I’ve read through the entire StoryNexus manual but still can’t find answers to certain questions. Maybe I’m just bad at navigating the manual.
So I’ve created multiple BasicAbilities but they don’t show up in the sidebar like they do in Fallen London. I created a storylet that sets one of those BasicAbilities to 1 and played it, but I’ve still got nothing on the sidebar. In fact, I can’t find any way to check the quality at all which leaves me with no idea if the storylet is even working.
I have no idea what Broad or Narrow difficulty is even supposed to mean and can’t find either term in the manual. I assume it has something to do with the percentages you get for success or failure on a storylet?
Is there any way to set more than one quality with a single storylet? I’d like to be able to compress the startup phase into just the one storylet, where you select it and all four of your basic abilities are set to 1 and you’re ready to start playing, rather than having an essentially uninteractive opening that lasts for four storylets just so I can set all the qualities at 1.
For 1, they won’t appear until they have a (non-zero) value. I hope this isn’t too idiotic a question, but when you set the value to 1 using the Qualities Affected table, did you press the blue button marked Set? It’s rather confusingly in a column called Remove so it’s quite possible you didn’t.
And on a related point, for 3, sure you can! Set up the first one, press Set, and you’ll then be able to set up the next one.
For 2, it’s in the manual but tricky to find - look for Success And Failure in Chapter 5.
Another basic question that I can’t figure out, and which should probably be determined before I make too many storylets.
In Fallen London, you can be sent into exile or killed or what have you if your less helpful qualities build up too much. As I understand it, these places are alternate settings that you get sent to whenever a certain quality gets too high. But you can only be sent to other settings as a result of storylets. So how do I make sure the player gets properly shipped off to whatever unpleasant (but, hopefully, still intriguing) fate their negative qualities have earned them? The only way I can think is if you have every single storylet have a requirement that your Wounds/Madness/Infamy/Hunger be below a certain threshold, and then have another storylet that is only available when your Wounds/Madness/Infamy/Hunger is above that threshold, so that playing that storylet (which changes your setting to Crippled/Insane/Imprisoned/Ravenous) is the only option a player has when their negative qualities get too high. But that means adding an extra four requirements to every storylet, which is a bit of busywork. Is there a simpler way?
@MC: create a Pinned card with a Must frequency and a Minimum (Menace) X threshold.
It’ll automatically fire when a given Menace reaches X – say, when Wounds reaches 7. Since Pinned cards don’t have “maybe not right now” branches, players will be forced to play a branch that presumably shifts them to the Menace setting/area.
To elaborate: No, you don’t need to check that quality on every card.
If you have a “Suspicion” quality that is the menace, you only need one Always-Must card called something like “Arrested!” in the normal setting that the character is in that describes what is happening “The police that have been hovering about are wise to you! You are collared and dragged in for questioning…”
The requirements of the “Arrested!” card is that (for example) Suspicion >= 8. The result branch moves the character to the “In Prison” setting (along with adjusting any other qualities you want). Since your “Arrested!” card is in the normal setting, it won’t show up again while your character is the “In Prison” setting.
Depending on how you want to work it, you can have “Arrested!” set Suspicion back to 0 or some combination of actions in the “In Prison” setting make it fall below 8. When the characters status reaches a level say Suspiciion <= 0 you use another Always-Must “You Are Released!” with requirement Suspicion <= 0 that moves the player back to the normal setting.
You can use this to move the player to an area if you’d like - if your Prison is in the real world and you want the player released in a different place other than where they were captured you can do that. The setting change is useful if you want something to happen in multiple areas but release the player again in the same location they were in. For example a “Dream” setting can happen anyplace that I sleep, and if it doesn’t change my area, I will always “wake up” in the same area I was in when the setting changes back to the default.
You want to make sure that whatever happens, you don’t want your Always-Must to fire in an endless loop - you need to drop the menace below the threshold that fires the card, or use something else like a Mark of Cain quality so the player doesn’t get trapped in that card. For example, in the above scenario my Suspicion is above 8. I get moved to the “In Prison” setting and do what I need to do to get out, if I don’t have something lower suspicion below 8, when I’m moved back to the default setting, the “Arrested!” card will fire again and put my right back in prison.
I need a confirmation that this is not a bug. Does “change by” only affects qualities, that the player already has? Because if play a storylet, that “changes by” quality that I don’t own - I get 0xquality, and not 1xquality as I thought it would.
Depends what you’re changing and how you’ve worded it. This sort of sounds like the behavior some of us were grumbling about where a potential quality change will spoil it’s existence if you don’t have the quality. So if you have something called "Fred is the Murderer!" at 0 and a card that says "Set exactly to 2 if >=1", if you have the quality at 0, StoryNexus will announce something like "Your Fred is the Murderer Quality Hasn’t Changed Because It is 0!" That’s an expected behavior that they said wouldn’t change.
The one type of change that will remain subtle at 0 is if you just say "Set to Exactly Zero". If I have a Foo quality at 1 and a Bar quality at 0, it will only say "Your Foo Quality has gone!" and not mention Bar.
The one slight way around this is to write change descriptions that don’t give away your spoilery quality. I think that’s what happens in Fallen London when you see a "The winds change…(something)" message. I think that’s just some type of cycling randomizer that shifts from time to time.[li] edited by HanonO on 6/22/2013