I want a mixed reaction, the method leans upon another of tool, event codes. A character that has worked hard to serve a faction might have a high renown score but also possess negative event codes. For example, having “killed the mayor’s horse” or “burned the town,” the protagonist may have difficulty getting aid from the mayor, regardless of the protagonist’s renown. If a high renown score in this case does win an offer of aid, it would come only grudgingly or perhaps at a cost.

It’s also important not to overuse this second tool. Event codes should only stand in for renown adjustments when (1) the affected NPCs do not represent the faction as a whole, (2) the adjustment is so deep as to warrant references in future dialog, or (3) there is some other reason to want a mixed reaction. Otherwise, numerical adjustments to the score are preferred for consistency and to ease the chore of tracking persistent event codes.

Primary Measurements

Renown ratings let players feel the consequences of their actions, in the short term and the long term. They are tools that make the world more responsive to the player. They don’t fit every story. A solitary adventure with no NPCs or supporting characters can’t use—and doesn’t need—such tools. Renown ratings are only useful in stories where other people matter. However, it is my opinion that stories should include people that matter. Without spectators or people to help, stories tend to feel less meaningful.

In the short term, the immediate display of a renown adjustment punctuates a player’s action; the result is felt on a personal level and a mechanical level. Even though the number doesn’t have a concrete meaning in the moment, it portends a future consequence.

“Kenny will remember that.”

If you want to avoid the metaknowledge of an immediately-signaled renown change, you can apply a temporary event code that will later lead to a renown adjustment, probably in the moment the adjustment is felt most poignantly.

In the long term, renown makes that future consequence real. You don’t have to write apologetically if criminals “randomly” come after the protagonist; you know the protagonist went after them first.

Secondary Measurements

In the Eight Petals Argent series, the protagonist can gain and lose renown points relevant to four different factions. These include two sets of “opposite” groups. Many of the reputation-affecting decisions are binary in that the protagonist will gain or lose reputation with one faction or with its opposite, depending on the option selected.

The four factions in the Eight Petals Argent series are the Waterdeep Watch, the [Xanathar’s] Guild, the Slipstone Gang, and the Crimson Perytons. The first two of these represent a nebulous, high-level conflict between law and chaos in Waterdeep. The second two are more personal; smaller-scale factions that represent the tensions inside the protagonist’s friend group.

It’s useful to cast these factions as opposites to support the story’s theme and to help the protagonist “advance” along certain conceptual lines. By tying these developments to the factions, I can reward players for playing within their (very broad) archetypes.

My first pair of factions recognizes that D&D characters are particularly defined by their desire to operate within the law or outside it. By reporting to the Watch, the protagonist is preparing to walk in the sun, to collaborate with authority figures, and to manage conflicts with straightforward dialogue or combat. A low score with the Watch occurs when the protagonist commits crimes, disturbs the peace, or otherwise acts in a shady manor. Naturally, these criminal actions are admired by the Guild and will increase renown with that faction. A protagonist liked by the Guild has opportunities to buy poisons, learn details known only to criminals, and approach problems from the shadows.

The second pair of factions is the character’s gang of friends, the Slipstone Gang, and their rivals, the Crimson Perytons. The protagonist gains renown points with the former by making wise, friend-helping choices, and loses it by opposing the gang’s interests or acting against their “good” morals. Renown with the Crimson Perytons comes from making peace with individual members—though the Perytons leader is always antagonistic—and it is lost by killing members of that gang. A low score with the Perytons is easy to get if the protagonist kills a lot of that gang’s members, making it secondarily a measure of the character’s willingness to fight and kill opponents.

Although these four factions represent developmental directions for the protagonist, their renown adjustments are not independent of their own stories. They are living factions first, thematic tools second. This means the renown scores primarily represent the work the player has done with those factions. They only “secondarily” measure these other factors, the character archetypes and behaviors.

Downtime Adjustments

My use of the renown system allows the player to improving ratings with downtime. This is conceptually consistent with the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rules, but I use an altered mechanic for this activity, one that better reflects the scale of a single-player gamebook.

The use of downtime further degrades reputation ratings as a secondary measuring tool for player proclivities since any player can modify the ratings regardless of choices made. This is both good and bad; a player committed to a faction can wipe out an accidental loss by spending downtime to affect that renown score. The protagonist gets to stay on the track its player imagines, but the world is less accurate in its responsiveness to past deeds. This is another reason that persistent event codes are necessary to track exceptionally-influential deeds.

Tracking across books

In a series that uses renown, tracking the range is very important, as is tracking the reasons for the adjustments. Here is an example of the renown adjustment possibilities in book 1 of my series. (“DT” means downtime.)

Before the end of the book (before downtime options), I can use any negative renown rating with the Slipstone gang as shorthand for the one event that can cause it, killing a youth hired to serve as a rival gang’s scout.

As the books progress, this sort of fine detail gets lost in the numbers. However, each time I need to set a renown range as the trigger for certain events or reactions, I’m not looking at raw ranges. I’m looking at all the events and imagining different combinations of them that should trigger whatever I’m planning. I then translate those combinations using their combined numerical ratings.

Other Options

If you want a karma system, Dungeons & Dragons has in-built alignment mechanics you could track along the good-evil and law-chaos axes as seen in various CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate. However, the protagonist’s alignment doesn’t affect the game world; alignment-referential mechanics are almost entirely absent from the game’s current edition. The player might appreciate a mechanic that changes the protagonist’s alignment, but the effect isn’t visible outside that character’s brain. Rather than enjoying a character’s arc through alignment change, I think you will find players unreceptive to it.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide also includes an optional “loyalty” mechanic. If your story doesn’t have persistent factions, but it does have persistent, independent NPCs, the loyalty rules can be leveraged with similar result of renown.

Feedback

If you’re writing gamebooks for D&D, feel free to find my Facebook group and engage in the discussion with us. Comments here aren’t likely to be noticed.