DEFINITION

Variety and contrast

<aside> ⛷️ VARIETY IN GAMEPLAY & MECHANICS

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• Successive encounters or quests should vary in theirdominant nature, and not all be of the same type: social, exploration, combat...
• Of the encounters of the same type, it is great to vary their paterns to offer a variety of challenges (e.g.: changing monster types, terrain or tactics in comabt encounters, or changing bricks of level design during platforming encounters).
• Quests can also vary from one another in their rewards, length, and other parameters.

<aside> 🤯 VARIETY IN EMOTION & NARRATIVE

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"Hey, what's the color of this quest?" - "Tragedy Grey, like all the other ones. Now eat up."

• Variety of emotions:

  • Awe at beauty / receiving Wisdom / being impressed
  • Being seduced
  • Humour
  • Horror
  • Feeling danger
  • Solving an intrigue
  • ...

• Variety in Verbs & Objectives

  • Go to
  • Rescue
  • Sabotage
  • Gather
  • Exterminate
  • Assassinate
  • Escort
  • ...

• Additional parameter of narrative variety: dynamics (being witness/allowing - instigating/taking - asking/giving - being asked/receiving...)

• Consider changing the scenery, companions, context of giving the quest (e.g.: given by a letter instead of by an NPC) or other narrative tools for creating additional variety.

Rising & Falling Tension

<aside> 📈 RISING TENSION & CLIMAX

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• Rising tension is created by moments of stress, uncertainty, anticipation of challenge, hard choice
  • Combat / obstacles / other mechanical challenges...
  • Interpersonal conflict, unsatisfying negotiation...
  • Raising the stakes, making things personal, adding motivations, imperatives, and perceived consequences.
• Difficulty can be adjusted to impact the intensity of a gameplay encounter. It is great when that difficulty can be acompanied with narrative drama as well instead of standing on its own for the sake of difficulty alone.
• Introducing secondary tensions is a great way of raising the stakes, giving a deeper insigth into the context of the quest, or making things more complex by introducing potentialy conflicting objectives.
  • Example:
• Reinforcing an existing tension is done by giving a tangible reminder of an established plotline.
  • Example:
• The climax is the moment of biggest emotional release, the passage of the curve with the biggest drop in tension. It needs to be built by reinforcing the main tension and converging other plotlines together to a single moment of release.
  • Example: