Prompt Ideas: Play LiveTale Like a Choose Your Own Adventure
Out of ideas? The Need ideas? link turns any scene into a choose your own adventure page: two suggested actions and one question, written for this exact moment of your story. Pick one, make it yours, or ignore them all and write your own path.
Remember choose your own adventure books? Every page ended with a handful of paths: sneak through the cellar, confront the guard, or ask the innkeeper what she knows. Prompt Ideas brings that page-bottom moment to LiveTale, for exactly the times when the input bar is waiting and your mind goes blank.
Your choices, written for this exact page of the story
Above the input bar you'll find a small Need ideas? link with a lightbulb next to it. Click it and up to three choices unfold for the current moment of your story, just like the options at the bottom of a choose your own adventure page:
- Two actions. One usually pushes toward your active quest, and the other takes a different angle on the situation.
- One question. A yes-or-no question you can put to the Oracle when you'd rather probe the scene than act on it.
Unlike a printed book, these choices aren't fixed. They're written for where you actually are: the characters present, your quests, and what just happened. They refresh with every beat, so every "page" of your adventure ends with a fresh set of paths.
The choice the book never printed
Here's where LiveTale leaves the classic choose your own adventure format behind: there's always a fourth option, and it's the best one. Write your own.
Clicking a suggestion never submits it. It just fills the input bar and switches to the right tab, so you can send it as is, or better, edit it first. Sharpen the wording, add your own twist, use it as a springboard for something the suggestion only hinted at. The suggestions aim for the sensible next move, not the brilliant one; the boldest turns in your adventure will still come from you. Think of Prompt Ideas as the printed choices, and your own imagination as the pen in the margin.
There when you want it, quiet when you don't
The panel remembers your habits. Fold it away with the × and it stays out of your way; the lightbulb keeps glowing quietly in case you change your mind. And if you'd rather never see suggestions at all, you can turn Prompt Ideas off entirely in Game Settings.
So next time the blank input bar stares back at you, give the lightbulb a click and pick a path, or let the printed choices goad you into writing a better one. That's how the best choose your own adventure stories have always worked.
Cheers,
The LiveTale Team