agency wont be a running theme or anything btw dont worry (Patreon)

1.6? 1.7? it's gonna start getting messy as i go across different files.

inky's knots and diverts enable a lot of cool things with conversational flow, but one of the things i am most enjoying playing with (and looking forward to learning to play with better in the future) is manipulating who has agency in a conversation.

cass and i have been playing new vegas lately. it's my first time, a replay for her but she also is on a small bethesda kick...
anyway really if you've played one bethesda game you know how the conversation trees go in all of them.

there are prompts.
questions.
conditional lines.
maybe subcategories leading to more topics.
so on.

but with pretty much any npc all of these things flow purely on the player's schedule.
it's a rare moment when an NPC takes the intiative to talk about anything, let alone takes any kind of control of the conversation...
...and when it does, it usually (at least to me) feels like a mechanically-necessitated narrative funnel rather than something done to match the personality of the NPC.

so one of my personal challenges lately has been "how can i use the flow of the conversation to texture the feeling of interacting with the character?"
for instance,

• a character with low agency, such as a young child or someone who's very passive, probably suits the typical formula of always letting the player choose and lead the topic.

• today's character is a bit of a defensive prick, so every time you ask him about something he doesn't like, he'll then proceed to try and change the topic and redirect the conversation to something of his choosing instead of yours.

• or maybe if you have a character who's out of touch with reality (like my mother) and doesn't really talk with people so much as at them (like my mother) then i would write a singular linear stream of dialogue (like my mother's) where they hardly give you a chance to get a word in (my mother) in favor of just rambling on about whatever preconceived idea (my mother) has and wants to justify and take you back to the same end point regardless of whatever you say (mom)

im good btw

what were we talking about?