Difficulties of being a Person of Some Importance

So the blessed day has finally come. And yet I find this good fortune tainted by an unpleasant discovery. I suspected this would be the case, of course - I saw the other locked storylets as well - but now I am rather chagrined to discover that my Ablution Absolutions and other curatives are significantly less effective than before.

So what is the solution? Do I simply buy more, and spend more of my actions patching up the scars - mental, physical, social, and otherwise - of my exploits? Or do Persons of Some Importance also gain new means of curing these ills?

[color=000000][quote=TheRyusui]Or do Persons of Some Importance also gain new means of curing these ills?[/quote]
Not really, no. Except[color=000000] t[/color]he distinguished members of the Parthenaeum do not have to worry about Suspicion overmuch. There’s an opportunity card for the Parthenaeum which is common enough to keep one’s Suspicion on a healthy level.
[/color]
edited by Rupho Schartenhauer on 4/4/2015

I believe you can still use social actions to reduce menaces? I find them quite handy in either case, costing only 2 actions to remove 4 CP of a menace (Assuming you’re trading with a friend, they accept and remove 5 of yours, you accept theirs and receive 1). That’s 2 CP per action, which isn’t too bad in my opinion. Reduces it faster than a lot of other options, and no chance of failure at that.

Once you’ve spent enough time exploring the islands, you should have enough Collated Research to join God’s Editors which provides an opportunity card that heals your [color=rgb(255, 255, 255)]Nightmares and Scandal[/color].
edited by Patrick Reding on 2/10/2012

Except for Nightmares, menace isn’t a big deal anyway. Just ignore it until you’re sent to a failure area, those are the most efficient places for menace reduction. (The exception is Scandal, which you can easily reduce to zero by laughing it off – just wait until it hits 7.)

I’m really not sure places of menace are the best way to reduce menaces. A lot of the cards in those places only reduce it by 1, while there are a fair amount that reduce it by 2, you can’t guarantee they’ll come up. Prison may have the option to escape and remove all scandal, but the cards to do so are excessively rare, and now with the daily cap gone, spending time flipping cards in New Newgate is not a very good idea. Using social actions can allow you to reduce 5 at a time (2 per action if exchanging), and can be done relatively at your leisure to keep from entering places of menace in the first place.

Social actions are very inefficient, though. They require an action both from you and your partner, and often have an additional cost on top of that. Plus, they increase the recipient’s menace as well. If you just wait for your wounds to hit 8, you can play chess with the boatman and get rid of over 5 change points an action, I believe, and New Newgate can theoretically be escaped in two actions. Flipping cards can be problematic and is up to the whims of chance, yes, but if you stack your deck you can get pretty good odds.

This only leaves Nightmares, and there are a number of ways to deal with that, even as a PoSI. Investigate Dr Schlomo, take a ride in the Clay Sedan Chair, work with God’s Editor’s…etc. And laudanum can still be used.
edited by Little The on 2/11/2012

[quote=Little The]Social actions are very inefficient, though. They require an action both from you and your partner, and often have an additional cost on top of that. Plus, they increase the recipient’s menace as well. If you just wait for your wounds to hit 8, you can play chess with the boatman and get rid of over 5 change points an action, I believe, and New Newgate can theoretically be escaped in two actions. Flipping cards can be problematic and is up to the whims of chance, yes, but if you stack your deck you can get pretty good odds.

This only leaves Nightmares, and there are a number of ways to deal with that, even as a PoSI. Investigate Dr Schlomo, take a ride in the Clay Sedan Chair, work with God’s Editor’s…etc. And laudanum can still be used.
edited by Little The on 2/11/2012[/quote]

Actually, I took into account the fact that it requires an action from both you and your partner, and the increase to menace from the recipient. The person asking loses 5 CP, the person receiving gains 1 CP. If both players give each other one (trading menaces), they will have lost 4 CP of menace for 2 actions. Also, reducing nightmares is the ONLY social action for menaces that has an additional cost, requiring a sudden insight (It seems to be a running theme that nightmares is the most difficult menace to get rid of).

Wounds is indeed easier to reduce by simply dying and playing chess with the boatman, but this is easier said than done. For starters, your watchfullness needs to be in the right range, since soon after it starts getting easy, it jumps up to the next tier. Also, assuming you didn’t manage to get the difficulty to “straightforward”, there’s still a chance of failure. Now, assuming you can get your watchfullness one below where it jumps to another tier, then perfect: feel free to use that. Otherwise, the social action can come in handy.

In either case, while there may be other ways to reduce nightmares such as the ones you mentioned, I still believe that spending a sudden insight for every 4 points of nightmares lost is a better deal than spending a whole echo, some wounds, and a laudunum habit that I’m guessing reduces it’s effectiveness after repeated uses.

If you have a Winsome Dispossessed Orphan you get your laudanum for free. Keeping the habit in control is easy, there’s an opportunity card for that. And I don’t mind Wounds, I like the occasional chess tournament on the Slow Boat…

[quote=Wieland Burandt]
If you have a Winsome Dispossessed Orphan you get your laudanum for free.[/quote]
[color=0000CC]Also your echoes for nuthin’.

That’s not true. I can’t back that up.[/color]

Move-a move-a!

Now look at them adventurers - that’s the way you do it
You learn ancient secrets on the Unterzee
That ain’t working - that’s the way you do it
Echoes for nothing and laudanum for free

[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]Now look at them adventurers - that’s the way you do it
You learn ancient secrets on the Unterzee
That ain’t working - that’s the way you do it
Echoes for nothing and laudanum for free[/quote]
Disaster! I meant to give you a thumbs up but gave you a thumbs down! Curse you, fingers!

I shall treat your thumbs-down as ironical, like the Revolutionary Firebrand recommending the Bishop of Southwark’s essays for their subtlety and moral equanimity.

[quote=Wieland Burandt][quote=Chris Gardiner][quote=Wieland Burandt]
If you have a Winsome Dispossessed Orphan you get your laudanum for free.[/quote]
[color=0000CC]Also your echoes for nuthin’.

That’s not true. I can’t back that up.[/color][/quote]
? [color=0000CC]
[/color]
“Your Winsome Orphan is out of control - Give him a chance to mend his ways - Gain: 4 x F.F. Gebrandt’s Superior Laudanum” [color=0000CC]
[/color]
The only cost is the action you spend for playing the opportunity card…[/quote]

Actually, there’s the matter of opportunity cost here. It’s not “free”, it costs whatever I could sell the laudunum for.

Flipping cards isn’t as good, but still doable with a little strategy. If you go in with no actions left and a full deck, you can flip those cards and the cards you gain while replenishing actions without wasting any actions. That gives you 16 cards (26 if you’re Exceptional), plus one for any card you do play. I’d need to figure out the math for cards to know how close that gets you.

Considering my last time I went to New Newgate, I spent pretty much an entire day flipping cards and never managed to get the last one before deciding “screw it” and lowering my scandal the normal way, I’m still not a big advocate of the “Oh, just escape from jail” strategy.

Flipping cards isn’t as good, but still doable with a little strategy. If you go in with no actions left and a full deck, you can flip those cards and the cards you gain while replenishing actions without wasting any actions. That gives you 16 cards (26 if you’re Exceptional), plus one for any card you do play. I’d need to figure out the math for cards to know how close that gets you.[/quote]

I was going to do the math, but figured I’d just take an estimate while seeking the name (since that gave me seven tries). With about four or five incarcerations since the action limit changed I never did get out the “easy” way. With the new action (non)limit, I would flip cards until I had 20 actions, and then start buying my way out with candles and cards like the governor. Every time suspicion hit zero before I got all three items I needed (though I already had the shiv.) This was a real shame, since sometimes my suspicion was 10 or more… I’ve been a naughty 'neather.

The math probably supports getting out more often than 0/5, but I tend to be unlucky in that regard.

I probably should’ve actually tried it before I talked… flipping cards now, and we’ll see whether Suspicion hits zero (only taking actions that give me something in addition to a Suspicion decrease) or I find the Dirigible Schedule first.

A rough shot at the math: the Wikidot wiki says there are 20 cards in New Newgate. Four of them lock if you’ve already gotten whatever they give you. (starting Benefactor storyline, Acquaintance: Repentant Forger, Commissioned to Enact Love’s Revenge, and the Shiv) Since you never get a card already in your hand, if you flip cards one at a time, a 3-card hand will remove 2 more from the deck, leaving 14. Assuming all cards are equally likely, it’ll take 7 cardflips to get the first part of the escape plan (2/14 cards), and 13 cardflips to get the second one (1/13 cards, since the part you have won’t come up again). So that’s 20 flips total (plus or minus 1.5 if your hand size isn’t three), which definitely seems lower than what folks have reported in this thread.
edited by Aspeon on 2/13/2012

The problem is that not every card has the same chance of coming up. For one extreme example, notice how the card to get the white weasel in Ladybones Road is EXCESSIVELY rare. I’d wind up repeating some cards many, many times, and never did see the final escape card.