EXPERIMENTAL CONTENT: A Flash Lay

Fallen London
101

I really want to try the flash lay, it sounds exciting. I’m a bit committed to a few deadline intensive impossible grinds though and don’t know if I can spare more than an EF candle’s worth of actions on diversions from the grind at this time.

Does anyone know about how many actions these take roughly? If its less than 40 I may have to give in to the temptation and give it a go. I saw it being compared to the Last Court hunts, and I see that as a very favorable, very alluring recommendation.

102

NiteBrite, I’m pretty sure I took less than 40, but I had ~250 Persuasive, and I don’t know where your stat rebuilding project is at.

103

The Spirifer run is pretty much the same as the Auditor one, so if your stats aren’t capped or near-capped you could give that a go. I’m pretty sure I did that under 40 actions as well, though I wasn’t keeping careful count.

104

Is that for the harder version or the less hard version?

And thanks for your concern about my stats. I was able to rebuild them within about a year of SMEN ending, since there was nothing actively draining them anymore at that point. That’s when I started grinding to try and get 7 crimson books this year (time sensitive grind). I just need to convert my last 20 tears into M______B____'s and I’ll be set. I’m also trying to grind out about ~33 pails of lacre if I have time before the urchins stop selling them (also time sensitive).

EDIT: Thanks for the clarification Sara.
edited by NiteBrite on 12/19/2015

105

NiteBrite,

It took me exactly 30 actions, on the difficult path (started with no menaces, capped stats - though I did not bother to equip maximizing Persuasive gear). I didn’t even know I was supposed to get to 100 Progress and just fumbled along semi arbitrarily, trying to sample all options, never using second chances.

I got lucky by finding the exit card just before I hit 100 Progress. As you can see in this thread, some others were not so lucky and had to wait a lot for the exit card.

So, it’s definitely possible to do in under 40 actions, unless you get really bad luck. If you just want to quickly sample the mechanics and text (and not maximize rewards, necessarily) perhaps you should try the easy path, where you probably won’t fail challenges. Try to start without menaces.

106

[quote=Infrasound]Playing the Up Your Sleeve option on A Confessional Evening without touching Time Draws Near leaves you with the Time Draws Near card.[/quote]This is an important point; I hadn’t really considered the option and it’s clearly the one to be preferred, so as not to waste a useful card.

I couldn’t understand likening a card to a storylet, but this explanation here makes perfect sense, Infrasound. Thank you for the trouble you took in rephrasing.

[quote=Gonen]Yes, I understood that they wanted us to explore on our own. Though when investing in so many actions, 2nd chances and later on, cleaning high menaces… Well, I’m having a hard time accepting the punish of such an investment just because one needs to find the rules on one’s own. Even the shorter Heist instructs on the failure option. 5 scandal was not a big deal until now, so never had I suspected that achieving &quotmerely&quot 5 scandal can kick me out.
Imagine the other 90% of players who don’t read the forum and finds out the hard way.[/quote]
I get what you mean; the Flash Lay isn’t actually marked as experimental content, and there is no announcement about it that would direct a player to the forum. Moreover, although there are some warnings about menaces once the Flash Lay has begun, failure is largely unexpected (and the player still isn’t warned about the importance of menaces before starting). And I did spend several second chances, though I didn’t mind as much as I might have because of all the Christmas cards.

You could have either tried turning the editor to HTML and removed the colour tags, or clicked on &quotpreview&quot, then copying the text from the preview and pasting it within the quote tags, which would have eliminated the orange colour and substituted the purple of quotations (not white). But then you didn’t use quote tags for my part. Why, Gonen? Why?

107

I’m glad I took the time to play the flash lay. It had a definite Chris feel to the mechanics, and it reminded me of Dragon Age: The Last Court (TLC) hunts (a good thing) minus a lot of the polish those had.

[spoiler]The Issue (IMO)

For example I would say 30 actions is pretty reasonable length for the Lay, but it feels long because there’s no sense of progress. In TLC hunts for example, there was a progress bar and you could watch as you gained on your prey growing closer and closer. The end condition of the hunt auto-fired as a Must immediately once you had enough progress, but you could miss, lose progress, and get a chance to try again (at an advantage) if you had time left. The main complaint I have about the Lay is without a sense of time or a way to keep tabs on progress it feels like you aren’t making progress and are just aimlessly trapped and flailing about.

Hunts in TLC had an interesting 'time is running out’ mechanic. You had until the end of the day to catch your prey or else it got away. Every move you made cost some amount of time, similar to how Cat and Mouse cases with the implacable detective card works in Fallen London. This gave you an incentive to sometime pick the riskier options or to take on a voluntary menace quality because you were up against the clock. Maybe you choose to leave your hunting party behind because they are slowing you down, and this means you cant surround your prey on the final move. Or maybe you choose to drag your party with you into the thick brush creating a lot of noise (making progress harder). The important thing here is it made you very aware how close you were to the end condition. You are a lot more aware of how many more moves you have left. It adds a sense of time and urgency, and keeps you engaged in planning your actions.

I believe the Hunt menace events were scripted to occur at specific levels of progress (ex. 50%, 100%) as well as popped up as potential choices on cards. Here in the Flash Lay, menaces seem to be things that happen to you by blind chance. Blind chance menaces which are beyond your control (ex Suddenly you get caught snooping around a door: gain a suspicion or gain a scandal) don’t really have the same impact as menaces you bring upon yourself through informed self-sacrifice. The inconvenient contact had the feel of being a burden you choose to take, as I like to see, but again there didn’t seem to be any incentive to do so such as a deadline. Improved EPA isn’t a super great incentive when you consider there are other simpler and less chance based grinds out there. Maybe the idea with the Flash Lay is your stats aren’t supposed to be good enough to let you take your time on the Lay, and the menaces are your timer, but that feels a bit clunky to me and it sort of feeds into this feeling that no progress is being made.

Three things I would recommend based on this is 1. having the end of the Lay autofire when the progress goal is achieved, 2. find a way to make progress more visible (a bar is nice, but I’d understand if this is rejected for not fitting the aesthetic of Fallen London), 3. introduce an incentive to chose the riskier options such as a time limit on how long you can be gone from your normal life before someone notices.

Potential Add-ons

There were some cool features TLC hunts had that don’t have a counterpart in the Flash Lay but which could be neat to see in the future. I see the current content as a test of the stripped down core mechanics, and these other features as potential polish for the future.

  1. Different prey at the same difficulty - This worked like picking your reward for cashing in dramatic tension in the War of Assassins carousel. TLC hunts offered a broad selection of rewards without changing the overall difficulty significantly. It was nice being able to pursue specific rewards.
  2. Starting Boons - At the start of each hunt you had the opportunity to prepare an advantage or boon before heading off into the wilds and leaving your normal life behind. Maybe you packed extra provisions, a one time menace reduction per hunt. Maybe you left early to get a little extra time. If you were the acquaintance of a specific companion who was known for being a prolific hunter you could take them along and gain progress more easily. The choice of boon opened and closed opportunities accordingly and gave each hunt a different feel even if the cards were the same from hunt to hunt.
    3. Variable difficulty/Area Movement - TLC hunts had two zones you could move between either using supplies or by using a specific movement card. The first area was an easy difficulty forest area where progress was slow, but menaces were rarer and you were unlikely to fail challenges. The second area was the deep woods and it had riskier options, gave more frequent menace cards, but as a boon you progressed much faster. The mid-point hunt scripted menace event would move to this area if you chose one of the high progress gain menace options (ex. &quotquick chase after your prey, alone, into the deep woods or stay here and lose a bit of progress [this will remove your hunting party]&quot). I liked that sense of progress, that as you drew closer to the end things got harder or you moved to a new area. The closest similar thing I can think of in Fallen London is how the cards change with Troubled Waters when zailing at zee. The change in cards makes zee voyages have a definite progression feel. Troubled waters acts the opposite of what I recommend above and is a risk disincentive rather than a risk incentive, but the concept is similar.
  3. Quirks gain - There’s quirks drains in the Lay, but no quirks gain as far as I could see. If there’s enough randomization and drains in the content that it can’t be readily farmed for quirks (no more than the opportunity deck can in regular FL) then it might make sense to have some quirks gains spread around in there as well. One of the things I really liked about TLC was how the &quotstats&quot/quirks there played off one another and the player was sort of tasked with a dynamic juggling act of choice and consequence and that could be nice to see here too (it’s an ideal).
  4. The demon bear / the bard is kidnapped - !!! TLC had a few hunt related key events where you encounter a hunt that is harder than any other, but was either on an epic scale or was of significant personal investment (such as reclaiming a kidnapped lover). A one off tough flash lay of a specific individual of some importance could be quite thrilling compared to the general riff-raff of a common flash lay of people we never heard of before. Anyone can rob a random spirifer, but imagine a quest to rob specifically one of the Masters, or like to trick your way into the confidences of a high ranking New Sequencer.

The Good

I’d like to end off this long post with some positivity. I liked the writing and the feel of this content. The flash lay has good core mechanics. I really like the feel of potential here. I’ve seen how this type of content can be used and I look forward to seeing it more fully implemented and further polished.[/spoiler]
edited by NiteBrite on 12/20/2015

108

[quote=dov]NiteBrite,

It took me exactly 30 actions, on the difficult path (started with no menaces, capped stats - though I did not bother to equip maximizing Persuasive gear). I didn’t even know I was supposed to get to 100 Progress and just fumbled along semi arbitrarily, trying to sample all options, never using second chances.

I got lucky by finding the exit card just before I hit 100 Progress. As you can see in this thread, some others were not so lucky and had to wait a lot for the exit card.

So, it’s definitely possible to do in under 40 actions, unless you get really bad luck. If you just want to quickly sample the mechanics and text (and not maximize rewards, necessarily) perhaps you should try the easy path, where you probably won’t fail challenges. Try to start without menaces.[/quote]

I was lucky enough in all but one of my runs to get the exit card early, so I’d just hang on to it until I needed it. I was also lucky enough to get a card that gets rid of Suspicion and Scandal on a success.

109

An interesting thing about the Flash Lay is that you can’t receive Shadowy, Persuasive or Watchful Christmas Cards but you can get Dangerous ones. This is probably related to the mechanic by which to reduce menaces and the fact that Dangerous/Wounds checks are not in the Lay. That is to say, you must send scandal/suspicion/nightmare reduction requests from your lodgings but wound reduction needs to be initiated from the other party. This locks you into using Up Your Sleeve to reduce menaces while in the Lay.

I tried to use an alt to send a menace reducing Christmas Card seeing as it’s suppose to function like a letter from the lodgings. Didn’t work. Yet, I was in a Lay overnight and successfully received a Dangerous Christmas Card (thanks Olentzero!).
edited by navchaa on 12/20/2015

110

A followup thought to Nitebrite’s post:
Not only do I not feel like the menaces were really a timer, they kind of work as the very opposite of a timer: when my menaces started getting high, I stopped taking risks, and so it took me even longer to get out of my first Lay because I was using very low Progress actions. The boost for removing an obstacle is very large, but I only got one opportunity to do that based on my card draw.

111

I was wondering why I couldn’t send certain cards to certain people recently. They must be in Flash locations then?

112

…Anderson, Hopkins, Reed…
Are names of constables from the velocipede squad, sharing a nice little earner.

113

[quote=Ian Hart]I’m very curious about the mechanics behind the difficulty adjustment. I tried the easy Flash Lay first, and then the harder one. When I entered the harder one I still had some cards left in my hand from the easy one, but their difficulty had jumped from straightforward to chancy!

I don’t see any lock/unlock qualities on the options, is it some sort of variable in the skill check itself? Not a feature that is in StoryNexus, as far as I can tell, which is a shame, it has all sorts of potential.[/quote]

Isn’t there a Venture Difficulty option when you pick your target?

114

Yep, there is.

115

I bet there’s some math that uses the numerical value of the Venture Difficulty quality? Nice addition, that!

116

Yeah, my theory would be that each difficulty is something like 100+[20*Difficulty] or something. That’d be a wonderful feature to have access to in StoryNexus.

117

Well, I didn’t realise that letting Nightmares get too high would be such an issue! Just failed a flash lay at 99 progress (over 40 moves, I’ve had some terrible luck). Interestingly enough, the auto-fire storylet (which seems to arrive at 5 Nightmares?) allowed me to switch up my gear, but didn’t go away when I equipped a goldfish and pimp cane. Does this sound like something I should send a bug report about?

I have to agree with the people saying that 100 is too high a bar to reach. Also very much in favour of making it clear that high menace levels could get you kicked out of the lay. I’ve played it through maybe four times now, and this is the first time it’s become an issue.

That being said, I have played it multiple times, and enjoyed it up until now! I’ll probably go back and do it again. The mechanics are very interesting (I loved them in Flint) and a real change from how things are normally done.

118

Finished my first two runs of the easier Spiefier one which is straightforward for me even with the TRF putting my stats into the 160’s, which leads me to comment purely on the question of mechanics.

  1. if I had known how hard it was to find the completion card I would have held on to it the first time! That’s one thing where the 3-card limit hurts. I hit progress 170(!) before I finished. Mind, I did a ton of reduce scandal and suspicion actions so I ended with only 1 additional in each menace but it took an extra 15+actions if not more (I overshot my 100 mark by 20+ points to start)
  2. With a bad draw you can still get kicked out even with perfect checks. My second attempt gained me up to level 4 in Suspicion and Scandal before I scraped by the finish line, even though I had the Mark card held and finished immediately.
  3. I liked it a lot! But I tend to do heists and expeditions because I like controlled randomness, so this isn’t surprising. I’m part of the choir here - I’ll do something for fun even if it’s not particularly profitable. More variety, more possibility! Throw in some Making Waves, and I’ll probably never leave.
  4. I don’t have a problem with the 100 progress, but I do think the Mark card should appear a la the end of the Burglary card in a Heist - frequent and only after completion.
  5. That said, I look forward to the conversion of heists to this style of never-ending cards with a hard hand limit. It worked better than I thought, though for heists I admit that 4+ cards is a big deal.
  6. I would definitely be interested in different levels of progress as suggested before, along with an escape route like option to leave early. I’m going to wait to zero out my menaces before trying the harder Lay since I’m not yet at stat cap. I suspect I won’t make it!
119

[color=#ff9900]Hi all![/color]
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[/color]
[color=#ff9900]I’m still collecting feedback - we’ll implement revisions to the Flash Lay in the new year, so there’s still time to be heard. Until then, though, I’ve added an always-available storylet allowing you to abandon the Flash Lay as long as you have at least 25 Progress. [/color][color=rgb(255, 153, 0)]I’ve also indicated the content is experimental on the initial Flash Lay storylet, and provided a convenient link to this thread. [/color]
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[color=rgb(255, 153, 0)]Thanks for your responses so far! Hugely useful.[/color]

120

Bless you.
edited by Kolanowski on 12/21/2015