I’m beginning to suspect that StoryNexus requires a more ordered mind than (Ahha! The pixies are calling me … what? I’m busy!) my own to use. I’m somewhere between baffled and completely confounded.
Not having read the manual entirely, I won’t give in yet. However, a Ctrl-F did not locate anything that might help me delete cards/stories/qualities I no longer want - (indeed everything, so I can start again afresh without them confusing things).
Also - I wanted to play test it so far (a vast number of about two cards), and couldn’t redo it as I had already progressed. I know you can kill your character with a death card, so you can create a new one. Except I can’t even create a death card, and can’t find anything in the manual about doing that, either.
I found this advice earlier in the forum: "The recommended method is to create a storylet (that’s Key of Dreams locked!) called RESET CHARACTER or something. Make sure you’ve got the Key of Dreams set, then play through it, using the Game_End_Effect setting (under Branch Options)." But I can’t find Branch Options, let along ‘Game_End_Effect’.
I should back away from the creating thing, shouldn’t I?
EDIT: Follow up question. Why are there minimum and maximum settings for qualities, but not equal to? Again, probably teething problems - but I wanted to create a starter area where I moved through the cards by using the ‘a stranger’ quality for the first few cards - which once used, wouldn’t show again. I was planning to simply set the requirement for each card at 1 level higher stranger-ness - and have each card add one. But I can’t do this, as the max/min thing means that some of the other cards will be visible.
How else would you do this?
You can’t delete things you no longer want. If you want to start afresh, you’d probably just be better off renaming your world to "1234broken" or something and then making an entirely new one.
GAME_END_EFFECT is under Advanced Options -> Exotic Effect in the results bit.
look here’s a screenshot edited by Spacemarine9 on 8/26/2013
[quote=Spacemarine9]You can’t delete things you no longer want. If you want to start afresh, you’d probably just be better off renaming your world to "1234broken" or something and then making an entirely new one.
GAME_END_EFFECT is under Advanced Options -> Exotic Effect in the results bit.
look here’s a screenshot edited by Spacemarine9 on 8/26/2013[/quote]
You may have prevented me from punching a wall. Thank you.
Another option instead of scrapping your world is to make a DELETED tag and put all your unused storylets and qualites there. Another good thing would be to put IMPOSSIBLE! - 1 as a requirement in the root branch, just so these wayward storylets don’t jump out into the game by accident.[li]
Ideally you’ll find opportunities to fish an old card out of there and use it again. One more suggestion - on your death card, you may also want to move the player to the starting setting and location as well. I’m not sure if it makes a huge difference, but I’m almost positive my world was glitching out due to a problematic setting/location scenario. [/li][li] edited by HanonO on 8/26/2013
Since Jack was nice enough to start a topic with this very useful title, I’d thought I might as well join in and use this thread for the same purposes. I’ve been playing Fallen London for close to half a year now, and have been in to pen and paper rpgs for about 20 years, so I thought I’d give this a go as well. I’ll try and pick up as much as I can from this forum, but sadly the search function isn’t too useful (or I still have to find a smarter way of using it. Anywho, the first questions that have risen:
As a creator, I start with ‘A stranger’ at level 1 and ‘Key of Dreams’ at level 1. Is it safe to assume that all normal players start with ‘A stranger’ at level 1 as well? I managed to find an explanation on Key of Dreams in the manual, but no hard evidence on the other quality.
There is no way to designate a starting area. Is the ‘[worldname] Starting Area’ always the starting area by default (ie no change possible)?
The forum search function is genially ineffectual. If you want to find something, I’d recommend a site-specific Google search: enter ‘site:community.failbettergames.com’ along with your search terms.
Yes, the ‘A stranger’ quality is currently given to all new characters. It looks like that may change in the future, if Failbetter decide to fully implement Personas.
You can’t change which area is the Starting Area, so far as I know, but you can rename it. edited by Flyte on 9/5/2013
Everybody starts with A Stranger 1 (and I wouldn’t count on that going away any time soon, especially since it would break functionality for almost everybody.)
Starting Area and Starting Setting can’t be changed, but they can be renamed.
Thanks to both of you for your input. I’d already found the possibility to rename areas, I was just curious as to how designation was handled; it’s a behind-the-scenes thing, it appears, but since it works it’s fine.
In regard to ‘a stranger’, I wouldn’t even want to change this, since it’s the only hook I see to hang a couple of ‘must’ storylets on in order to go through the character creation process in a neat way. Had I been able to choose, I’d possibly named it differently, but the mechanic is great as far as I’m concerned.
Another basic question: for my stories, I’d like to implement something similar to the FL ‘Connected’ qualities, but with a slight twist: for each faction a player can be connected to, you can either be neutral/unknown (Connected=0), friends/allies (Connected>0) or enemies (Connected<0). The solution I’m looking for concerns using two mutually exclusive (variable) Qualities, being Allies(group) and Enemies(group). If you are Allies with any group and take positive action it rises, and it falls by negative action. With Enemies it’s the other way round; it rises by negative action and drops by positive action. When either reaches 0 both are up for grabs again, but more importantly: when either reaches zero and there are CP left, these should be invested in the other quality straight away.
The only feasible solution I can come up with right now is using a single quality for each connection and raising the zeroline to, say, 50, counting 0-49 as ‘enemy’ and 51-100 as ‘friend’. This means pyramid numbers are out (which I would have liked), but moreover it’s just not the prettiest solution to work with.
Does anyone have an idea as to if/how this could be tackled?
Oh and additionally, does anyone know how to mark forum posts as ‘read’? Actually reading them doesn’t count, it seems ><
I don’t think any solution will give you everything you want. The only (sane) way to carry over cps from positive to negative allegiance is to use one quality for both, as you suggest. But do you really need to? For storylets which only give a small number of cp, it seems like unnecessary book-keeping. Will there be many which give large numbers of cp? And is a sliding scale really a good way to represent acts with large impacts on your connections, anyway? Will that mob boss forgive the player for selling him out or jilting his daughter, if they just run enough errands?
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that if the cp changes are small, it’s probably not necessary to track the overflow. And if the changes are large, a sliding scale may not be the right model to use.
If you abandon that requirement, you should be able to get something adequate using Rich Quality Effects. I’ll explain with an example.
Let’s say the player is operating a printing press, and publishing pamphlets of a certain kind mildly irritates the Jesuits. So you want the action to reduce worsen the player’s relationship with them by 1cp. You have two non-pyramidal qualities: Jesuit Enmity and Jesuit Esteem.
You only want Enmity to increase when the player no longer has any Esteem. So you add two effects to the result:
[ul][li]Jesuit Enmity is changed by 1 - [q: Jesuit Esteem]; and[/li][li]Jesuit Esteem is changed by -1.[/li][/ul]This will never increase Enmity while the player has Esteem. It also works fine with pyramidal qualities. The Reference Guide is a little vague about syntax, but I’m fairly confident something similar will work for higher cp changes. If you have with it, let me know and I’ll try rigging something up in my sandbox.
Brilliant Sebastian! I actually slept on the OP’s request because I couldn’t think of how to make it work.
One of the interesting things about different game/story development systems is trying to make everything work. I know I came to SN with a bunch of ideas and tried to shoehorn them into the system. In the manual FB detail how “fires in the desert” works best for SN (loosely connected episodes which can make sense in the player’s mind in any order). One of my difficulties is I’m always trying to make the story a little more fine-grained than that. Anything can be simulated somehow though, but often it just takes the author yielding on the exact idea they wanted and taking a step back to look at the tools we’re given and see how we can make in work. Often the solutions I’ve come up with are better than my original ideas. I was trying to model a world map and 1-1 room movement like in a text adventure, and once you realize you don’t have to do that, it’s a bit freeing in a way.
I had the same trouble in another CYOA system. I’m like “Of course the player is going to want to get out of bed and brush his teeth and take a shower and pick which clothes he puts on and decide what he wants for breakfast each day before setting out on his adventure.” It took a playtester reading to basically tell me “You can skip all that and just write the story” to cause a lightning bolt in my head.
I’m curious as to how one makes a storylet only completable once…
I have a "you’ve arrived" sort of storylet, but upon completion, you can still do it over, which obviously makes no sense.
[quote=Tyler Zabel]
I have a "you’ve arrived" sort of storylet, but upon completion, you can still do it over, which obviously makes no sense.[/quote]
You could have the preceeding storylet give a "Newcomer" quality, which is stripped away by the "You’ve arrived" storylet, which requires Newcomer 1 to play.
What Theus says. Alternatively: all new characters are given the quality A stranger 1. Are you using it for anything? If not, you can make it a requirement for the storylet, and set it to zero once the storylet is played.
Ah! I’m not… Thanks!
Basically, I can only make a one-time-completion-storylet if I make it only completable with a certain item or status that is then used up?[li] edited by Tyler Zabel on 9/8/2013
Either that, or have them require “no more than 0” in some quality that they gain. Do what makes sense. If you want a player choice to have some weight, give them a quality. “You are now ‘A Betrayer of Frogs’!” If it’s inconsequential you can use something you gain and then goes away.
In the case of “You have not yet arrived”, it may not make sense to carry around a quality “Arrived”.
More questions, about the layout of storylets this time:
Hard returns used in the descriptions are ignored when you play the storylet. How do I have these added to the in-game text as well?
The first line of the root event description has a slightly different layout from the other lines (same layout except it’s bold text, it appears). Is this intentional? Can I somehow bypass this?
[quote=LuckyDee]More questions, about the layout of storylets this time:
Hard returns used in the descriptions are ignored when you play the storylet. How do I have these added to the in-game text as well?
[/quote]
You can use a lot of html formatting tags. I use </br> for one line break, and </br></br> for a paragraph break.
[quote]
2) The first line of the root event description has a slightly different layout from the other lines (same layout except it’s bold text, it appears). Is this intentional? Can I somehow bypass this?[/quote]
[li]
I played a world where the author just skipped all the title bars of the branches and they were able to make all the branches flow together somewhat by timing paragraph breaks where the titles would be. I think since then, the ui requires a title for each branch.
Perhaps try a blank alt-character in the title bar of branches?
It has articles discussing slightly broader-view story creation and structure. For example the "one time use" storylet detailed above is referred to by FB as a "Mark of Cain". Other types of structures and grinds have terribly interesting names such as "Grandfather Clock" and "Midnight Staircase". If anything, it makes discussing high-level structure a bit more concise.
Other highly recommended articles are on "fires in the desert" and "combinatorial explosion".[li] edited by HanonO on 9/10/2013
