How YOU Wrote Rimworld's Best Story

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I don't save scum in Rimworld- I express directorial intent.

A Rimworld video essay without mentioning Dwarf Fortress? Impossible!

this is why gaming is the pinnacle of all media. it either tells a story interactively by your input, or lets you write your own story by your actions

"The video depicts an artwork of a hooded man explaining why this creation is enjoyable. The video is contrasted with a small green semicircle in its foreground. 37 judges are watching in anger with bowls on their heads on a cliff in the background." Quality: Legendary.

"Vampires became worshiped, boosting overall happiness" is my favourite sentence ever said

The most fun I remember having on Stellaris was the time I blew up my own empire's homeworld during the midgame, gambling against the odds that my scientists could contain an eldritch phenomena for study instead of disposing of it like any sensible person would've done. It was a VERY densely packed planet, so upon exploding (imploding?) it took a quarter of my empire's population and economy with it overnight, the resulting economic crash taking decades to resolve from while leaving me badly underprepared to ward off opportunistic invading xenos. My takeaway from that was that emergent stories are often more fun with major setbacks to make them more unique, rather than 'optimal play'. No lessons were learned about making dumb choices in the name of overly ambitious mad-science-wizardly. 10/10 would risk killing tens of billions again.

One of the beauties of Rimworld being a story generator is that the developer console can just be turned on with a single click. I've never thought about it until I was coaching a new player, and they said they didn't think story-wise a certain positive event made sense at one moment, or they didn't want to deal with a disease outbreak because it was distracting them from a more interesting event line, or they decided it had been too long since a negative event and triggered one, that I realized Tynan probably knew this and gave us the tools to cheat and change the story if we came up with a more enjoyable story than what Randy rolled for us. This is probably also related to their full embrace of mods.

I think Shadows of Doubt’s current biggest problem is the lack of motive behind killings. On the tutorial case, I was fixated on one of the victim’s coworkers who had emails on their computer from someone begging for money, the victim had a life insurance policy recently taken out on them Neurons fire, I investigate this woman thoroughly, onto to later learn the emails were generic spam you will find basically anywhere and there is actually no motive behind killings. It may have been updated since then, but I haven’t played

To add to the point about DMing, they have the advantage of getting to understand almost everything about the player characters; what they hope to be, do, and feel. The best DMs tend to LOVE the characters the players have made, and cater everything from combat design to chapters of a story to bring the best out of them. VideoGames try to do personality tests, give you choices that come with “tags” to influence choices, give you gameplay setting, but its all lesser versions of just talking to a person about what they want their experience to be.

One of my strongest memories of rimworld started sort of similar to Jerbear's. The colony took in a guy and the only thing he was good at was art. He had some permanent wounds which made most all his stats pretty terrible and he was so ugly, no one liked him. Eventually though, he had made friends with the colonist and had made a surplus of artworks. To help the colony, he set out with a load of art to sell to a nearby ally. However, on the trip, he experienced terrible luck. We zoom in as a pack of ravenous chickens start chasing him. As he ran from them, he was struck by lightning and downed. Shortly after, the chickens finished him off. The colony that originally shunned him, mourned his loss. Certainly not the story I'd picture when starting the game but it is one that has stuck with me for years

Sorry you've been dealing with Covid! I hope you're on the mend, though. And thank you so much for those kind words at the end. I'm glad you dig what I do! bumps up Rimworld on my list a few spaces

Here's my story so far. Sorry if it's a bit of a ramble I gotta eat soon. Three colonists crash land onto a planet. -Aly, the 26 biologically-year-old but 2000+ chronologically-year-old cave dweller. She's an undergrounder who being social and going outside but has a passion for art. -Beniko Mullen. A woman who used to be a royal princess. By far the best talker. -Trigger. Aly's son and Mullen's ex-husband. Former soldier and policeman. -A golden retriever who gets eaten by a cougar early on lol So they crash land with their trusty dog and get to building. Life is confusing and hard at first (with the odd bit of cannibalism here and there), but soon they start to get the hang of things. But the first major turning point happens when Mullen recruit her first raider, Pigeon. Life continues on and the camp slowly improves. Life's looking good. So good that Trigger tries to rekindle his lost spark with his ex-wife, Mullen. Mullen rebuffs him, which saddens Trigger at first. And although Pigeon never made a move on Mullen, they start sharing deep conversations more and more often. A lot more often than Mullen ever shared with Pigeon. Trigger doesn't hate Pigeon for it, but it starts to look like Trigger will never rekindle the spark that once held their flame together. However, he doesn't give up. Maybe... just maybe they can do things right the second time. He continues trying to woo her, continues getting rejected, rinse and repeat. It seems like a hopeless, futile pursuit. But then, Trigger says a joke and wouldn't you know it, Mullen falls back in love with him. They build a double bed, and they spend the night together. All seems well and looking up. However, the next morning another person raids the camp. A large bear-sized dude, but he is BOOKING IT. He's sprinting through the woods like a wolf chasing its prey. But the colonists got guns, so it shouldn't be a problem right? Trigger comes out first, aims his rifle at the raider. BAM!! Misses. Aims again. BAM! Misses. By then the raider is beating the ever living fuck out of Trigger. And by the time Mullen, Aly, and Pigeon come out to rescue him it's already too late... the raider kidnaps Trigger and disappears off the map. - Now that's where I'm at. A couple other things happened like a pet rhino domesticating itself as well as other people joining, but this is the main story in my playthrough. I have no idea if Trigger is alive or not or if we'll ever get a chance to get him back. Ever since then Mullen has had a few minor mental breakdowns (and is constantly on the verge on another one), yet she's the de facto leader who has to run the colony. If we ever get a chance to rescue Trigger, I'm sending everything I got. I'm willing to blow dozens of hours of progress just to have the chance to see Mullen and Trigger reunite. Better love story than Twilight. Yeah rant over

18:45 the Rimworld soundtrack is super underrated

Another game to consider, which is essentially the granddad of games like Rimworld: Dwarf Fortress. Especially after Dwarf Fortress' Adventure Mode is finished and rereleased. If you want a game that has an emergent story, play while keeping track of your initial dwarves. Check in on them on occasion. You'll see that while you are directing the story of the fortress itself, there are as many stories going on underneath your nose as there are dwarves in your fortress and the stories of all the nations in the overworld. Bonus points if your fortress becomes the Mountainhome.

Rimworld is one of the few games I watch being played on youtube where I don't mind watching failure, because it's a story first and foremost (and the youtubers I watch very much know this, and lean into it)

You not stripping jerbear for his coat before executing him caused me physical pain

This actually reminded me of Fire Emblem a bit. I've been looking into the "Permadeath vs no Permadeath" argument lately, especially in regards to Resetting, either using in-game mechanics, or just save-scumming. A lot of people think that using reset methods completely negate Permadeath and that the Reset mechanics should be removed in favor of a Classic vs Casual game mode at the start. They often argue that Permadeath is what made Fire Emblem so amazing by having Emergent storytelling. Forcing you to play through a character's death, seeing who gets stronger and who gets benched, etc. The problem is that, while that's all true, Fire Emblem is also a Strategy / Tactics game AND an RPG with Levels and Stats, so players often play it as a Tactical RPG and less of an Emergent Storytelling Strategy game like XCOM. It certainly doesn't help that Fire Emblem games aren't really designed with Emergent Storytelling other than Permadeath. There's no good catch up mechanic to offset any negative outcomes and the story isn't really designed to be reset in case of a screw up. There's also little variation in the actual story depending on your actions. It's completely relegated to gameplay. Emergent storytelling requires supporting Players FAILING for it to actually work and Fire Emblem doesn't really support failure.

One thing you got to be careful about when it comes to emergent gameplay is make sure that the player isn’t encouraged to do the same thing repeatedly. This is why I think Ubisoft games aren’t a good example despite their systems. In far cry the optimal strategy is sneaking in bushes and throwing rocks, while in Assassins creed you can often just charge into enemies because of the piss easy combat (ironically) this is why the Monolith Middle Earth games nemesis system is so good for reasons outside of characterization, because it circumvents this issue on at least some level due to orcs being immune to some things and returning orcs learning from your previous fight and making it so you can’t do that strategy again. I’ve noticed some people (particularly in the steam community forums on certain games like Rimworld) get mad at these events being called stories for some reason. I’m not saying that they can’t have their opinion, but I find it funny that they got mad about the “story generator” term and don’t see how the events that naturally occur count as a story on some level.

I'm intending to soon play a game of Rimworld where every time they go to sleep I open a word document and write as if it's a Diary of one of the characters. When that character dies I'll just switch to another and explain why