Informal Poll--Dead Ends in a Story?

[mememe621]

I've been working on my next story for CHYOO and I can't decide whether to plan to have dead-ends in the story--meaning branches that just end, no more options, Game Over Dude. (Farmer's Daughter--http://www.chyoo.com/index.php/main.story.cover/4430--is the best example of this I know of.)

So I'm wondering what y'all think. Are dead ends cool? Are they annoying? Do they make the story more interesting because you can fuck up, or boring because you can't always add to cool threads? Does it actually feel like a challenge when you can just hit the Back button?

 

[Torg]

Having an end to a story is better than unending threads.

 

[GoodBoy741]

Only once have I written a thread that I thought was a decent spot for a story to end. Generally I want the option to keep things going, but there are rare occasions when I feel like I've written things to a satisfying stop.

When I was a kid reading choose your own adventure stories, I hated the branches that killed you. It usually felt arbitrary, like I hadn't really made a mistake, I'd just taken a perfectly valid choice and been screwed. I get the idea of why those kinds of branches are there, to make things more exciting when you go down a good path, but it just never feels worth it.

So I don't like "bad" endings. A natural stopping point deep in a story is fine, but not "you made a mistake, game over," threads.

 

[Torg]

I don't mind the "You lose" threads, as long as its not just arbitrary, but a reasonable result from prior risky choices. The "Bad Endings" in "Farmer's Daughter" and "Knocking up Sister" are pretty well justified, in my opinion. I've even written some that ended badly in Farmer's Daughter.

But I agree on ones that just end, even with reasonable choices.