: Gameplay clashing with story? In my game, you have a companion with you, who offers you assistance in combat. During gameplay, the companion basically acts like an activated ability, where he

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Gameplay should come first in a video game. That does not mean that story should be just ignored. It isn't hard to be creative and give some kind of explanation. For example, just with what you gave us, I could say the NPC is ALWAYS invulnerable, but when he gets "tired" because he is being pounded on, to remain invulnerable, he becomes immaterial. That way he remains invulnerable (his primary ability) at the expense of being able to protect others. This could be conveyed visually by animations that show him getting tired, and then by his becoming somewhat translucent. After all, just because he remains invulnerable doesn't mean he must always be substantial.

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The first rule for writing narratives for games is always that the mechanics should inform the narrative. If you're finding that what you want to be the story isn't consistent with what you have for the players, then the story likely needs to change--which is a bit of an odd concept for some. The gameplay is the primary draw for a lot of people, and at the end of the day, you're crafting an experience, not writing a book. This means that internal consistency is possibly more important here than anywhere else because players have direct control over the world and can break things in all manner of ways the creator never intended.

Now, with characters that have unlimited powers like this, it gets difficult to write interesting situations for them around those powers because of their inherent nature as constant and infallible. These characters are often paragons by their very nature and so cannot fail in specific instances, which then requires either some very creative writing to navigate around these, or additional caveats. Perhaps this character IS indestructible and functionally immortal, but still feels pain and doesn't enjoy feeling hurt for too long at one shot or needs to recover from the damage taken before they're ready to be a human shield again. Both of these are potential solutions to this problem, and neither one interferes with your mechanics. For all intents and purposes, this character still plays the same way and still cannot die, but this ability of theirs has an in-universe reason, which provides quite a bit of opportunity to write around as well. This ability to protect pretty much anyone--within reason--already shapes how this character will behave and respond. If they experience a lot of pain, they might hide it for the sake of your player's character to keep them from worrying about them. There's a lot of room to explore all sorts of ideas and concepts here, and really all you need to do is figure out what works best for your narrative and keep chugging along.

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Change the story more (as you have already begun; sidekick isn't always invulnerable). Give the sidekick damage points that he can't recover for some turns after a battle: This becomes a part of strategy too, the player must avoid battle for a few turns if his shield is still effed up by the last battle, or take his chances without the shield, or risk the death of the shield. Or even preemptively take on the battle himself, to save his shield for a more intense battle later.

Instead of computing damage, you could just compute battle defense credits: He can defend in 3 battles, his credit begins at 3, but it takes 2 game days to recover from each battle. If his points are at zero and he defends, he dies (and warns the player that will happen).

That way the player might not want to waste a battle defense on some troll he can likely defeat himself, but will against a squad of demons likely to kill him and eat him.

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