Does anyone else here like, really dislike the plans tab? I like the idea of the mechanic, as I’m a very organized person, but the pell-mell list makes my head hurt. I try to use the notes to remind myself where the action is I’ve saved, but as we all know FL is so labyrinthine it’s nearly impossible to actually remember the steps necessary to get back to that action.
I’m wondering if anyone else shares my frustrations and/or maybe has some suggestions for how to put it to better use/alternatives they’ve found work for them!
I’ve stopped using it for the reasons you mention. Looking up Progress and logging out in an action helps me remember where I am and what I’m “working” on.
It always bothered me that the plan couldn’t actually be enacted from the plan tab, but programming that is probably really complicated (since it’d have to determine whether that option is actually available to you at the moment). But something that shows where that action is located (including location, card and/or storylet) would be helpful.
Although I never actually use the plans tab, anyway.
I use plans in the exactly opposite way they were intended: I mark the options I don’t want to play, so when I do a round of A Boxful of Intrigue or get "An Unsigned Message", I have these nice little red flags on options where terrible things will happen if I play them. This has helped a lot in the past to not lose Favours or Notability or become a Turncoat.
I also find that frustrating! You can go into the Plans tab and reopen the plan, of course, but that’s just as tedious as everything else about the tab imo.
[quote=Robin Alexander]I do use the plans, but - like the OP - have issues with them . . .
I’m using them at the moment, for a few reasons; two of the paths I want to take are fate-locked, so I can’t take them right now (as I can’t afford the fate), but I don’t want to forget about them and thus have them marked to do when I am able. I’m also trying to grind the final bit to Masters 11, and it’s very convenient to just click my Plans to see what items I have, rather than going to the opp card.
That being said . . . I had one option marked on my plan; no idea what it is, where it’s from, or what it’s even supposed to be . . . I marked an option for a plan, didn’t even think it would be so vague in the plan section, and was puzzled for a very long time (until the relevant opp card came up again).
So . . . they can be great, but can be useless.[/quote]
I also mark fate-based options that I’m actually interested in pursuing, and for actions that I need more items for. Like aegisaglow said, it would be really helpful if we could see the path to the action, or at least some general location. If it’s too much to program an actual go-to-action link, at least give us that!
When being tested, Plans did show the location where the option was found; I assume it was removed for being too much of a burden to the servers or for some sort of bugginess.
A slight diversification of plan types would work well, I feel:
[ul][li]One-offs (the current plan option)[/li][li]Repeats (these plans stay active, no matter what, until toggled to another type in the Plans tab)[/li][li]No-nos (shows a scrawled, bloody "X" over the plan marker) - purely aesthetic so that you can play the option if needed[/li][/ul]Marking a plan would bring up a small popup asking what kind of plan you would like to make this storylet. Radio buttons would probably work well here. Plans would be alterable or mutable under the Plans tab. Clicking an active or assigned plan invokes the plan type popup asking what type this plan should be.
Hmm, with some more metadata about plans you could even add a "Sort By" option. Seeing old plans or expensive plans first would help with managing a big old list of plans. I’m thinking plan creation time and a crude cost metric would be useful. I guess raw Echo cost plus maybe somewhat inaccurate action cost for the cost metric? edited by Stygota on 9/20/2016
Action cost wouldn’t work at all given that different people have different options available, different chances of success, and different willingnesses to do certain things. For example a friend of mine won’t steal anything so doesn’t use Thefts of a Particular Character.
Something I do actually find the plans tab quite useful for is providing me a reference for things like summoning Slowcake’s Amanuensis where I can note the exact amount of MW I need to hit for the next point of notability (I prefer to slowly grind my MW incidentally to other grinds over a course of weeks).
It’s also nice for organizing your renown gain options so you can keep track of whether or not you meet their item requirements in a sort of “Renown Dashboard”.
I use the plans tab extremely sparingly mostly so I can reference it to remind myself how much of something I need. I think that ends up just being summoning the Amanuensis, Drowning my Secrets on the Seeking Road, and building a Noman so I could track the Noman cost status without visiting the Wicket when I was going for a tattoo. From the perspective of these uses I have no complaints.
I’ve never tried to use it to track story stuff. I reached the content boundaries before they were implemented and am used to turning to the wiki if I get completely lost (which is, admittedly, not always the easiest source to navigate).
Hmm, kind of. If you consider your available actions to be a graph, you can build a spanning tree or maybe a network to simulate cost of various paths. You’d just build it from all available options, flag transition conditions (qualities or what-not) to determine which branches are viable when tracing out optimal costs, and present them. It removes the meta kind of if you do display how you achieved that cost - which would be necessary to cater to the morals of various characters. Also, it would probably be time consuming and expensive and not really feasible…crude echo cost is still a thing though.
I just really want the ability to be able to mark plans as repeating… edited by Stygota on 9/21/2016
"Not always the easiest source to navigate" is an understatement, hahaha! I’ve started using the other wiki in tandem (echobazaar.wikidot.com) as I find the entries to be a bit more fleshed out.
I’ve only been playing FL for about six months, so I think I just haven’t figured out fully how I’d like to spend my time, either… sometimes I get so confused with how many storylines I’ve got going that I just want to start over!
"Not always the easiest source to navigate" is an understatement, hahaha! I’ve started using the other wiki in tandem (echobazaar.wikidot.com) as I find the entries to be a bit more fleshed out.[/quote]
The issue there is of course that said older wiki is very much out of date. For example I doubt it has anything on Renown, and that started over a year ago.
"Not always the easiest source to navigate" is an understatement, hahaha! I’ve started using the other wiki in tandem (echobazaar.wikidot.com) as I find the entries to be a bit more fleshed out.[/quote]
The issue there is of course that said older wiki is very much out of date. For example I doubt it has anything on Renown, and that started over a year ago.[/quote]