Playing With / But Thou Must!

Basic Trope: A game seems to give you several route options, but there's really just one option.

• Straight: At some point in Tropeland Chronicles, Princess Maria asks Tana if she wants to help her Find the Cure! to a mysterious illness that's spreading across her kingdom. You are given a multiple-choice question and a Dialogue Tree. The four options are "Yes", "Of course I'll do it for you", "Sure", and "Anything for you, Your Highness".
• Exaggerated:
  • There are 50 different options, all of which are affirmative.
  • You get a huge Dialogue Tree with ten choices the first time, each leading to ten new choices that each lead to ten new choices. No matter which of the 1000 combinations you end up choosing, you'll end up agreeing to help Maria in a complicated mess.
  • Every single decision in the game is like this.
• Downplayed: There are two options, "Yes, of course! After all, it's a duty to help those in need" and "Sigh. I guess I have to". The latter leads to Maria respecting Tana slightly less.
• Justified:
  • Tana adores Maria and wants to help her. The player gets more freedom when Tana's opinion is more unclear.
  • A spell forces Tana to accept any command given to her.
  • Refusing the Princess is just not done.^note Protocol, honour, and self-preservation instinct due to the threat of being executed for treason demand no less than willing acquiescence to Her Highness' wishes.
  • Tana wouldn't dream of passing up a request to help those in need.
  • The player has agreed to every single one of Princess Maria's requests thus far. There's no good reason to expect them to turn back now.
• Inverted:
  • At some point in Tropeland Chronicles, Princess Maria asks Tana if she wants to help her Find the Cure! to a mysterious illness that's spreading across her kingdom. You are given a multiple-choice question and a Dialogue Tree. The four options are "No", "Absolutely not", "Not gonna happen", and "In your dreams".
  • All the choices are refusals and offer different possible paths. You can even change your mind later.
  • The only option is "Yes", but after choosing it, you're free to do whatever you want.
• Subverted:
  • The visible options are all affirmative, but scrolling down reveals some negative responses.
  • Responding in the negative causes Maria to go "Aww, don't say silly things like that! I'm sure you'd love to help." Tana is then given the option to say "I'm not helping, and that's final."
• Double Subverted:
  • Choosing a negative response leads to Maria asking again and again until you finally agree.
  • Choosing a negative response causes a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Maria has a dozen different responses pestering Tana to help her, and eventually resorts to a silent Death Glare, forcing Tana to acquiesce.
• Parodied:
  • There are all kinds of responses, but Maria interprets everything as affirmative, even "No way I'm doing that. It's not my problem".
  • The player is allowed to write their own response. Maria treats everything as affirmative, potentially leading to situations like this:
    Tana: HELL NO! Screw you and your stupid kingdom!
    Maria: I knew a good girl like you would agree to help me out! We should be best friends forever!
  • The protagonist often makes their own decisions without the player's input. Just this once, the game gives the player "choices" for what the protagonist does.
• Zig Zagged:
  • Sometimes you get nothing but affirmative/negative responses, sometimes you get multiple responses, but choosing incorrectly leads to a Nonstandard Game Over, sometimes the NPCs will ask repetitively until you choose the right answer, sometimes you actually get a choice...
  • The visible options are all affirmative, but scrolling down reveals some negative responses. Choosing a negative response leads to Maria asking again and again... until you reach 13 refusals, after which she says "Fine! Just let everyone in my kingdom die slowly and painfully, you selfish bastard!" As Tana tries to leave the castle afterward, a guard tells her he won't let her leave before she has agreed to help Maria, but the guard is easily defeated. Then a witch curses Tana so that she can't leave the castle before she has made a Magically-Binding Contract to help Maria... but it turns out that there's an alternative way to break it. However, by the time the curse is broken with the alternative method, the disease has spread all across the kingdom. If Tana tries to leave the castle through the kingdom, she'll get infected and die, and there's no other way to leave the castle.
  • The choices are meaningful, but the results of your choice are extremely unintuitive. Rejecting Maria's offer locks you onto the quest, while accepting it offers you some room to weasel out.
• Averted:
  • The player is free to choose whether to help Maria.
  • In a cutscene, Tana agrees to help Maria. There's no choice, but no illusion of choice either.
• Enforced:
  • "So, how can we railroad the player to help Maria?"
  • Making a CYOA is hard enough, dealing with people going Off the Rails is too much for the poor game designers.
  • Only Chapter One is fully mapped out in this Beta Test, so of course there's going to be issues with the choices for Chapter Two… and the less said about Chapter ThReE, the better.
• Lampshaded:
  • "Tana, I don't think you really have a choice there."
  • One of the developers steps in as a cameo and says: "I'd give you the freedom of choice, but it's better that we relieve you from the burden of choice."
• Invoked: One of Maria's servants curses Tana, forcing her to obey Maria's commands.
• Exploited: Maria starts asking for more favours from Tana because she has to accept them.
• Defied: Tana says "Screw these options, I won't do this only because the developers wanted me to!"
• Discussed: "Sometimes I wonder if I have free will or everything is pretermined. Was helping Maria my choice or was I fated to help her?"
• Conversed: "Another game that only gives you an illusion of choice."
• Deconstructed: Tana is given all affirmative options, only it turns out that a specific, unmentioned button combination must be done to say a negative response. The narrator mocks her when she chooses positive responses.
• Reconstructed: But the moment Tana is given a negative response through a specific, unmentioned button combination, the narrator outright ousts her for cheating the game. This meant that the only way Tana can progress is to answer with any one of the affirmative options, which is what the game developers intended.
• Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste: This is done to show that the narrator is actually a deity that loves to use his powers to control others. Said deity pretends to be benevolent at first, but his true nature gradually starts showing, and Tana has to fight him throughout the second half of the game.
• Played For Laughs:
  • Every option is affirmative, but some of them are unwilling/reluctant ("Ugh, another stupid princess in need? I thought I could finally take a holiday and play games all day."), some are wordy ("Affirmative"), some are confusing ("I won't say that I'm not going to refrain from failing to help you"), etc.
  • If you choose an incorrect option, Tana and/or Maria will say something funny, then Maria will ask again.
• Played For Drama:
  • The trope is used as a way of telling that You Can't Fight Fate.
  • Tana has to Shoot the Dog, and there really is no other option for her. This results in her being Blamed for Being Railroaded, progressing the story.
• Played For Horror: The game is usually very good about letting the player choose multiple options, and having those choices matter. Until the player character is put under Mind Control, and forced to play through dialogue trees like this a form of Controllable Helplessness.

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Go back to the main page?
A) Yes!
B) Of course!
C) Indeed!
D) Uh, OK, I guess...
E) Why say no? You're going to force me anyway.
F) No thank you.

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