Fallen London, as a game, has a fundamental design problem that deeply affects gameplay at all levels, especially the highest. The problem is as follows:
Equipment can changed at any time, at any place, at no cost.
Allow me to convince you that this is a problem. Imagine a turn-based RPG where you could, at any time during combat, pause the game and change your equipment without spending your turn, even in the middle of an enemy attack. Such a game would have one dominant strategy: whenever an opponent attacks, pause the game and equip whatever gives you the most defense against the attack, then when your turn comes, switch to whatever gives you the highest attack rating.
I’m sure a good developer could make it fun, but this game would most likely be terrible. Every RPG has the obligatory sword that gives you a lot of attack but has a defense penalty. The penalty would become irrelevant. Inflicted with a status effect? Quickly switch over to the armor that gives immunity then switch back. The core gameplay of most RPGs revolves around creating a balanced build that defends and attacks well and has responses to a variety of moves the enemy might take. If changing equipment was free, the whole core would be destroyed. There would be no decisions, just computations of what is best for this immediate action.
I don’t think I need to explain what Fallen London has to do with this.
Now, put the pitchfork down, I’m not suggesting they add an action cost to changing equipment. I would riot along with all of you if they did, because it’s not the sort of thing you can really change after the fact since it would negatively affect our precious EPAs. But, just as a thought experiment, imagine a London where switching outfits cost an action. What would such a game look like?
Well, in such a London, players would probably have one outfit that they stick to most of the time, that they have carefully selected to give a good balance of the stats they like. Players of this London would only switch outfits if they got a shiny new piece of equipment that they like better than what they have, if it’s a really hard and important challenge that is worth spending an action preparing for (i.e creating a theorem with the truthbreaker machine, an end-of-carousel challenge), or if they expect they’ll need different stats for a time (i.e an extended stay in the laboratory, grinding for Poet Laureate, making a lot of skeletons…).
This London would have much less tedium than the London we have. I said that outfit switching has no cost, but this is not quite so, it does have a cost in tedium. Currently, switching an outfit requires 4 clicks and 3 loading screens. This is why sometimes I don’t bother to put on my evening outfit when the Bazaar lodgings card comes around. This is not an actual gameplay decision I have made, it’s just me being a little burned out from the tedium of constant outfit switching and deciding that I’m willing to risk the ~15% change of failure if it means not having to go through that rigmarole for the fifth time today. The worst of it was before the recent bone market update, where I counted a mind-boggling 15 clicks and 13 loading screens per action in order to get ivory humeri efficiently. It’s thankfully better now, but the fundamental design flaw persists. In current Fallen London, the only difference between optimal and suboptimal play is willingness to go through tedium. This is not good design.
This flaw has another, more insidious, effect: Most equipment is worthless. Imagine an item that gave +8 to all main stats. This item is worthless, we have items that give +10 on each stat separately. Other than collector’s instinct (which I do have), there is no reason to care about anything but the almighty Best in Slot (Although, admittedly, there are some uses for the Worst in Slot too). This severely limits the design potential of equipment, you can’t have an item that gives a lot of persuasive but kills your shadowy, because that’s effectively just a persuasive boost with no drawbacks. In the hypothetical London where changing outfits costs an action, both the +8 to all and the +Persuasive -Shadowy items would be interesting, worthwhile items to add, and there would be actual decisions to be made regarding whether you want to go with the +15 persuasive item or the +8 Persuasive, +8 Watchful item.
Recent content has alleviated this last problem by introducing more stats and items that have utility outside of challenges. This is a good thing, but it doesn’t really address the fundamental problem, just kinda works around it.
How do we fix this?
There is a fix, but it requires swallowing a hard pill: Fallen London doesn’t have an equipment system, it has a level up system with extra clicks.
If the best persuasive you can possibly get right now is 250, and you get a new item that’s 2 points of persuasive over your previous Best in Slot, that just means the best persuasive you can get is 252. There is absolutely no other gameplay effect*. Getting this new item is effectively the exact same thing as getting two levels of persuasive.
This is not a new piece of equipment, this is a level up, except that taking advantage of it may require 4 clicks and three loading screens but otherwise no other gameplay effect. I would actually say this can be a good thing. Once you reach the cap of 200 persuasive, you can continue to increase your level by working towards the Best in Slot items, which is just changing the method to stat grind. In a sense, we already have an implementation of the recent overcap changes, except, again, one with extra mindless clicks.
The fix to the fundamental design problem is to embrace this fact. The fact that this is not equipment but a level up. Concretely, the fix is to tie outfits to challenges explicitly. Persuasive challenges always use the Evening outfit, Shadowy challenges always use the Incognito outfit, etc. These outfits are not to wear, but for challenges. The outfit you actually wear would be for storylet requirements and, crucially, for roleplay, not for challenges. This is a roleplaying game where we can’t roleplay with our outfit, that’s a travesty.
A preemptive response to some objections, spoilered so this doesn’t look quite so long (I know it is very long, sorry about that):
"But what about when you want low stats?"
Well, this solution is no worse when it comes to that than the current system, if you want to fail a persuasive challenge, fill your evening outfit with Worst in Slots. However, there is an even better solution, simply add a checkmark below "use a second chance for this challenge" that says "Use your current outfit for this challenge" so that it forces the game to use your actual stats instead of your Evening Outfit stats.
"What about BDR?"
There are no BDR challenges, so any manipulations of BDR would be made on your main outfit, this is not truly ideal, but it’s no worse than what we have now.
"What about MAGCATS?"
We are overdue for MAGCATS outfits anyway.
"What about esoteric challenges that don’t use the main 4 stats or MAGCATS?"
Those are fun! I wish there were more. Those can use the current system.
"What about the technical overhead of such a project?"
Honestly? fair. I don’t know the codebase but I know it’s bad and implementing this would probably take weeks. But hey, a man can dream.
"This sounds like a job for a script."
A script that does this would be extremely useful, although I believe it would go against Failbetter’s TOS and in any case the people who use scripts are generally a minority. I do use a couple whitelisted scripts, but nothing of this magnitude. Maybe if Failbetter gives the go-ahead I’ll sit down and write it myself when the bone market breaks me.
*Okay, there is one. The one minute difference is that you can now fine tune your persuasive a bit more, but there is very little advantage to doing this with the way the game works (which is, honestly, a good thing, otherwise it would be even more tedious).
edited by NotaWalrus on 7/11/2020