An Esoteric Campaign - Dialog Design
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[/p][h3]UPDATED DEMO UP NOW, AND IT'LL STICK AROUND[/h3][p]Hey! A few days ago the Esoteric Ebb DEMO became available once more- only this time it'll stay up a lot longer! Some of you might also have noticed- the demo is slightly updated with some new artwork and minor changes. If you've already played it, then it's more or less the same content as the old demo, but just overall a lot better. [/p][p]So if you haven't tried it yet, go do it now! Roll some dice and make some dumb decisions. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think. And now, for something completely different...[/p][p][/p][h3]AN ESOTERIC CAMPAIGN - DIALOG CHOICES[/h3][p]It’s been eight months since I last wrote one of these devlogs. Back then I hadn’t even announced the Raw Fury partnership yet, and now I’m working with a (in my opinion) massive team of collaborators. I even have an editor! Getting a second pair of eyes to actually critically look over all of my writing is, as you might imagine, very helpful to increase quality.
A while back I passed the word count of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it got me thinking: is what I’m writing here actually good? The answer to that is, decisively, no. The mythical ‘good writing’, especially when it comes to interactive writing, is born in the second, third, and sometimes fourth (maybe fifth?) draft. This is what I’m spending my days on currently. Banging my head against the keyboard to make my crazy dialog code functional, playable, and actually ‘good’. In that order.
In that last devlog I wrote about my three general rules of Ebb-writing: Agency, Engagement, and Realism. Now, Agency is a topic of which I am insanely obsessed. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to understand it, and practicing my findings (mostly by playing TTRPGs), and then using it to create Esoteric Ebb. In this devlog, I’m going to go over various aspects of my dialogs in Ebb and showcase how and why I designed them in the ways I did. However, first I want to acknowledge an obvious fact: I’m not inventing the wheel here. I would argue that while making an objectively subjective list of TOP 10 BEST DESIGN CHOICES IN ESOTERIC EBB, nine out of ten already belong to the masterpieces I am inspired by.
You ever heard of a game called Disco Elysium? It’s pretty good. What about Planescape: Torment? That’s the one random people on the internet keep telling you to play - the one you bought on a sale years ago but haven’t started yet. Go do it. If you’re reading this and would be in any way interested in getting into interactive writing, go play those two games. There are a ton of other classics I can recommend, but when it comes to pure skill of merging design and writing and presenting it in highly engaging content, those are the games I recommend. My goal with Ebb is to match their level, and merge it with my personal love for extreme non-linear authorial quest design. [/p][p]Let’s talk about how I intend to perform such a foolishly ambitious task. [/p][p]![]()
A high choice-to-text ratio means both a lot of choices, and choices often.
[/p][h3]THE CHIMES[/h3][p]I don’t think this existed before Disco Elysium. The closest thing I can think of would be a Malkavian playthrough of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodline (another masterpiece) or certain games trying to simulate mental breaks. But no, this system seems to me a completely fresh thought by those original developers. Disco Elysium’s signature mechanic is that your skills talk to you, the player, internally within the protagonist’s mind. We’ve always rolled dice with skills, and even early digital D&D games had skill-based prerequisites on dialog options, but this was different. This was constant. This was extremely dynamic. This was awesome. After encountering it in October 2019, I immediately began trying to deconstruct and rebuild it from scratch, just to understand how this system worked, and why it worked so well.
Then, in my research, I came across this part of an interview with Argo and Robert from a year prior. Specifically the following quote sent me spiraling into a hole for the coming seven years:
“I really hope other people steal it from us. If there are any developers here, please make your skills characters who talk to you. I think it's a step that you have to have there, to make this kind of story-based game very personal to the player.”
Thank you for that, Mr. Robert from 2018. I agree.
Though I don’t use the 5e skills in Ebb, for two simple reasons: they are asymmetrical and accessory. Constitution, for example, does not have a skill in 5e. And you can, quite easily, remove skills from 5e entirely, and the game runs fine. I would argue skills are a very positive addition for both player-action clarity and customization in TTRPG play, but for Ebb they were very easy to remove. I did think about redesigning the system in different ways: perhaps making them more symmetrical (each stat gets three skills each!) or allowing the player to be way more creative in the application of skills (which is how I always run my homebrews). But no. I decided quite early on that I wanted to focus entirely on the six ability scores and give each of them an equal playing field.
But then I had to change the name. Since ‘talking stats’ or ‘speaking ability scores’ didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I landed on a term that many in the community sometimes use for these internal voices: that they ‘chime in’. Hence, Chimes.
The Chimes in Ebb are, in comparison to the incredible array of 24 (what the fuck) skills in Disco Elysium, a rather timid list of creatures. Six voices, each representing a fragment of personality in a person. However, this immediately goes against 5e design. The physical stats, STR/DEX/CON, are not supposed to play into the inner workings of a character. Having 19 or 6 Strength will not change your personality, RAW. I never liked that. To imagine those last three holding tyrannical sovereignty over the actual behavior of my character always felt like a travesty to me. So in my homebrew, that is not the case. Every character has a different ‘reaction’ to having high or low STR. To the Cleric, it means the difference between being a macho man zealot, or a spineless wimp with a religious complex. When you make a character in my homebrew, you get to decide what all your stats say about your character. What does increase the complexity of these six CHIMES, is the fact that they are technically twelve. The high and low DC versions of each stat are distinct from one another. This puts the number closer to half of the 24 (still, what the fuck) skills in Disco Elysium, so the goal here is to have these twelve aspects of the Cleric constantly interacting with one another.
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High intelligence gives you the correct context. Low intelligence gives you... the wrong context.
What makes this mechanic so amazing to work with is actually one of the secrets to good DMing: giving your players context. Agency can only be achieved if the player is aware of both choice and feedback. Most players are human, and humans are fleeting creatures with tired minds left weary from years of hard labor. My players constantly forget shit. I forget shit. If I miss a trigger in combat, my players help me remember. If one of my players says they want to pay 500GP for a magic item that I told them was cursed 45 minutes ago, then I am going to remind them- as long as that information is something their character should remember. My catchphrase at this point is basically: [/p][p]Your characters are smarter than you are. Or at the very least, they always have more context than you do.[/p][p]To simulate that in the digital space, in Esoteric Ebb, the Chimes are amazing tools. They allow for a fun, engaging, and immersive way of giving the player constant exposition. If used to maximize their Agency, the player will love them. The only trouble is that the exposition itself actually has to be good. As in, well-written. Interesting. Or just, at the very least, not boring.
[/p][h3]DIALOG CHOICES[/h3][p]There are three types of dialog choices in Esoteric Ebb.
1. "A spoken dialog."
2. An internal thought.
3. (An action.)
I like to use this clear distinction, even if it disallows smoother writing in choices, simply because I want to make sure the player is given as clear information as possible in their decisions. Again, to maximize agency.
But this is only the side the player sees. In those visuals, I do not use tags or 'shown prerequisites', as part of my choice design. There are arguments for and against this decision, however I’ve found that most players will have a negative Agency impact when shown more behind the scene info in choices, for a number of reasons. Three, in fact:
1. The Best Choice Problem: if one of the choices is glowing and is clearly the best choice due to its prerequisites, then that removes any agency from that particular choice.
2. The Absent Information Problem: if you show when a choice is important, then every time the player does not receive that feedback during or after their selection, they will feel as if the choice did not matter.
3. The Reading-The-Damn-Choice Problem: a big part of the experience of making a choice in an RPG dialog is simply reading the text and performing a test of reading comprehension. This test will make the player more connected with the outcome of that choice. Adding accessory information to a choice will, to some degree, make the player pay less attention to the actual text.
I should also note that showing choices that have unmet prerequisites (i.e. ‘grayed-out’ choices) might inspire a small percentage to replay the game, but will cause the majority to simply get really annoyed. At least according to the, admittedly very limited, research I did for my master’s degree. So my tip is to avoid that, unless you’re going for a very short (rogue-like-ish) style of gameplay.
Behind the scenes in Ebb there are also three types of dynamic choices. Everything comes in threes here apparently. Must be my Planescape obsession shining through.
1. Variable Choices: when options have prerequisites. Whether from the level of your stats, or from one of the approximately ten thousand Story Variables that govern the state of your story.
2. Spell Choices: I decided early on to remove these from the dialog UI entirely and place among the rest of the spell UI. But in short, if you’re in a dialog with an animal, then Speak with Animals will light up in your UI. If you press that spell button, then the Speak with Animal choice will be selected in the dialog.
3. Roll Choices: that’s when the dice come out. Click on it, and you get one of two outcomes: success or failure. They each branch off into separate paths. What makes these special is the fact that the DC/Difficulty Class, i.e. the number you need to roll to win, is influenced by any number of variables that I either place by hand, or are affected by the systems. If you’re rude to Snell, the DCs of his rolls might increase. If you put on the Belt of Dwarvenkind, you get advantage in dialogs against all characters that have the DWARF tag on their character sheet.
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Even minor modifiers can come back to bite you - or save your ass.
Finally, I have two categories of choices: PATH and HUB. What does that mean? Well, it’s a rough thematic approximation of what kind of journey those choices will take you on. A PATH choice will only ever show up once in your adventure. It’s a one-and-done. Every character introduction is filled with PATH choices. While HUB choices are the ones you can, potentially, return to later. Talking with a character about their past? That’s probably a HUB. Asking all the standard questions about the Tea Shop, or their political opinions? Most likely a HUB choice.
A good question here is: why even have HUB choices? You could easily make it so that all previously picked choices disappear from the player’s view. However, there are a few positives. For one, it gives the player a clear view of which characters they’ve talked to or not. You can look upon all the ‘grayed-out’ options and feel like you’ve accomplished something. And also, some players enjoy re-reading certain sequences. My personal opinion is that while it does diminish the choices made inside of HUBs to a degree, it also puts less pressure on the player. Yes, being rude to a character in the HUB will probably increase a roll DC somewhere, but the stakes aren’t so high, so you can relax and just have a friendly conversation. And that’s communicated via the UI design, and the fact that HUB choices are circular. It’s kind of cool when you think about it like that.
The most notable difference between these two would then be the ROLL choices. PATH ROLLs have two outcomes, and you can only ever encounter one of them in your playthrough. While the failures in HUB ROLLs can be encountered over and over again. It’s just a roadblock, until you eventually manage to meet the DC, and get to the success branch. The design here is something that I’m very open to discussing, especially when it comes to how often one should use these different types of rolls. If PATH ROLLs are rare, then the player will start feeling like every roll challenge is just an obstacle they bang their head against. If HUB rolls are never used, then the player might feel a massive pressure to succeed every time a roll does show up. Disco Elysium handled this by color-labeling the different rolls in white or red. I decided not to, and let the design of the dialog (hopefully) indicate the differences between the PATHs and HUBs. We will see in time if that particular design decision was wise or foolish.
Whoa, this was a dense thing to write. Since I'm still in the middle of production, I wouldn't classify any of my thoughts here as anything other than rambling ideas. But if you want to see some even more unstructured thoughts about this, then I have the notes from my 2024 talk 'PLEASE (DON'T) MAKE MORE GAMES WITH INTERACTIVE WRITING' up on my website. And since I mention Disco so many times here, I should also say: recently there's been a bunch of questions on the Ebb discord about the recent events surrounding the original developers of Disco Elysium. While I'm very much not involved in any of it (I'm very boring), I can however point towards this great post on the DE subreddit that summarizes the whole ordeal quite neatly. Hope that helps.[/p][p]-Christoffer Bodegård[/p]
A while back I passed the word count of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it got me thinking: is what I’m writing here actually good? The answer to that is, decisively, no. The mythical ‘good writing’, especially when it comes to interactive writing, is born in the second, third, and sometimes fourth (maybe fifth?) draft. This is what I’m spending my days on currently. Banging my head against the keyboard to make my crazy dialog code functional, playable, and actually ‘good’. In that order.
In that last devlog I wrote about my three general rules of Ebb-writing: Agency, Engagement, and Realism. Now, Agency is a topic of which I am insanely obsessed. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to understand it, and practicing my findings (mostly by playing TTRPGs), and then using it to create Esoteric Ebb. In this devlog, I’m going to go over various aspects of my dialogs in Ebb and showcase how and why I designed them in the ways I did. However, first I want to acknowledge an obvious fact: I’m not inventing the wheel here. I would argue that while making an objectively subjective list of TOP 10 BEST DESIGN CHOICES IN ESOTERIC EBB, nine out of ten already belong to the masterpieces I am inspired by.
You ever heard of a game called Disco Elysium? It’s pretty good. What about Planescape: Torment? That’s the one random people on the internet keep telling you to play - the one you bought on a sale years ago but haven’t started yet. Go do it. If you’re reading this and would be in any way interested in getting into interactive writing, go play those two games. There are a ton of other classics I can recommend, but when it comes to pure skill of merging design and writing and presenting it in highly engaging content, those are the games I recommend. My goal with Ebb is to match their level, and merge it with my personal love for extreme non-linear authorial quest design. [/p][p]Let’s talk about how I intend to perform such a foolishly ambitious task. [/p][p]
[/p][h3]THE CHIMES[/h3][p]I don’t think this existed before Disco Elysium. The closest thing I can think of would be a Malkavian playthrough of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodline (another masterpiece) or certain games trying to simulate mental breaks. But no, this system seems to me a completely fresh thought by those original developers. Disco Elysium’s signature mechanic is that your skills talk to you, the player, internally within the protagonist’s mind. We’ve always rolled dice with skills, and even early digital D&D games had skill-based prerequisites on dialog options, but this was different. This was constant. This was extremely dynamic. This was awesome. After encountering it in October 2019, I immediately began trying to deconstruct and rebuild it from scratch, just to understand how this system worked, and why it worked so well.
Then, in my research, I came across this part of an interview with Argo and Robert from a year prior. Specifically the following quote sent me spiraling into a hole for the coming seven years:
“I really hope other people steal it from us. If there are any developers here, please make your skills characters who talk to you. I think it's a step that you have to have there, to make this kind of story-based game very personal to the player.”
Thank you for that, Mr. Robert from 2018. I agree.
Though I don’t use the 5e skills in Ebb, for two simple reasons: they are asymmetrical and accessory. Constitution, for example, does not have a skill in 5e. And you can, quite easily, remove skills from 5e entirely, and the game runs fine. I would argue skills are a very positive addition for both player-action clarity and customization in TTRPG play, but for Ebb they were very easy to remove. I did think about redesigning the system in different ways: perhaps making them more symmetrical (each stat gets three skills each!) or allowing the player to be way more creative in the application of skills (which is how I always run my homebrews). But no. I decided quite early on that I wanted to focus entirely on the six ability scores and give each of them an equal playing field.
But then I had to change the name. Since ‘talking stats’ or ‘speaking ability scores’ didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I landed on a term that many in the community sometimes use for these internal voices: that they ‘chime in’. Hence, Chimes.
The Chimes in Ebb are, in comparison to the incredible array of 24 (what the fuck) skills in Disco Elysium, a rather timid list of creatures. Six voices, each representing a fragment of personality in a person. However, this immediately goes against 5e design. The physical stats, STR/DEX/CON, are not supposed to play into the inner workings of a character. Having 19 or 6 Strength will not change your personality, RAW. I never liked that. To imagine those last three holding tyrannical sovereignty over the actual behavior of my character always felt like a travesty to me. So in my homebrew, that is not the case. Every character has a different ‘reaction’ to having high or low STR. To the Cleric, it means the difference between being a macho man zealot, or a spineless wimp with a religious complex. When you make a character in my homebrew, you get to decide what all your stats say about your character. What does increase the complexity of these six CHIMES, is the fact that they are technically twelve. The high and low DC versions of each stat are distinct from one another. This puts the number closer to half of the 24 (still, what the fuck) skills in Disco Elysium, so the goal here is to have these twelve aspects of the Cleric constantly interacting with one another.
What makes this mechanic so amazing to work with is actually one of the secrets to good DMing: giving your players context. Agency can only be achieved if the player is aware of both choice and feedback. Most players are human, and humans are fleeting creatures with tired minds left weary from years of hard labor. My players constantly forget shit. I forget shit. If I miss a trigger in combat, my players help me remember. If one of my players says they want to pay 500GP for a magic item that I told them was cursed 45 minutes ago, then I am going to remind them- as long as that information is something their character should remember. My catchphrase at this point is basically: [/p][p]Your characters are smarter than you are. Or at the very least, they always have more context than you do.[/p][p]To simulate that in the digital space, in Esoteric Ebb, the Chimes are amazing tools. They allow for a fun, engaging, and immersive way of giving the player constant exposition. If used to maximize their Agency, the player will love them. The only trouble is that the exposition itself actually has to be good. As in, well-written. Interesting. Or just, at the very least, not boring.
[/p][h3]DIALOG CHOICES[/h3][p]There are three types of dialog choices in Esoteric Ebb.
1. "A spoken dialog."
2. An internal thought.
3. (An action.)
I like to use this clear distinction, even if it disallows smoother writing in choices, simply because I want to make sure the player is given as clear information as possible in their decisions. Again, to maximize agency.
But this is only the side the player sees. In those visuals, I do not use tags or 'shown prerequisites', as part of my choice design. There are arguments for and against this decision, however I’ve found that most players will have a negative Agency impact when shown more behind the scene info in choices, for a number of reasons. Three, in fact:
1. The Best Choice Problem: if one of the choices is glowing and is clearly the best choice due to its prerequisites, then that removes any agency from that particular choice.
2. The Absent Information Problem: if you show when a choice is important, then every time the player does not receive that feedback during or after their selection, they will feel as if the choice did not matter.
3. The Reading-The-Damn-Choice Problem: a big part of the experience of making a choice in an RPG dialog is simply reading the text and performing a test of reading comprehension. This test will make the player more connected with the outcome of that choice. Adding accessory information to a choice will, to some degree, make the player pay less attention to the actual text.
I should also note that showing choices that have unmet prerequisites (i.e. ‘grayed-out’ choices) might inspire a small percentage to replay the game, but will cause the majority to simply get really annoyed. At least according to the, admittedly very limited, research I did for my master’s degree. So my tip is to avoid that, unless you’re going for a very short (rogue-like-ish) style of gameplay.
Behind the scenes in Ebb there are also three types of dynamic choices. Everything comes in threes here apparently. Must be my Planescape obsession shining through.
1. Variable Choices: when options have prerequisites. Whether from the level of your stats, or from one of the approximately ten thousand Story Variables that govern the state of your story.
2. Spell Choices: I decided early on to remove these from the dialog UI entirely and place among the rest of the spell UI. But in short, if you’re in a dialog with an animal, then Speak with Animals will light up in your UI. If you press that spell button, then the Speak with Animal choice will be selected in the dialog.
3. Roll Choices: that’s when the dice come out. Click on it, and you get one of two outcomes: success or failure. They each branch off into separate paths. What makes these special is the fact that the DC/Difficulty Class, i.e. the number you need to roll to win, is influenced by any number of variables that I either place by hand, or are affected by the systems. If you’re rude to Snell, the DCs of his rolls might increase. If you put on the Belt of Dwarvenkind, you get advantage in dialogs against all characters that have the DWARF tag on their character sheet.
Finally, I have two categories of choices: PATH and HUB. What does that mean? Well, it’s a rough thematic approximation of what kind of journey those choices will take you on. A PATH choice will only ever show up once in your adventure. It’s a one-and-done. Every character introduction is filled with PATH choices. While HUB choices are the ones you can, potentially, return to later. Talking with a character about their past? That’s probably a HUB. Asking all the standard questions about the Tea Shop, or their political opinions? Most likely a HUB choice.
A good question here is: why even have HUB choices? You could easily make it so that all previously picked choices disappear from the player’s view. However, there are a few positives. For one, it gives the player a clear view of which characters they’ve talked to or not. You can look upon all the ‘grayed-out’ options and feel like you’ve accomplished something. And also, some players enjoy re-reading certain sequences. My personal opinion is that while it does diminish the choices made inside of HUBs to a degree, it also puts less pressure on the player. Yes, being rude to a character in the HUB will probably increase a roll DC somewhere, but the stakes aren’t so high, so you can relax and just have a friendly conversation. And that’s communicated via the UI design, and the fact that HUB choices are circular. It’s kind of cool when you think about it like that.
The most notable difference between these two would then be the ROLL choices. PATH ROLLs have two outcomes, and you can only ever encounter one of them in your playthrough. While the failures in HUB ROLLs can be encountered over and over again. It’s just a roadblock, until you eventually manage to meet the DC, and get to the success branch. The design here is something that I’m very open to discussing, especially when it comes to how often one should use these different types of rolls. If PATH ROLLs are rare, then the player will start feeling like every roll challenge is just an obstacle they bang their head against. If HUB rolls are never used, then the player might feel a massive pressure to succeed every time a roll does show up. Disco Elysium handled this by color-labeling the different rolls in white or red. I decided not to, and let the design of the dialog (hopefully) indicate the differences between the PATHs and HUBs. We will see in time if that particular design decision was wise or foolish.
Whoa, this was a dense thing to write. Since I'm still in the middle of production, I wouldn't classify any of my thoughts here as anything other than rambling ideas. But if you want to see some even more unstructured thoughts about this, then I have the notes from my 2024 talk 'PLEASE (DON'T) MAKE MORE GAMES WITH INTERACTIVE WRITING' up on my website. And since I mention Disco so many times here, I should also say: recently there's been a bunch of questions on the Ebb discord about the recent events surrounding the original developers of Disco Elysium. While I'm very much not involved in any of it (I'm very boring), I can however point towards this great post on the DE subreddit that summarizes the whole ordeal quite neatly. Hope that helps.[/p][p]-Christoffer Bodegård[/p]