Questionable Questing

I don't really mind where ever, I just got finished eating so it's why I didn't respond.

As for quest mechanics, how I'm making mine work is that I have a list of different situations or encounters, whatever you want to call them, planned out ahead of time. Like for Game of Thrones, we all know the White Walkers are the ultimate enemy, we know Baelish is a dick, we know the Ironborn are idiots. So we already have some canon enemy's we have to deal with, plus I have a couple of my own I've come up with.

Nice, I'm going to be cooking up shit storms for the players. I always like planned out conflict arcs to smash them in the face with in between management. For the Kingdom, inspired by Pathfinder Kingmaker, treating their personal Realm as a character in its own right with traits and skills they can add to, letting them feel their territory as an extension of their character.

Next I come with how the readers can deal with them. For example I gave three chooses for how the readers can expose the evidence against Baelish. Each one would lead to a different path. If you went discrete, that path would lead to either assassinating Baelish or tricking someone else to do it for you.

With the Doom, I can have demons and devils oh my pop up, The Others are going to be so much worse. Those are some big ones, while others will be rival mage rulers or other possible foes like a growing invasion of monsters and exta planar beings seeping in. Slow cook a steady drip of magic

If you went accuse their would be a trial not only against Baelish, but Jon Arryan as well that had the potential to expose a bunch of potential corruption problems or the last option Spectacle, is spoilers.

What you'll notice is that each option has same goal, get rid of Baelish, but they each have their own distinct style and way to achieve that goal. Discrete would be a game of cat and mouse of trying to kill him without getting caught while Accuse leads to a trial.

For the readers, how they interact with the votes would change. With Discreet they'll for example be give the option of bribing one of Baelish's guards to help you and then it'll be up to the readers if they trust them and depending on the offer and how its presented is wither or not the guard will work with you.

For the trial they would've been given the option of calling for certain witnesses and bribing some of those witnesses to say what you want. Not only bringing the moral dilemma of cheating to achieve your goals, but the strategic of do we trust that this person will take the bribe.

The routes option, we did that in Vet. Pre selected gives them choice while letting us have control over direction

So we have a goal, we have the readers vote for how they want to achieve that goal, and now for the last and most important part we need to show the consequences of those choices. meaningful game play in any medium is when there's consequence for actions.

I see, give the same objective but different benefits and style and risks with the different options, but then here is the issue I find. Players are spineless bitches. They will always scamper away from risk

If the readers had successful bribed the guard during Discreet, then the readers would be given the choice of hiring on all of Baelish's mercenaries and guards once he's arrested and can no longer pay for them. Not only rewarding the readers for achieving the persuasion attempt against the guard, but acting as a potential plot point in the future.

Now for the hard part like you said, Risk. There needs to be negative consequences in your story. If there's no negative then it turns into a power fantasy which is fun, but not something I'm guessing you want to do? Again nothing wrong with it, there's plenty of people with fetishes for the number in a game going up

So killing the protag is never the goal, and killing important side characters is a bitch and a half. Sure it has impact, but once they dead? They dead. Unless they picked something like undead or demon for horrible revival, but if they didn't, then now we need to make a new memorable character and if that side character dies? They have to go out with a bang

But the way I handle risk is by making the consequence not super clear, but let the readers know something will happen that might not be good if you make this choice.

In the latest vote, I hope at least, I made it very clear Tyrion was acting really sketchy. So I gave the voters the ability to spy on him and gave a reward for doing so by offering more interludes for doing so

But I also like pushing the players, finding new ways to fuck with and challange them while preparing them to make use of their toys to fight it off.

But I also made it clear if you get caught, it will have a disastrous impact on the relationship. Thus they're in a pickle and they're given a hard decision. What's more important, the relationship or information? Do we trust Tyrion? What exactly are they going to do in Pentos? These kinds of discussions are good. It means the readers are responding

That's how you do it. You give the reader a problem, you offer them a couple potential solutions and directions it will lead the story, and you force them to make compromises between different things that they want. That's the key for me. What do the readers want?

I originally wanted this story to be a romance between Cersei and Ned Stark and added the lesbian Cersei as a bit of a joke option. But the readers really liked it so I shifted what direction the quest would go.