I've been playing a fair amount of Triangle Strategy and I came to one of the most major choice points in the game. I generally like the voting system as an experiment that mostly works to make branching in a narrative game a bit more interesting than just picking the best option off of a menu. Where it falls apart some is The Choice.
Spoilers for Triangle Strategy Below
You are tasked with choosing whether or not to give the Roselle (the group of people basically everyone in the three nations of the setting hate) under your protection back to the nation they escaped from, which also enslaves them to mine salt. This choice already is a bit of a problem as far as moral choices go as there is no real dilemma no matter how much two of the supporting cast are written to say there is. Either you send slaves back to their masters, from under your protection no less, to try and save "your people" and potentially become a high ranking member of the slavers' country or you protect them and endanger your entire domain, which is already in danger by this point.
Sending the Roselle back is considered "pragmatic" and yeah, maybe it is. But the framing of "sending them back to protect your people" is incredibly uncomfortable to me and has some serious rhetorical parallels with nazi rhetoric. The choice of phrasing on someone's part has to be intentional, but even without that particular phrase thrown in, I don't find these sorts of moral choices in game narratives compelling. The choice between good or evil, even if framed between idealism or pragmatism does not lead towards encouraging a lot of reflection in your players about what that choice means to them. It boils down to "do I want to be a dick?"
There can be fun in in entertaining being a dick, but these choices don't even provide strong characterization of those making the choices. Part of why Serenoa comes off as weak is because he has to be written to be able to hold both contributing to slavery and genocide and fighting for a marginalized group in his head and weigh them equally. Someone who can do that will always come off as non-committal at best and he is no exception.
This is all before I talk about my favorite character in the game, Frederica. She is a half Rosellan woman and Serenoa's fiance. The fact that Serenoa is willing to seriously consider sending people like his wife off to a life of slave labor puts their relationship in a very unflattering light, to the point where I feel like saying to Frederica, "you are too good for that man."
What makes this choice somehow even worse than just asking the question "do you want to send people back to slavery even though you love and are engaged to someone who would be shipped off if not for the fact that she is your fiance?" of the player is the way the persuasion system characterizes poor Frederica. She is written incredibly passionately and says she will not budge from her position, while the pragmatic racist characters are very measured in how they talk. Yet, yet it is easier to convince Frederica to side with you to send her people back to slavery than it is to convince the pragmatists that they are being immoral.
That was the part of the game that broke the narrative design for me. I'll keep playing it and enjoying what's there, but I know I will never try to 100% the game or play certain routes. I don't want to play a nazi-sympathizer in my spare time!
To try to end this on a more positive note, the core problem of designing these binary choices is that if a single character is making them, there is no way for them to feel more than centrist about everything. They cannot express conviction because they must weight everything equally, in the popular approach to making these.
There are ways for these situations to work and be characterful moments. A classic being shown the option, clicking it, and being told it is too unreasonable (or other fitting phrasing) to consider. One of the reasons Disco Elysium feels so well written is because you are always playing Harry DuBois. You are always playing a disaster of a man and are only given options that make sense to reinforce the exact cocktail of disasters your Harry is. Harry is not a centrist or a centristly written character and he is so much better for it. See also Monkey Island always making you tell a joke, but giving you a choice of which joke to tell.
In summary: your systems will reflect onto your writing and ultimately the stance your story takes with its themes. Make decisions, be audacious, and write characters!
