At the moment, failing the Dangerous check for disassembling a skeleton yields valuable Bone Fragments which are exclusive to the newest content and can be used to synthesize new skeleton parts, while succeeding gives you an equivalent amount of Whispered Secrets, which you can get anywhere.
This seems backwards to me. Just because I wrangle dream sharks regularly doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t delicately take bones apart to salvage more out of them. It’s also very annoying for high-level players because you want to fail here; second chances are worse than worthless and temporary Dangerous penalties can only lower your "success" rate so much (sorry, Dumpstat!)
To me it makes more sense for these rewards to be switched, giving high Dangerous players the more scarce and valuable reward and removing the need for a penalty outfit.
Any thoughts?
First thought: that was done to give end-gamers some handicap, precisely because bone shards are more useful at this point.
This option is just for salvaging valuable frame after miss click, isn’t it? You could finish skele and sell it for fragments, if it is your goal.
Maybe, but usually when the game presents a challenge that you want to fail, it will tell you so. It’s also non-intuitive for the reason I mentioned in my first post. If this is by design, it would be nice to have some confirmation of that by the developers.
That depends on whether your skeleton is plausible enough to sell, and you also don’t get the frame back that way. Say you have an eight-headed skeleton with eight brass skulls. Almost impossible to sell without spending Waswood items, but scrapping it basically lets you convert echoes directly into bone fragments. Maybe that could be considered an exploit, but there’s a dearth of reliable bone fragment sources otherwise.
edited by MrUnderhill89 on 1/9/2021
That’s probably the intention. But the way the mechanics are, if you just start & disassemble a human or thorned ribcage, you earn 3.125 EPA of stuff without ever having to attach (waste) other bones. Those returns come in the form of Whispered Hints on success, Bone Fragments on failure. And to Mr Underhill’s point, I agree that the "failure" is more useful.
I think the core issue is that putting a torso up on a stand and taking it back down again is actually a competitive grind. Recovering wasted supplies is one thing, but generating bone fragments out of thin air is a bit much, even for Fallen London. Larger skeletons subtract the value of the frame from the number of hints/fragments they return, I think the same could simply be applied to the smaller frames. Then you’re better getting fragments by selling skeletons instead of doing deadlifts inside your closed bone market stall.
I’d be on-board with having both the success & failure be in the same currency, possibly different by value or tacking on a menace value. I don’t think it’s game-breaking to have the option to liquidate osteology inventory into fragments.
Perhaps the idea is that the skeletons are being assembled and disassembled so rapidly that a partial vacuum forms, sucking bone fragments from the rest of the market into the player’s stall? ;)