Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20181123023529/@comment-26006155-20181124113723

Here's another exaple of Story Potential in action, applied to Undertale:

If the lore said that only human souls could be used to break the barrier, and monster souls could never equal the power of a single human soul, then there's low story potential. The only way to break the barrier is to wait for another human to fall down.

But if the lore said that many monster souls together -could- equal the power of a human soul, but it would take more monster souls than all the monsters in the underground, now you have two possiblities to break the barrier: A) Wait for a human. B) Collect monsters souls over generations until you have enough

But the actual lore of Undertale says that it would take -almost- all the monsters in the Underground to equal the power of a human soul. This has the highest story potential of all, because now you have three possiblities:

A) Wait for a human.

B) Collect monster souls over generations until you have enough

C).. Break the Barrier INSTANTLY by genociding monsterkind and taking the required number of souls in one blast.

Asgore and Alyphs went for the relatively humane Option B approach. But as long as Option C even exists.. this is going to tempt any creatures who might be both powerful and unscrupulous enough to pull it off. And something monsterkind has to watch out for.

Which is why I think Gaster attempted Option C, the clearly evil yet expedient choice.