Lecture 4: Titles, Effect Lines, Criteria, Stats, and Target Practice, Oh My!"
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This is going to be a technical mish-mash lecture, mainly to make your draft 100% complete.
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Lesson 1: The Title
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Titles seem easy, right? Well, you’d think so, but I’ll have you know that not a single one of my first 14 accepted issues ended with the same title I originally gave them (well ok 1, but to be fair they did remove the exclamation mark), and most were added post-editing. The title is hardly the thing you should focus on when writing, but sometimes it could be an inspiration for an issue (as one of mine was, and was later completely changed, but I digress).
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A title should simultaneously roughly describe the issue, have some humor, and keep with the issue’s theme if it has one. It can be a reference (All of the issues in “The Enemy Within” are named after Beatles songs, with one borderline exception), or say something but mean something else (For instance, “An Expensive Watch”, which is about the costs of keeping police on watch at rowdy stadiums). It could even just be a cheesy pun (Foreign Tax Credits Leave Film Industry Reeling).
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Lesson 2: Effect Lines
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Normally going underneath the “option”, you may add fallout: or [effect] or outcome -, or something along those lines, to describe your effect line. But what is an effect line?
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You know how, when you choose an option, you’re taken to a page which says the “The Talking Point”, followed by a sentence that seems to have an unexpected outcome? That’s the effect line.
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Effect lines also appear on the nation’s home page, in the same paragraph that describes the national religion and animal. THIS IS WHY, when you make an effect line, it must look like this:
it can't have any commas nor most punctuation marks, "Unless dialogue or circumstances like Mr. are involved"
It’s a nitpick, but something that’s pretty frequent.
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Effect lines, too, should be witty. Think of an option as a joke. The effect line is the punchline. It should have an unintended consequence that is very humorous. For instance, say you have an issue about excessive drinking, and an option that creates mandatory classroom education about the dangers of alcohol, then an effect line idea might be “mandatory AA meetings are driving people to drink”.
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… sorry, I’m pretty proud of that one, myself. xD
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“I’ve received effect lines that weren’t funny, though!” Ok, those were old issues. But these days, effect lines that “state the obvious”, or even “state what the option was saying” aren’t particularly good. They’re generally good if they are an unexpected consequence, such as an exaggeration, or an opposite-effect. I myself am terrible at these, though, and they are even considered by editors to be one of the hardest parts of the draft. I’ve heard that sometimes they’ll just sit on a draft for weeks thinking of an effect line for one option, though I can not verify this.
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“What about the newspaper headlines and the stat changes?” you might be asking. Well, here’s how you add them: You don’t. Newspaper headlines are totally random, and stats are added by the editors, since they know how they work (they’re complicated). Adding stats is unnecessary clutter that frustrates you and detracts commenters and editors alike.
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Lesson 3: Criteria/Validity.
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The “validity” is basically the restrictions you place on an issue or issue option. The editors can often times decide what’s a good validity, but figuring out the validity for yourself can help both the editors and your own writing! Does the issue revolve around private industries funding politicians? Welp, the issue’s restricted to democratic nations and capitalist nations, and depending on how it’s written, specifically nations where political bribery is a thing. (Specific criteria can be complicated, though, so don’t worry about that last one; I’m not even sure if that’s tracked.)
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Similarly, an issue may be restricted by not a policy, but a hidden flag (like policies but less well-known), statistic (like “happiness” or “weather”), whether the issue is adult (touchy topics and dirty jokes; don’t get too dirty now, even with “adult” on), if the issue’s for WA members, the commended/the condemned(haha no don’t write for this), or if the player has chosen a specific option (which could trigger its own flag OR directly chain to another issue; this is how issue chains are also made, I believe.)
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What if one of your speaker smokes? Welp, then that option won’t appear for a nation where smoking’s illegal (unless the guy’s already breaking the law). How do you fix that? You could either make the speaker not smoke, or make the option only available to nations where smoking is legal — which is bad. Please, do not set unnecessary restrictions. Only add them if the issue or option depends on it, like an option asking for the private sector to take over a government (wouldn’t work for nations with communism).
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There is a third way, though, and this is what editors will likely do if they really want to keep smoking; add a variant option. You don’t have to worry about this, but this essentially means that you have an option where the guy smokes, but only available to nations where smoking is legal, and then a replica option where the guy doesn’t smoke, but only available to nations where smoking is illegal. This kind of dualism isn’t so common with smoking, but is incredibly common if an option relies on ads/information (mainly internet vs. newspaper, whether internet’s legal or not), and even moreso for capitalism vs. socialism.
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Speaking of which, if you do make a variant option, a good idea is to riff off of the difference. Take, for instance, capitalism vs. communism. The capitalist could be a greedy corporate thief who sells cheap products, while the communist could be selling @@LEADER@@-O’s in honor of your great party. This is where learning criteria of an option comes in:
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Lesson 4: Target Your Audience!
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This section is less about the remaining bits and pieces, but more a writing tip in general.
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If your issue is for communists, write in a style that’s communist. If your issue is for nations that are stupidly happy, make everyone relentlessly cheerful. This is not an absolute must, but is important to keep in mind. And, as such, the options should also reflect this. A communist issue isn’t likely to have a capitalist option as a first option, and certainly not in more than one option (except for that one issue). Make sure what you write is appropriate for your target audience, and your criteria will reflect that.
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Similarly, if an issue you make is based off of a decision your leader’s previously made, like “We banned sports!” (no sports policy), then don’t make a reversal that’s just “We don’t like this!” or “You made a bad decision!”. By all means, feel free to make a reversal, or even an option that says this, but the rest of the issue should be made to take into account that you want this decision, and instead of asking the same question twice, try to come up with a unique idea, one the player wasn’t expecting when he/she previously chose that option.
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Note: If you want an option to do something in particular, like activate a flag or chain to another issue, then you can say so somewhere above or below the option. Stats, again, are untouched. We’ll cover issue chains in the next lecture.
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HOMEWORK:
With your existing draft, or with a new draft, put in a title, the effect lines, and any criteria/validity to the issue or individual options you like, or flag changes if you so desire. There are a lot of flags, so you probably won’t know all of them. And it’s OK if you do not get any of these; people are willing to help, and all of these things are easily changed. None of them are absolutely crucial to getting accepted, speaking from a ton of personal experience, but they don’t hurt, and could help your writing.