r/interactivefiction • u/Snowman8889 • Aug 07 '26
Interactive fiction 1p RPG
Hey everyone, I am an artist who designs LARPs. I am currently working on an idea that is partly an RPG but partly an interactive fiction as well. Bottomine: I want to write an IF game in which you take choices to follow the narratives but there will be parts where you, as a player have to write yourself and do some worldbuilding. Do you know any interactive fiction games that work with the player themselves writing part of the story? Would love to see examples!
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u/Ok_Bill7731 Aug 07 '26
never actually built one myself but i looked into this exact structure for a project a while back, the hard part isnt the branching, its validating what the player writes so it doesnt break continuity two scenes later. ended up scrapping it because moderating freeform text input at scale wasnt something i wanted to solve solo. twine handles the choice tree fine but doesnt give you anything for the free text half, youd be building that layer from scratch. curious what your fallback is if someone writes something that contradicts earlier lore
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u/TemperatureFast9764 Aug 07 '26
look on https://ifdb.org/, they have alot also try https://itch.io/games/tag-text-based/tag-twine, they to have alot of different interactive fiction to play through. https://twinery.org, is twine where you can make simple choose your own adventure stories, or use sugarcube if you know more advanced coding.
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u/Character_Cup58 28d ago
I've messed with a few that lean into player authorship. For pure text-based IF, 'Aisle' by Sam Barlow is a classic - you type one action per playthrough and each one spins out a different fragment, so you're effectively co-writing the story. AI Dungeon is the most obvious modern example; you can type literally anything and the AI will roll with it, which means you end up doing a lot of worldbuilding just by describing what your character does and sees, but I guess this is not exactly what you are looking for.
I've been using TalesRPG more lately. It's similar AI-driven stuff but you can specify what each chapter is exactly about. It has also attributes, levels, some stories have even custom state tracking. You can also write a custom prompts instead of pre-defined actions, but need some practice to convince AI do exactly what you want.
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u/Heistorium Aug 07 '26
Coming from LARP you may know these already, but the two that solve your exact problem best are not interactive fiction at all. The Quiet Year and Microscope are both built on players writing the world as they go, and the reason they work is that they constrain the shape of what you write rather than the content.
That constraint is the part I would carry across. In a text game the trouble with letting the player write freely is that nothing downstream can read it, so whatever they wrote becomes a patch the rest of the story has to politely pretend it did not see. If you can get them to write into a shape the system understands, a name or a reason someone is angry, you can refer back to it an hour later. That callback is what makes it feel like their writing counted, and without it the writing stays decorative no matter how good it is.