I just noticed that when you beat up a gang member in The Life of Crime card, it increases your Favours: Criminals.
“You’ve done somebody a good turn. Now, they’re in your debt.” Masochists, gotta love them!
The Ruthless Henchman card can now give one Favour in exchange for 10 Romantic Notions. Also the text is totes adorable!
Which reminds me, why are we seducing annoying artist when our underling will snap a dozen necks for love?
Why not both?
I just now thought to check the Thieves’ Cache expedition; it costs one Favour to embark on, but gives you 100 cryptic clues on a successful Watchful check. So if you’re ever in a situation where you’re desperate to shed some Criminal Favours, you have a second option besides the Skeleton Key.
edited by Kaigen on 9/1/2015
I’m curious why the Crime & Punishment card is still un-discardable since there are no longer any options which don’t eat up Favours/Connections without granting Favours for the opposing faction.
It was a bit more reasonable when there was the Affair of the Box option, or an option which would increase one faction to the greater detriment of the other.
But the current option only allows one to destroy Favours for items.
What’s the motivation for this remaining un-discardable?
That’s the plan for all the new conflict cards.
Edit: Here’s the quote in question
2) How will conflict cards work?
[color=rgb(194, 178, 128)]Conflict cards will appear when you’re owed a significant number of Favours by certain groups, like Constables and Criminals. You won’t be able to discard them, but they’ll disappear if you spend some of your Favours. Playing a branch on the conflict card will usually remove all Favours of one type in exchange for a substantial benefit.[/color]
edited by Ian Hart on 9/2/2015
For now I’d like to offer my hearty endorsement of the new Criminals dynamics as a career Shadowy. Whereas I had stopped using most conflict cards since I couldn’t be bothered with the paltry rewards net gain 15 CP gets to be a waste of time, above the very low baseline required for periodic stat gains I now take almost every opportunity to acquire a favor. Seven of those bad boys for a pile of jewels is a MUCH more straightforward affair then grinding Criminals, but the acquisition of those favors involves some Menace, liability, and also waiting around for the right cards. That is how relationships should work: you don’t grind networks, but build them with patience. You rely on people eventually needing something from you.
I maintain 10-15 levels of various factions (Hell comes to mind) because most of my un-augmented stats are in the 100-150 range, and factional stat gains are one of the more turn-efficient means of growing them without going far out of my way. Forcing me to either make a choice I don’t like or lose 5-7 Favors from somebody is a REAL choice. Great Game/Criminals/Urchins are my favorite factions: being confronted with the unavoidable loss of favor with one of them would be a lot more like a modern political dilemma.
[i]edited by Gerald Edgerton on 9/2/2015
[/i]
edited by Sara Hysaro on 9/2/2015
[quote=Ian Hart]2) How will conflict cards work?
[color=rgb(194, 178, 128)]Conflict cards will appear when you’re owed a significant number of Favours by certain groups, like Constables and Criminals. You won’t be able to discard them, but they’ll disappear if you spend some of your Favours. Playing a branch on the conflict card will usually remove all Favours of one type in exchange for a substantial benefit.[/color][/quote]
I know that is what’s happening, I’m just curious what the explanation and motivation is.
What’s the reasoning behind discouraging folks from collecting Favours? With multiple, un-discardable conflict cards, it’s going to make collecting Favours from multiple factions impossible. If I wanted to, for instance, curry favour with The Urchins, that means I can’t collect Favours from either The Widow, The Docks or Hell. At least not for the purposes of gaining Renown or potential storylets which require high Favours.
I don’t care that this is the case, I’d just like to know why.
My best guess: the new conflict card design combined with the low cap on favours is intended to keep the system dynamic, making it potentially more interesting than a system where you sit on a hoard of favours from all the factions waiting for opportunities to cash in.
I’d get that if the conflict cards were a way of exchanging Favours from one faction for another, but as it stands it’s an unavoidable Favour drain.
Or if Favours were a tangential benefit to other endeavors that accumulated on accident. But instead you have to actively seek out Favours on opportunity cards.
The conflict card system, as it stands now, is designed to discourage you from collecting Favours at all except as a potential revenue source.
So if the exchange of Echoes for Favours on the conflict cards is less than whatever Echo grinding you’re currently engaged in, or if you aren’t interested in Echo grinding, it’s best to avoid any opportunities to obtain Favours as it’s just going to needlessly drain actions and cloud your deck.
So if the new conflict card system is: Don’t Collect Favours, that doesn’t seem dynamic at all.
EDIT: Now I’d get if the reason is "It makes collecting Renown harder." That makes perfect sense.
But I never really liked the idea that folks thought "nuking connections" was a good idea to avoid cards they didn’t use. The idea that having Connections is Fallen London was a bad thing to be discouraged seemed the antithesis to the theme of the game.
Now this new system seems to be using the same tack where "smart" players will avoid Favours all together, making Factions in Fallen London a part of the game many players will choose to avoid.
Which sucks because Factions are awesome and an integral part of the flavour of the game.
edited by Nigel Overstreet on 9/2/2015
I suppose it depends on how grindable other connections end up being and what the payouts from the new conflict cards will be. The new system might be Don’t Collect All The Favours At Once rather than Don’t Collect Favours At All. If it works like Crime and Punishment currently does, you’ll still want to collect some Favours, but you can’t be chummy with everyone simultaneously.
Yeah, it seems reasonable to me that you can’t be simultaneously playing “both sides” in conflicts like criminals vs cops, docks vs widows etc. Eventually one side is going to find out and you’re going to get in trouble with them (and rewarded by the other side) unless you sacrifice opportunities to keep your dual-loyalties hidden (ie, keep the card in your hand.)
It would be cool if, long-term, they added storylines that add a new non-burning option to conflict cards.
For example: a story that unlocks with high criminals and police renown, where you convince both sides that you’re a double agent. From then on, that conflict card would have an option where you get a medium sized payout but don’t lose favour with either faction. That seems like a fun way to handle it to me. Certainly not likely to get done anytime soon. But since Favours are fairly easy to grind, it’s not really a barrier to grinding renown with either faction, just a slight impediment to grinding both at once.
This. I’m still going to work towards becoming very Renowned in all the factions I think fit my characters, but I’ll be working on it in steps and putting more thought into who my characters wish to be associated with than I would otherwise. The factions not fitting those characters will either be spent before Favours hits 4 or ignored entirely.
Favours will not be grindable at all. They are intended to be only available through opportunity cards or one-time storylets. If Favours were grindable, this wouldn’t be an issue because you could just get your 7 Favours, cash them out for Renown and erase the card.
But as collecting Favours is a long term endeavour, this makes gathering them at all a potentially deck nuking proposition as you can go weeks without getting the necessary cards. It also makes getting the cards needed to collect more Favours more difficult as the conflict cards will eat up your deck space.
The trouble is the cards don’t let you pick one side over the other. They only let you destroy Favours. You don’t get an additional Favour from the other side. So Criminals don’t care that you picked them over the Constables or vise versa. Your only reward for destroying a Favour is monetary.
I could get behind destroying 2 Favours for 1, but destroying Favours for Echoes? That seems to discourage having any connection at all.
Competing factions is a perfectly reasonable idea, much like the Matriarch and the Squad, if these were only directly competing cards, like Hell & Church. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
But Rubbery Men and Revolutionaries? And Constables? And Tomb-Colonist? Many of the conflict cards aren’t for competing factions.
I don’t mind if collecting Favours is hard, i just don’t want a system that discourages players, especailly new players, from playing the Favour ssytem at all.
I never want to see anyone suggesting that new players avoid faction options all together, like we have now.
It just encourages you to be a little more careful with who you’re cultivating favours with at that moment. There’s nothing stopping you from becoming renowned in both Hell and Church circles, but doing it at the same time will give you an annoying card. If you work on one and then the other everything will be fine, and after you’re as renowned as you want to be you can hover at 4 favours for each faction you don’t plan on spending for resources.
Well, how would you represent working “for” the criminals/constables if not a monetary reward? Renown has it’s own system already in place, and if you’re drawing the conflict card it’s very likely that your favours in one or the other are nearly capped out.
I’ll admit that I’ll be a little annoyed if the monetary reward is low, or the items don’t fit the flavor of the faction you’re favoring. But there’s really nothing they can give you other than items, that’s sort of the core mechanic of the game.
[quote=Nigel Overstreet]I don’t mind if collecting Favours is hard, i just don’t want a system that discourages players, especially new players, from playing the Favour system at all.
I never want to see anyone suggesting that new players avoid faction options all together, like we have now.[/quote]
If a new player runs into Crime or Punishment, they’re going to get 20+ echoes for their trouble. That’s a fair chunk of change at that stage in the game. It’s more annoying for those of us who are further in the game right now because the Connected: Constables drop for tipping off the smuggler is a lot harder to come back from than Favours: Constables is going to be (unless they’ve adjusted that and we’ve haven’t found out because no one wants to take that option. Hm).
Favour for Favour.
Choose the Constables over Criminals? Lose 5 Favours: Constables, gain 1 Favour: Criminals.
Or something like that. Maybe not that steep. Maybe throw in some monetary reward on the side. Something where gaining Favours and Renown is a goal, rather than pure monetary gain.
After all, there are plenty of options to trade in Favours for Echos. So if you want to play the character who trades in his Favours for money, there are plenty of options for that.
But if you want to be the sort of cat who is loyal to a group for RP reasons, or just to get a high Renown, there should be an option for that too.
A conflict card should be about picking one side over the other, rather than being a mechanic to force you to use Favours solely as a monetary gain system.
I hear that and I think for directly opposing factions it’s a good idea. It’s also pretty intuitive for new layers.
But most of the Conflict cards aren’t for opposing factions. They’re a spiderweb of almost all factions. These are old cards. A lot of those were just thrown out as a way to connect seemingly disparate factions.
And collecting Favours is such a luck based crap shoot, you’ve got to take what opportunities when you can. Getting from 5 Favours to 7 Favours could take weeks. So if you’re just grabbing every Favour you can when you first start out, you could find yourself with 3 non-discardable cards from 3 seemingly non connected factions. And each of them just sinks your Favours.
So if you’re frustrated with the cards, the solution is not to collect Favours. Or worse, that collecting Favours from one faction over another is mechanically discouraged.
It just seems the sort of thing that would turn people off of collecting Favours at all.
Maybe not to us because we’re long time players and know how to game the system, but new layers might think the game doesn’t want them to get Rubbery connections, which is the opposite of what the game seems to be about.
[quote=Kaigen][quote=Nigel Overstreet]I don’t mind if collecting Favours is hard, i just don’t want a system that discourages players, especially new players, from playing the Favour system at all.
I never want to see anyone suggesting that new players avoid faction options all together, like we have now.[/quote]
If a new player runs into Crime or Punishment, they’re going to get 20+ echoes for their trouble. That’s a fair chunk of change at that stage in the game.[/quote]
True, but that means the Favour/Renown system is now solely a monetary gain system. It creates the impression that your connections are only useful for Echoes. Besides, there are plenty of other actions which trade Favours for Echoes without making it a mandatory part of the system.
There was a thread in The Salon a while back about if you could only choose one option on the conflict cards, which one would it be. There were a lot of cool, varied answers reflecting all sorts of ideas about the factions.
If all of these factions are just reduced to which gives the best EPA, something ephemeral about the game gets lost.
[quote=Nigel Overstreet]True, but that means the Favour/Renown system is now solely a monetary gain system. It creates the impression that your connections are only useful for Echoes. Besides, there are plenty of other actions which trade Favours for Echoes without making it a mandatory part of the system.
There was a thread in The Salon a while back about if you could only choose one option on the conflict cards, which one would it be. There were a lot of cool, varied answers reflecting all sorts of ideas about the factions.
If all of these factions are just reduced to which gives the best EPA, something ephemeral about the game gets lost.[/quote]I think you still get that with this system. A player who runs into a conflict card is going to see that playing factions off of each other can be fun and profitable, but they’ll also realize that they’ll have to pick a side (at least for a time) if they want to get their Renown up to higher levels. Granted, Renown is currently not useful for anything, but neither is having Connected: Constables 100, apart from enjoying what that says about your character.
I guess I don’t see why whether or not conflict cards grant Favour with the faction you side with makes a big difference in whether the system has life beyond an EPA calculation. You pick a side, and they reward you, but they’re also aware that you could have gone the other way, and so perhaps they shouldn’t rush to embrace you. And as a practical matter, the fact that you only get conflict cards when your Favours are so high means that you might hit the cap in one or both Favour categories before it turns up, which would make any granted Favours wasted.
edited by Kaigen on 9/2/2015