Moon Hunters - Lessons On Procedural Storytelling

Moon Hunter's Lead Designer Tanya Short shares three lessons on procedural storytelling with us, in this article on Gamasutra.

The game is a co-operative RPG that tasks players with finding out what happened to the moon, which has gone missing. Against the backdrop of fantasy version of ancient Mesopotamia, players explore a world in which environment is randomized, but so are the story beats and characters they encounter along the way. Across short play sessions, players retell the same myth with different characters the way that a storyteller might continually recast Pandora, The Monkey King, or other ancient heroes. It's a tradition dating back across many cultures, including Polynesian storytelling and classical myth making.

In searching for an opportunity to have players experience “the multiple truths of storytelling,” Short hit upon 3 fundamental lessons for investing players in a randomized quest.

1) Break away from duality

To start, Short explains that nailing the “multiple playthroughs, multiple stories” tone for Moon Hunters depended on successfully introducing what it means for a story to have different retellings. To her, those carrying versions ultimately represent a wide variety of possible truths, with each tale's telling having a different moral or point depending on the context of when it was told....

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I have to admit I really have problems with procedural story telling. The one game I found it worked in pretty well was Expeditions:Conquistadors, and there I think it was only a part of the storytelling. First problem: you run into the same event multiple times, sometimes in the same playthrough. Second problem: most of these story arcs are extremely encapsulated. You usually read a text (sometimes even well written), make a choice, and suffer a consequence in terms of games mechanics, and that's it. There are no quests which weave through a playthrough or which have any feel of long term importance. Problem three: This kind of story telling is mostly impersonal. A whole bunch of short term events doesn't make a story and can't compete with even some of the more mundane Bioware side quests, which are at least presented in the form of a character or characters. I can't remember a procedural game which presented procedural story telling in terms of interesting characters. The only one which comes close is the Banner Saga, in which you can lose a character gotten in the main quest through a random event. Even then most random events in TBS are characterless in comparison to the main story.

Interesting article. The campfire downtime mechanic is an interesting idea to let the player reflect a little on there choices.