: Re: 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

@Alves689

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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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