I admit right now I feel like I’m stuck and just can’t fit my vision within the system as it is. But maybe someone here can help me see the light… so here are bits of what I have (focusing on the problematic ones) and what I’m trying to achieve. Let me know if you see a way out.
I have the player start aboard a zeppelin, with the goal to get out of it somehow. The ways out are pinned cards with restricted choices (Qualities to improve). I’m using Opportunities to represent various locations on the zeppelin, as well as random events such as “A Patrol!”
These cards allow the player to raise stats and gather items needed to leave. When he does so, he’s out of the zeppelin and flying away but there’s still a single Pinned card (and no Opportunities – for now) to solve another complication.
Once all this is done, I intend the player to reach a large hub àla Fallen London (though probably dealt with as a single area). From there, the player would be able to go all over the world as adventures pop up.
Various issues I have with this setup:
Player picks Opportunities when on the zeppelin, doesn’t use them all, then leaves the zeppelin (area change, hand not cleared). Player has unplayabled cards forever since these cards are currently restricted to the Zeppelin area. Can’t discard and can’t even “open” them to reach a discard-like option.
If the card is made for “Any” area, it would remain accessible and “discardable”, but it would keep popping up forever (though I suspect there might be a Quality restriction trick here I’m missing)
Later on, the player reaches the hub and acquires new Opportunities… then gets into a context where these shouldn’t be playable anymore. Maybe it’s a “city” opportunity and he’s now lost in a mountain, or vice versa. Or maybe he’s into a very specific place/situation where only a few Opportunities would make sense.
If I put conditions on these Opportunities, I risk locking them for a while, or forever…
If I don’t, they could pop up at any time and clog up the player’s hand (and use up his precious actions for nothing)
It sounds like I would have to avoid “location” cards and instead do “thematic” cards… but I’d be stuck with extremely generic things such as “Danger!”, “Bad guys!”, “A quiet moment” and similar, with dozens of branches restricted to various contexts (+ a default discard-like choice, just in case). While possible, it seems to dilute the immediate impact of a card. It’s not “A tiger!” when I’m in the jungle and “A patrol!” when I’m on the zeppelin but “Danger!”, all the time.
My game is a little like this (with spaceships) so trust me, I feel your pain.
My solution has been to create two Settings – Voyaging, and Landfall. Landfall contains all my destination areas, and Voyaging contains all my journey areas. To get to a new destination area, you must take a voyage, and thus switch settings and clear your hand. So not only do you get around trouble with your shipboard cards hanging around, you don’t have to go into all that tomfoolery I outlined before. To move from area to area, you always have to swap Settings and clear your hand.
May not work with your game, but it’s a direction, anyway.
Settings were my first workaround considering that clearing aspect. Right now, it would probably solve my problem. But I know no card can share settings, so it might become a pain later on. Means I either don’t have cross-setting cards, or I have to constantly keep a clone up to date for each one, for each additional setting (ugh!).
Admittedly the only cross-area card I have right now is meant for debugging, but I have the feeling I’ll need more.
That said, your example is intriguing and I might be able to work with something similar. Thanks for the tip!
[quote=leokhorn]
I have the player start aboard a zeppelin, with the goal to get out of it somehow. The ways out are pinned cards with restricted choices (Qualities to improve). I’m using Opportunities to represent various locations on the zeppelin, as well as random events such as “A Patrol!”
Once all this is done, I intend the player to reach a large hub àla Fallen London (though probably dealt with as a single area). From there, the player would be able to go all over the world as adventures pop up.
Any advice?[/quote]
As people have said, you definitely want separate settings for this. In Fallen London, the introduction in New Newgate is a separate setting to the city itself for this very reason.
It’s worth exploring ways to make the absence of a discard option a virtue in your designs. It allows some options that weren’t possible in Fallen London. Here’s a technique we’re planning to use in an unannounced project and trailing in The Silver Tree:
Have mini-menace qualities, like Lost, Weary, or Having a Bad Day. Have an opportunity card for each one, made available by having 1+ of the quality. Each card has branches that let you remove or reduce the menace, but at a cost. You get rid of Having a Bad Day by snapping at a colleague, but that reduces your Trust quality with them. You get rid of Weary by resting, but it reduces your Hot on Their Trail quality.
The player can ignore the card if they want, but it eats up a slot in their hand while they do, so each draw is less useful. This is a decent way of doing nuisance-level menaces.
There are various tweaks you can do, too. Like have a mini-menace that unlocks one card at 1+, one at 3+ and one at 6+. Now, if that quality is allowed to get out of control it could potentially eat up your whole hand until you start addressing it.
Ah excellent! Pleased to see that using menaces to force unpalatable choices is a “thing” as I’d been worried it might be labelled poor game design or something when I was trying to design some menace responses that weren’t FLs model. I very much like the “no discard” design by the bye, not least because I think it encourages creative thinking in a designer.
The only thing that had put me off the three-card model was that if you use the 1+ card to reduce the menace, would you not then be potentially stuck with the 3+ and 6+ cards? Presumably you can handle that by putting maxes on the lowee level cards - that is making it so that none of the branches on the 1+ card can be chosen if you have 3+ menace and perhaps ensuring that the 3+ menace choices reduce the menace to less than 3. Would you not also have to make sure that these unapalatable cards are the only way to reduce the minor menace - not a problem as it makes gaining the menace more significant, and I think you could still couple it with a pinned card that reduces the menace as long as (say) it is lower than 3 that has no choices or does not appear when the menace is higher >=3. Am I understanding the system correctly that you can’t just give each menace card a branch that only unlocks once the menace is reduced to 0 would not get round the problem because you need to meet all the requirements that drew the card when you try to play it?
I definitely saw the potential for Menaces. I’m actually already using it that way in my world :)
And this example raises a question since I’ve had to struggle with it. Let’s say we’re doing a GTA-like story where the player raises a Suspicion menace quality every time he does something illegal. It all takes place in a single area (the big city) and we don’t use settings.
Now we want to have forced Opportunities linked to his Suspicion. Let’s say…
“The eye of the Law”, Suspicion >= 2. The theme of this card is that one or two cops have their eyes on you and you can try something to distract them. Succeeding lowers Suspicion. Failing does other things, possibly raising Suspicion.
As is, this Opportunity only appears if Suspicion is at least 2. Since it disappears when you use it to lower Suspicion, there’s no problem.
Now, as you suggest, we want to make a higher Suspicion card to potentially lock a second slot.
“The arm of the Law”, Suspicion >= 5. The theme is that lots of cops are after you. Road blocks, car chases, traps, etc… Again, I suppose, actions can lower Suspicion or raise it if you fail.
I can already see one possible lock-up with this setup:
Suspicion is at 5 and both cards are in the player’s hand
Player uses “Eye of the Law” and lowers Suspicion to 4
Player still has “Arm of the Law” and can’t play it until Suspicion goes back up.
Can’t this happen? If so, how will you guys deal with this?
EDIT: ninja’ed by an interesting solution, but question still stands :) edited by leokhorn on 9/9/2012
Leokhorn: make it a Pinned card, not a Sometimes card. That way it’ll just vanish if your Suspicion is too low.
But I think I see another problem, if I understand you right. These cards are forced, based on suspicion level, and allow you to raise or lower that Quality. Correct? If so, surely then you’ll just get the card over and over again until you reduce your Suspicion?
But then the player is not forced to play it at all. Which is great for any card but a menace card, based on the example ;)
I believe it’s the point. But you do point out something important: menace cards as Opportunities only work well if enough other non-menace Opportunities exist. They make you keep wanting new cards and thus want to deal with the menace blocking a slot. The more other cards, the less prevalent the menace (which is good and bad: not as repetitive, but much less of an issue for the player with a modicum of luck).
And I’ll add another bad case I’ve just thought up. Assuming you use this for multiple Menaces, with multiple cards for multiple levels of menace… what happens if, by some stroke of bad luck, you get the “level 1” of each menace set when you need to clear the “level 2” first? (I’m assuming Ambrose’s solution is in place for this example)
Hang about. Can’t you force players to use Pinned cards by marking them as “Must”? I assumed that you’d use Pinned Cards for that, rather than Sometimes cards, because that way the Menace triggers the moment you’re over the threshold.
I certainly hope so, because that’s what I was planning. But I’ve already had to revise things after it turned out I had made bad assumptions, so if not then so be it.
UPDATE: turns out you can! :) edited by SmyJohn on 9/10/2012
[color=00ffff]Exactly this, except the only cards that lower the menace quality can be the menace cards themselves (or you can get stuck with the cards after reducing the quality via another method).[/color]
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[color=00ffff]What’s interesting about this menace structure is that it adds a qualitative difference to the menace between tiers. To use the cops-and-robbers/GTA example, once the police are setting up roadblocks and issuing APBs, then using the lower-tier option of slipping Billy the Informer some green is not going to solve the problem. You’re beyond that. You need to deal with the more extreme situations first.[/color]
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[color=00ffff]What worries me most about it the niche case of someone going from 4 menace to 5 but they haven’t drawn the 5+ menace card yet. That means the menace-reduction options on the lower-tier cards are closed off, and you can’t start reducing the menace until you’ve drawn the 5+ card. That may well still work in the fiction - things are bad, and they need to get worse before they get better - but it’s a tricky thing to explain to players. Some solutions:[/color]
[color=00ffff]You could up the frequency of the menace cards and put a 5+ option on a lower tier card that didn’t reduce the menace but explained the situation and at least got that card out of your hand temporarily (but it could come back with each draw!). “It was getting so I couldn’t even get a drink in this town without being harassed by the law. Old friends wouldn’t talk to me anymore. There was a storm brewing.”[/color][/li][li][color=00ffff]You could limit the menace to 2 tiers. Then it can’t take up more than 2 slots, so the situation has less of a sting.[/color][/li][li][color=00ffff]Rather than use an escalating menace you could use 3 different qualities to represent the worsening situation. In the cops-and-robbers example something like: A Person of Interest, Wanted for Questioning, Subject of an APB. Each has a menace card associated with it. Each menace card has an option to remove that menace, so you can get rid of each one independently. This is a slightly gentler option. To hand out the menaces would be a bit more complex. You’d need some branches that gave out different tiers based on having the tier below. So once you’re a Person of Interest, some branches impose Wanted for Questioning as a consequence.[/color]
[color=00ffff]You probably don’t want more than one menace in a game that works like this, or play could get frustrating. It’s interesting, though. It’s also entirely untested. :)[/color]
Some great stuff here. You could also combine multiple minor menaces with single cards with lots of branches using the BVWF options. So “Deal with Suspicion” has an entirely different set of options on it when your Suspicion is 3+ to when it is 5+; if you have three or more minor menaces (say) then the total fail state only occurs when you let three menaces get to 3+ simultaneously, but the sting of only getting 2 opportunities for your action still remains painful.
Color me interested, just saying. [/quote]
Awww, thank you. Someday I’ll even have the damned thing playtestable.
Yeah, that was why I was trying to get away with only two Settings – if I do end up with stuff I want available across Settings, at least I only have to clone it once. Much more than that and you’re into “Madness! Madness!” territory, and not in a good, Fallen-London-shiny-dreamworld kind of way.
boggle
See, just when I’m thinking I’m getting the hang of this setup you guys prove that you are infinitely more clever than me. :) That’s awesome. I am now resisting the urge to make up game content just to use this because this way, too, lies madness, and also never finishing. But it’s definitely something I’ll be chewing on.
I must say that I don’t much like the “no dismissing” approach. I think it is a constraint that may make smaller games better developed, but I think it will make larger game worlds much harder and - in the end - less sophisticated.
Perhaps I need to work with it for a bit longer, but at least to begin with I hate it!
I think the reason I don’t like it is two-fold. Firstly that I have a particular game world that I have written, that’s quite big and that I want to shoe-horn into the SN framework. Secondly, I love Fallen London, and am not so fond of Cabinet Noir…
[color=#009900]Ian - bear in mind if you want dismissable cards, you can just copy-paste a one-word ‘discard’ branch on to every card. But do remember - you played Fallen London, but we had to build and maintain it, and we’ve had a series of sharp lessons in the limitations that discardable cards impose. :-) FL isn’t more sophisticated than CN because it features a discard button - it’s more sophisticated because it’s approximately twenty times the size.[/color]
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[color=#009900]In related news, though, we are considering the possibility of allowing individual Sometimes cards to be ‘transient’, i.e., auto-discard when they no longer match player qualities. This would allow some flexibility to cover edge cases where getting stuck with a card is a problem, or where cards need to disappear for plot reasons when they’re no longer relevant. Sound off on the suggestions thread, folks, if you think this would be useful.[/color]
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]Ian - bear in mind if you want dismissable cards, you can just copy-paste a one-word ‘discard’ branch on to every card. But do remember - you played Fallen London, but we had to build and maintain it, and we’ve had a series of sharp lessons in the limitations that discardable cards impose. :-) FL isn’t more sophisticated than CN because it features a discard button - it’s more sophisticated because it’s approximately twenty times the size.[/color]
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[color=#009900]In related news, though, we are considering the possibility of allowing individual Sometimes cards to be ‘transient’, i.e., auto-discard when they no longer match player qualities. This would allow some flexibility to cover edge cases where getting stuck with a card is a problem, or where cards need to disappear for plot reasons when they’re no longer relevant. Sound off on the suggestions thread, folks, if you think this would be useful.[/color][/quote]
Yes! In my game I am adding a random element to character creation using cards. This would help me immensely as without it, my system doesn’t work. As it currently would casue 2 cards to become permanently stuck in the players hand.
And I don’t think this just goes for me. Not every scenario in the game should be present all the time, cards auto discarding when they become obsolete would be a blessing.