A Name Know to Many...a dead end, I'd call it

It does seem like a dead end. I chose the Honey Den option, just to see if I had missed any of the content leading up to where I had been, and now I’m stuck there. There seems to be no way forward.

I’m not interested in the Jewel Thief, and I haven’t seen a Heiress card since getting her to 6, so… Broken?

It would’ve been quite smooth if this forced choice of story state could’ve been made an optional storylet in the affected Persuasive-areas. That way players could’ve dealt with it at their leisure.

But I suppose there might have been technical reasons for why it couldn’t have been done that way, such as an already accomplished character entering Veilgarden, and playing through the part that eventually leads to A name Signed with a Flourish 1, thus locking that character out of the ‘choose your story state’ storylet, without the player realising it until it was too late. Or at least I assume that already having A Name Signed with a Flourish above 0 is what locks out a player from that storylet. That would certainly explain why choosing to never have set foot in Veilgarden was not an option.

Are you drawing cards in Veilgarden? That’s where her card is supposed to show up. At least according to the other recent threads on this subject.
edited by Gillsing on 8/9/2015

I have been since yesterday, with no luck.

It also seems like my Jewel Thief quality was completely reset with after choosing Honey Dens, but the Heiress stayed at 6.

I think for those who don’t remember ever having created mushroom poetry, perhaps it would have been better if having the tracker’s starting count (1) was that you’d encountered Veilgarden but not yet done anything there (including the Mushroom stuff).
Just an “I have done none of these things” option for characters who’d raised Persuasive in other manners, especially if they’d been gaining Persuasive by using Confident Smiles (from the Coffee at Caligulas social action), for example.

(Note: I don’t know the numerical values on the tracker itself, but something below the one which requires Persuasive 14 would have been a good start. Hopefully they do this for the others when they come about. ^_^ )

If I’d been given more of a choice, I would have reverted back to writing for the court… I’d like to do that symphony a few more times…

I easily skipped some lower level stories with the old system, and the game was written like I finished them anyway. So I simply assumed that not playing them just means that they weren’t included in the story, not that they didn’t happen (much like we don’t play our characters eating every breakfast, interacting with most postmen, or actually perform anything to earn their profession’s wages)

[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook][quote=Snowskeeper]I’ve found that there are many events necessary for advancement in this game which one needs to pretend never happened in order to maintain one’s character’s personality. I think the main reason this one feels different is that it appears the moment one logs in.

I could be misreading this situation entirely, though; I was done with the Court when this was introduced. I can certainly see why it doesn’t feel good; I’m just not sure it was any worse than some of the other events in the game. Why would a born socialite stoop to theft, for example, and why would a dockside bruiser without a formal education head to Veilgarden to carouse with Bohemians and write eloquent poetry?[/quote]

I think, essentially, it’s being made clear that the nature of a Person of Some Importance - the very definition of progression through the game - is someone who is a saucy socialite and a winning prize-fighter and an accomplished cat-burglar and an eccentric scholar-detective. An accomplished adventurer, a debonair jack-of-all-trades - someone like middle-period Sherlock Holmes, complete with royal commissions, gangs of urchins, and library of monographs. If that’s not even broadly the kind of character you want to play, well, I very much sympathise (I love playing within restrictions myself), but you’re not going to reach Person of Some Importance-level story progress. If you want to stay a surly docker or an ineffectual poet, you’ll just have to stay in Wolfstack or Veilgarden and forego ever becoming a dashing zee-captain or an influential press-baron.

(All that said - can one still pay Fate to skip POSI requirements? I don’t remember how effective those options were and I don’t know whether they’re still in place. I hope they’re still there - I’d quite like Doctor Taupe-Wainscot to reach POSI status through sheer virtue of mundanity.)[/quote]

Sorry; what I meant to say was that you couldn’t reach that point without pretending that certain elements of the plot never happened to your character. Which is impossible from a mechanical standpoint, obviously, but it would be even more difficult to write a cohesive narrative that took all those possible choices into account. The game is telling the story about this Renaissance Individual of Mysterious and Insdistinct Gender who can accomplish nearly anything they put their mind to through sheer force of ambition, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the story you’re telling.