Choice of the Dragon is a choice-based Interactive Fiction game, and the first work from Choice of Games. First published in 2009, it is written by Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse.
Play as a dragon, staking out your territory, battling rivals, and terrorizing the land.
You can play it here
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Provides examples of:
- Achievement Mockery: Angering the gods enough that they smite you and losing the battle against Vermias each earn you an achievement ("Blasphemy" and "Dragon Slayer," respectively.) Earning the former demands three specific choices while ignoring their attached warnings about angering the gods, while the latter requires engaging Vermias in direct combat with heavy wounds or otherwise letting her grow in power after her initial attacks on you.
- Ambiguous Gender:
- There are four possible gender settings: Male, Female, Neither, and Unknown/undetermined. You can also choose "Do not pester me with impudent questions!", a more roundabout way of setting it to undetermined.
- You can choose not to have a gender preference for your mate, in which case the mate options' genders will not be specified.
- And I Must Scream: If your wounds are too high when you battle Vermias, she defeats and reduces you to an immobile lab rat for her experiments and an occasional source of Human Resources for her contracts with demons. This continues up until you muster the will to stop your own heart.
- Big Brother Bully: Axilmeus, one of your dragon's elder clutchmates, who even as a hatchling always tormented others hoping to take what didn't belong to him. No matter what choice you make as a hatchling, he always succeeds in stealing your golden shield, but as an adult, you have an opportunity to teach him a lesson after he encroaches on your territory with designs on your treasure hoard.
- Blasphemous Boast: The dragon can come to legitimately believe themself to be a God. The universe's gods may not actually mind if the dragon still respects them, but if they interfere with the worship of the gods or start their own cult, the gods will seek revenge.
- Bolt of Divine Retribution: A variation. If the dragon blasphemes enough note the universe's Gods will respond by sending an avatar of the War Godess to take your head. Which she does, easily, as the narrator berates you for this.
- Caught Monologuing: You will at one point be confronted by Sir Rodegard. You are quite welcome to devour him mid-speech.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: When your hatchling-hood enemy Axilmeus reappears as an adult, if you choose a method of dealing with him in which you have a high enough statistic, you can vanquish him very quickly without suffering any injuries.
- Dragon Hoard: One of your objectives is to acquire and protect a pile of treasure, measured by the Wealth stat.
- Dragons Prefer Princesses: The player can choose whether their dragon follows this trope by kidnapping a princess, or bucks it by kidnapping a prince instead. Amusingly, the dragon and the narrator discuss the trope and its implications during the scene.
- The Dreaded: A dragon with high Infamy becomes this. Fear can be as powerful a weapon as a dragon's claws, enough so that it may keep adventurers away from looting your lair long after you go into hibernation as stories of you are told, embellished, and re-told.
- Dumb Is Good: Well, not "good" per se, but in Dragon, Honor and Cunning are mutually exclusive.
- Driven to Suicide: If the dragon is captured by Vermias, they eventually kill themself by stopping their own heart.
- Evil Sorcerer: Vermias is a powerful conjurer who specialises in summoning demons and other malevolent entities.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The player is a dragon in a fantasy world.
- Eye Scream: Choosing to rashly destroy a mocking effigy of yourself results in a ballista bolt taking out one of your eyes.
- I Gave My Word: An Honorable dragon tends to lean into this, keeping their promises to humans and considering themself honour-bound to defend their vassals.
- Gay Option: You have the option to choose your dragon's gender and, if you do the romance sidequest, the gender of your mate.
- A God Am I: You can believe yourself a god if you choose. You can also set up a cult as a way of raking in more tribute.
- Human Resources: The Evil Sorcerer Vermias' staff is supposedly made of a slain dragon's bones. Potentially your hatchmate Axilmeus', if you set up a Let's You and Him Fight between them earlier. You might join him as a test subject and source of parts, if you fail to defeat Vermias in battle.
- Kick the Dog: After beating Axilmeus, you can choose to "make him suffer" by attacking him, letting him almost get away, then catching up and attacking him again until he's too weak to resist any longer. And then you finally kill him.
- Let's You and Him Fight:
- When Axilmeus invades your territory, one of several potential responses is to trick them into assaulting a powerful sorcerer's tower; if your Cunning is high enough, it works and Axilmeus is either killed or captured by Vermias.
- Vermias tries to engineer one between the dragon and Callax by sending a conjured creature to assassinate the former while claiming the latter is its master. Depending on their subsequent reaction, this gambit may work or catastrophically backfire due to the dragon recruiting Callax to help take Vermias down.
- Lured into a Trap: The rival humans in the War Arc try to do this by setting up a crude effigy of the dragon in a field with several archer teams and ballistae concealed nearby, hoping that the dragon's temper will cause them to attack the effigy and be taken down.
- No Biological Sex: When given the choice of gender, you can choose neither, unknown, or simply refuse to answer.
- Noble Demon: An Honorable dragon will keep its word, not betray allies, and protect its vassals. A dragon with high Finesse and Honor fits this trope to a T and is likely to be a fairly decent being for a dragon. A Brutal and Honorable dragon fits in a different way; keeping your word doesn't mean you won't commit mass murder for the hell of it.
- Non-Standard Game Over:
- Choosing to move into your mate's lair and abandon your kingdom as part of the Romance Sidequest ends the game, with you and your mate combining your treasure hoards and beginning your unified reign.
- Angering the gods repeatedly will result in an avatar of the War Godess ambushing and swiftly executing the dragon, with your head taken as a trophy for her armour. This requires making three specific choices at different stages of the game, while ignoring the warnings about angering the gods.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Your dragon can have up to eight limbs, scaly, leathery, or feathery wings, and several different hide colours.
- Personality Powers: A dragon's physical traits are bound to his personality. A brutish and cruel dragon is also a mighty dragon, while a dragon who focuses on Pragmatic Villainy (or a Noble Demon) will be swifter and more agile. Honorable dragons are also more skilled in direct combat, while Cunning dragons tend to be better at underhanded plans and manipulation.
- Pragmatic Villainy:
- One reason the dragon can give for kidnapping a princess in the early game is their need to build a Dragon Hoard, with the associated ransom payments serving as an excellent means of doing so.
- They can choose to take control of a major trade route in a similar fashion, reasoning that controlling trade will let them control the kingdom. Additionally, they can do so by installing a guard (or themself) on the road and fleecing travellers of wealth through tolls that are high, but not enough to completely cut off the stream of traders.
- The dragon can choose to encourage the peasants' worship of them as a means of gaining further wealth for their hoard, rather than out of ego or legitimate belief that they're a god; they even refer to it as being no more than a means of control.
- Romance Sidequest: There is an optional mission where the player is able to search for a mate. As the player can choose what gender they are looking for, a Gay Option is available.
- Schmuck Bait: During the war against an invading kingdom, you stumble across a mocking effigy of yourself in a field with a few humans surrounding it. Flying down to destroy it normally results in you being Lured into a Trap and eating a ballista bolt to the face, blinding you in one eye; if your wounds are high enough, it results in a Game Over as the ballista and archers bring you down long enough for a knight to finish you off.
- Sweet and Sour Grapes: Early on, an elder dragon drives you away from his lair no matter which of the five choices you make, but you then find a "perfect lair" afterward.
- Vague Hit Points: Instead of explicit Hit Points, you have "wounds," which describe how badly messed up your dragon's body is (for instance, "battle-scarred" or "permanently wounded".) They can be raised by failing stat checks when performing an action, and performing certain actions with enough wounds results in a Game Over.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: After defeating your rival Axilmeus, one of the choices for "dealing" with him amounts to injuring him repeatedly until he can no longer run away, then letting him bleed to death. Even the narrator will call you out on your level of bastardry.
- Villain Protagonist: You're a Card-Carrying Villain who kidnaps princesses and defeats knights because that's the dragonly thing to do, though you can play as a Noble Demon if you so choose.
- War Arc: Midway through the game, a neighbouring country invades the dragon's kingdom and starts pillaging their territory. If the dragon chooses to defend their people (out of honour or pragmatism), they participate in a Big Badass Battle Sequence to crush the enemy army and pillage their home cities; if not, the arc passes offscreen.
- Weredragon: Rumor says that the black dragon from the west "sometimes takes human form and walks among the people, whispering in the ears of kings."
