The video game Mass Effect is a very popular 3rd-person shooter with heavy role-playing game elements. In it, you lead a team of warriors on a space-faring mission with dire stakes for humanity across the cosmos. One of the things that makes the game so appealing are the vast variety of choices the player can make in developing their team of warriors, as well as their environment and their spaceship. Their choices and actions have real consequences that play our over the course of the story, and can oftentimes be the difference between life and death for their characters. The most famous iteration of this is the legendary “suicide mission” in Mass Effect 2. In this game, choices you have made throughout the game, even early on, have very specific and lasting consequences for your team of warriors. If you haven't played the game yet, there are spoilers ahead. You've been warned.
Early on, you are presented with individual side missions for all of your teammates. Completing these missions successfully endears you to that particular member, and proves crucial in how well they perform their duties for you. If they aren't loyal, they are more likely to do their job poorly and get themselves killed during the suicide mission.
At three different junctures you are given the option to upgrade your ship's hull, shields and cannons. Failing to do any of these will seal the fate of a team member apiece. The first will die the first time your ship takes a hit, the second when your ship takes its second hit, and the third when you shoot at an enemy vessel but your gun isn't strong enough to destroy it before it returns fire.
Your maintenance crew is kidnapped shortly before the suicide mission begins. How you handle their rescue will also determine the fates of not only some of your warriors, but also of the crew themselves.
And finally, when planning the mission, you are given no less than three opportunities to assign teammates for specific duties to help the mission be successful. Choosing the wrong people for those assignments will get them, and possibly others on your team, killed.
Oh, and if you make ALL of the wrong choices and get your entire team killed, then you will die also. The only survivor will be the guy piloting your ship.
The appeal of this is the feeling that every choice matters and every action counts. During the suicide mission, you see your choices earlier play out in real-time, often with subtle (or not-so-subtle, in the case of upgrading your gun) reminders that is was a choice you made that determined what was going to happen next. And the deaths are very graphic and visceral. Many players reset the game before completing the mission after seeing the graphic death of a character they had grown attached to.
But this level of nuance adds depth and humanity to your protagonist and their supporting characters. And this is something you can utilize to build more of a connection with your readers.
When characters make major choices in your story, those have obvious effects on the narrative. These can be major pivotal points during the story, or important events in backstory or lore that majorly affect how the story progresses. Toran and Beyta's decision to allow the Magnifico Giganticus clown to travel with them in Asimov's Foundation and Empire turns out to be a huge mistake with dire consequences for themselves and for the rest of the galaxy. But even smaller decisions can play out in ways that deepen a character or plot and further endear a character to the reader. Like when, in Pratchett's Jingo, Comic relief cop Nobby Nobbs decides on a lark to visit a fortune teller who predicts he will find himself surrounded by beautiful women, right before the fortune teller starts laughing hysterically. Nobbs and the reader both wonder what is so funny, only to find out later when the prediction comes true in a very unfortunate way for Nobbs. Contrast that with Vimes's major decision early in Jingo to do one thing when his fortune-predicting dis-organizer urged him to do something else. This plays out directly in the story, as the dis-organizer keeps telling him throughout the story what he would be doing at the moment had he made the other choice (and it actually becomes a pretty bone-chilling revelation by the end of the story).
Likewise, what effects your character's decisions can have on the story can vary in importance. The obvious move is to have what appears to be the bigger decisions have major and far-ranging effects on the story, while the smaller decisions have changes that only marginally affect the plot or characters. But what if you turned that convention on its head? The first half of Foundation and Empire sees intrepid heroes Lathan and Ducen embark on a harrowing, danger-filled mission to warn the Emperor of a potential traitor that would try to destroy the Foundation, only to find out that their actions were essentially needless as the Emperor figured everything out on his own without their help. What was initially thought to be a major decision turned out to have zero effect on the overall narrative. Conversely, what if your protagonist's decision to wear a red shirt instead of a blue one that day turns out to be the deciding factor in a major conflict? In my real life, I once made a simple decision to wear my glasses one day when I normally didn't, and that decision literally saved my eyesight when piping hot antifreeze sprayed in my face while I was trying to fix my car later that day. Small decisions can have big consequences.
You can also determine the impact of these decisions in deciding when the decisions happen and when the consequences manifest. It is typical to have the decision made early on or even before the story begins, and have the full weight of those decisions play out at the end of the story. But you don't have to strictly follow that formula. Your characters are constantly making choices and decisions in reaction to the situations they find themselves in during the course of a story. Most of those decisions are reactions to an immediate problem, and therefore, get immediate results. But what if you had one of those quick decisions have an additional consequence that played out later in the story? One of the funnier jokes in Monty Python's Holy Grail is midway through the movie, when Lancelot hacks the movie's narrator to death simply for being in his way. This actually creates a backstory where real-world authorities are investigating medieval Britain to find the culprit, and it has a very unexpected and jarring effect on the movie's finale. What if you don't wait until the end of the story for the consequences to play out? A trope of romantic comedies is the consequences of a bad decision by the protagonist early in or prior to their romance manifesting in time to seriously jeopardize their relationship about 2/3 of the way through the narrative, giving the writer a full third act to figure out how the protagonist will fix their mess and win their love interest back.
Dealing with the consequences of one's actions is actually one of my major themes as a storyteller. In all of my stories you can trace major events in the story directly to a choice one or more of my central characters made. Bobby's final opponent in my graphic novel The Seizure is a direct result of a decision made by his mentor Eagleheart before the story began. The series of events that happened in Forest park near the end of The Leopard Man came because Ashlynn and her friend chose to go through there instead of taking their usual route home. Melvin's decision to not tell his son the truth early on comes back to bite him harshly later in Double Entry. Elijah is given a choice of what kind of people he would run with early in Godmode, and that choice sets the entire book into motion. And not one, but two bad decisions cost Tika her best friend in The Hand You're Dealt. In my stories, recovering from the consequences of bad choices is often a driving force behind the narrative.
When your readers read a happening and can directly connect it with a choice or action a prominent character made earlier in the story, then that creates a deeper connection to both the characters and the plot, and also makes the story more memorable.
Read More about the decisions of Quan’s characters and their consequences in one of his books here.