Drink wine at the carnival = 50% chance to reduce nightmare.
Pray at church = 70% chance to reduce scandal.
But when you’re failing 7, 8, 9, 10 consecutive times, or succeeding only once or twice in a chain of 10 attempts, it leads me to think that you’re not wholly honest regarding the advertised chance of success. I’ve played enough probability-dependent games, online and offline, to know this.
If this is a sneaky attempt to force players to invest more of their action points, and a nudge towards making them spend real money on Fate, I’m not impressed. ;)
Anything that has a nonzero probability of happening can happen. Ensuring that long chains of improbable evens won’t happen would make the resulting RNG not fair.
But, as I like thinking I like saying, fair RNG does not make a fair game.
[quote=xKiv]Anything that has a nonzero probability of happening can happen. Ensuring that long chains of improbable evens won’t happen would make the resulting RNG not fair.
But, as I like thinking I like saying, fair RNG does not make a fair game.[/quote]
I have to agree with you here. It may come as a surprise, sure, since the chance of it happening is lower, but sometimes bad luck is bad luck.
Also, honestly, compared to other game companies out there, I feel like FBG is less likely to be "money-hungry". Fallen London is, without extras like Fate and Exceptional Stories, thousands of free words for players to enjoy. I’m sure the people working tirelessly on this game need to get their bills payed somehow, besides crowdfunding… This is disregarding the Sunless series, of course.
Improbably things can happen but should not happen more often than is probable for their degree of improbability. ;)
Or put another way, yes failing 10 times in a row on a 25% chance can happen and should happen on rare occasions (its about a 5.6% chance). But having it happen five or six times with a single success inbetween is WAY out there on the bell curve. I’ve seen enough instances of things like that I’ve started tracking all my “die rolls” in FL on a spreadsheet. I’ll see how closely the stated odds are matching the actual results after a few thousand entries.
I’m surprised to hear that Scandal reduction by praying is supposed to be 70%; it’s always seemed less than that to me. I’ve never tried the wine-drinking, I tend to use the hyena and then ditch the wounds when the airs are right. Actually, when the airs are right, a day in bed will deal with nightmares, too.
Social interaction is much more reliable and efficient. You could as well say FBG tries to nudge players toward cooperation. There are a number of sub-optimal Fate options around, for sure. They also are at the bottom instead of top slot, which works a bit against a shameless money-grabbing argument. I saw predatory game design in many other games as well, FL is far from greedy or manipulative by any current standard. edited by Huey on 3/20/2021
I never use social interaction because you have to wait. It is not more efficient for me to have to wait until tomorrow in real time to do something than to do it in more clicks, but now.
Part of me does miss getting plastered at the Carnival and making an exhibition of myself. Just not becoming for an important railway magnate, unfortunately. Besides, Lettuce and Hephaesta have got me covered for Wounds and Nightmares these days, so not to worry.
I still do occasionally make a public show of sham piety in church though, and still enjoy leading the the Old Bill on a merry dance through Spite (while also picking up a few weasels, can’t have too many weasels), so I haven’t given up my old ways entirely.
A solution that I myself make large use of is having an alt you aren’t focused on to take care of those interactions. I think we have somewhat different definitions for efficiency, though.
That’s fair enough, just not how I want to play the game, really. It’s relatively rare for any of my contacts to get back to me the same day on a social interaction, and sometimes it can be three or four days. Any ‘wasted’ actions would have been recovered naturally by then so I don’t really see it as an especially useful method.
You can probably tell I’m not one of those players for whom e.p.a. is everything, nor do I manage my affairs for maximum efficiency on a per action basis. I’m not into Fallen London for that kind of thing, it just isn’t me.
Which means they aren’t truly random. ;) I’m not accusing FBG of anything. I’ve just seen enough mucked up "random" number generators to be suspicious of pretty much all of them. I also know that memory is selective and changes over time, so keeping a record over a large enough sample is the only way to see if there IS a problem.
I think for both nightmares and scandal, I’d recommend letting it get high and deal with it in the Mirror-Marches or the Tomb-colonies instead. Many cards in the tomb-colonies are 2x as good as going to church, and in the mirror-marches you can play a lot of cards without actions.
Which means they aren’t truly random. ;)[/quote]
…no? Are you being cheeky or just missing the point? Toss a coin enough times, you’ll get 10+ strings of only heads or only tails; even with just 3 coin tosses there’s a chance in four to come up with three heads or three tails. Also, getting many heads in a row doesn’t mean you’re more likely to get tails with the next toss, that’s not how coins (or any random events) work.
And again, pure chance checks are so few and so avoidable in FL that I can’t see how showing an incorrect number has any noticeable effect on FBG’s finances, so I don’t really see how a deliberate muck up argument stands. And to have decent evidence about RNG skewing you’d have to click through a not-really-good storylet hundreds if not thousands of time, which… to each their own, I guess?
EDIT: also ending up in a Menace location isn’t that bad of a thing, you get more content to explore and there are several useful things for which characters usually get thrown there on purpose (like the Repentant Forger acquaintance, a certain acquaintance of a Black Ribbon duelist, and a bunch of high-tier Renown items) edited by Huey on 3/21/2021
To chip in, once you get your own Parabolan Base Camp with maxed out Defences, that becomes the best nightmare reduction option, hands down.
I never used to have much problem with wounds even before getting the Cider, and exile in Tomb Colonies is more an opportunity than a setback, unless you care for both Austere and Hedonistic. I know I did use to perform the Church action, and the 70% seemed to more or less hold for me back then.
For suspicion, the Cabinet Noir option with Disappearing grind in Parabola is quite reliable for the endgame players…
Which means they aren’t truly random. ;)[/quote]
…no? Are you being cheeky or just missing the point? Toss a coin enough times, you’ll get 10+ strings of only heads or only tails; even with just 3 coin tosses there’s a chance in four to come up with three heads or three tails. Also, getting many heads in a row doesn’t mean you’re more likely to get tails with the next toss, that’s not how coins (or any random events) work.
[/quote]
"Toss a coin enough times". "getting many heads in a row doesn’t mean you’re more likely to get tails with the next toss" Exactly. But it ALSO means your shouldn’t be more likely to get another heads with the next toss.
The math on it is relatively simple. With a 50% chance the odds of getting heads three times in a row are 0.5^3=0.125. Double that for it being either heads or tails gives you that 0.25. Now, make it a regular six sided die and you have to not get a 1. 5 out of 6, 83% chance. So what are the odds of not getting a 1 ten times in a row? 0.83^10=0.16. So that’s not a high probability. So what do you think the odds are of it happening 20 times in a row? 0.02. So if you see that happen more than once in relatively short time the odds are pretty good there’s something else going on.
So using "Ignore the Merry Man" stated 40% chance of success, the chances of NOT succeeding 20 times in a row are 0.6^20=0.0000365. 5 times in a row are 0.6^5=0.07776. It should be a very RARE occurrence but I think I’ve seen it happen much more frequently than that. Add my own programming experience and knowledge that computer "random" number generators are not actually random and I start thinking there’s a chance something’s not working as stated. So I’m tracking my results. I’m not deliberately seeking out these situations, I’m just recording chances and results as I’m playing. Eventually I will get enough results to either say "Hey, I think there may be something wrong here" or "Well, I already knew memory isn’t reliable".
Here is an online utility that simulates coin tosses. Do 1000 times and notice how the pattern of heads and tails (probably) has long strings of consecutive heads and long strings of consecutive tails. That is how truly random patterns work. What you have there is likely just selection bias. You remember the long strings of failure better.
A few games implement pity timers, where unlucky outcomes add to a hidden luck stat that make the check more favorable in future, and the luck resets on failure. This avoids long strings of failure which often feel unfair (although they aren’t). Fallen London does not do this, so it does have this fair but unfair-feeling situations. edited by NotaWalrus on 3/21/2021
Well, fair enough. I am aware that closed RNGs (not sure that’s the exact term, I mean those that don’t have an external random input) aren’t perfect, but from my current experience with non-100% skill checks I can’t remember multiple instances of stated chances feeling blatantly wrong(there was an Invincible Mushroom but hey, who doesn’t like a Rocky story :D)
So I maintain that A) the RNG doesn’t feel that skewed relative to the stated chances, and B) even if it was, I doubt that is deliberate. Still, I always played in a way to make most of this kind of option irrelevant, so I don’t have an enormous stake in this. If you’re willing to put the effort, godspeed. I hope you find solid evidence one way or the other, for peace of mind if anything else.
(I say this, and I plan to acquire a Yacht with a 30% winning chance, so I may be foaming at the mouth about luck somewhere down the line lol)
Yeah, I think I’ve heard of this conundrum in game design before - that because people’s perception of probability is pretty skewed, actual random number generators often FEEL unfair and unrandom, because there are more streaks and clumps in truly random output than people expect. The way to make people feel like the random number generator is “behaving randomly” is to actually mess with the output so it’s less random - make it LESS likely to output streaks than true random. Or make the chance of success actually be higher than the listed rate, etc.
(I don’t think that the difference between algorithmic pseudorandom number generators and random number generators from an external entropy source really matters here. It’s a difference that you care about if you’re doing cryptography and you really really care about true mathematical randomness, but I don’t think that’s a difference that’s perceptible by humans just looking at the output.)
Thing is, someone playing this game is “flipping” a LOT of coins. If you take 100 actinos per day, that’s 100 random numbers generated each day, 700 each week. A sequence that is “memorably not-random-looking” should actually happen pretty often just by chance - you should get some weird streak at least once every few days, if you’re constantly doing things that require skill checks.
Fun anecdote - back in high school, a stats teacher did this trick where he’d ask all the students in his class to write down a 5x5 square of random digits they came up with, and also use a calculator to actually generate a 5x5 random grid. The teacher would almost always be able to pick out which one was human-faking-random and which one was calculator-random: and he revealed his trick, that humans were really averse to putting the same number together multiple times in a row, or having visible patterns in the output. People seem to think that “no repetitions = more random, no patterns = more random”. So given a pair of these squares, he’d scan looking for repeated digits or for “obvious patterns”, and whichever one had repeating digits or obvious patterns was the randomly-generated one.