So what I’m working on right now is a cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic/1984-esque thing (also my first thing) in a wonderful free-roam world, and I’m trying to include a Codex for players to access akin to something like in Mass Effect where you can go and reference stuff all the time. I’m thinking that this would be best served by having a Codex storylet that links to an area which itself has storylets, so that players can browse it more easily (it’ll have storylets for, say, Politics, Faction Knowledge [for at least four factions, probably no more than 10] Area Knowledge [for the three major regions], Technology, and Metaphysical Theory). The only downside of this is that I need a reliable way to get to it from each area. The method that I think is easiest is to have an always deck storylet for each region and the character creation stage that leads to the Codex. However, I’d prefer to have the always storylet for each region just say “Codex” or “Access Codex” rather than saying something like Codex: New California or Codex: Tokyo, since that would in and of itself be confusing and overlap with the Codex storylet for those places. Is there a way to make a part of the Storylet’s name visible only to myself, or to check areas on a branch in a storylet (I couldn’t find a way to do this myself, despite reading through the guide a couple times now).
Example: Accessing the Codex from New California actually takes someone to a Codex (New California) storylet rather than just a plain Codex storylet, but to the player it just says Codex, so that the whole system looks homogenous across all regions.
The world itself is based off a tabletop game I’m working on and want to get people excited about. edited by Kyle Willey on 11/15/2012
[quote=Kyle Willey]So what I’m working on right now is a cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic/1984-esque thing (also my first thing) in a wonderful free-roam world, and I’m trying to include a Codex for players to access akin to something like in Mass Effect where you can go and reference stuff all the time. I’m thinking that this would be best served by having a Codex storylet that links to an area which itself has storylets, so that players can browse it more easily (it’ll have storylets for, say, Politics, Faction Knowledge [for at least four factions, probably no more than 10] Area Knowledge [for the three major regions], Technology, and Metaphysical Theory). The only downside of this is that I need a reliable way to get to it from each area. The method that I think is easiest is to have an always deck storylet for each region and the character creation stage that leads to the Codex. However, I’d prefer to have the always storylet for each region just say “Codex” or “Access Codex” rather than saying something like Codex: New California or Codex: Tokyo, since that would in and of itself be confusing and overlap with the Codex storylet for those places. Is there a way to make a part of the Storylet’s name visible only to myself, or to check areas on a branch in a storylet (I couldn’t find a way to do this myself, despite reading through the guide a couple times now).
Example: Accessing the Codex from New California actually takes someone to a Codex (New California) storylet rather than just a plain Codex storylet, but to the player it just says Codex, so that the whole system looks homogenous across all regions.
The world itself is based off a tabletop game I’m working on and want to get people excited about. edited by Kyle Willey on 11/15/2012[/quote]
AFAIK there is no such way to hide bits of Storylet names from players.
Would it work for you to make a Pinned card that moved the player to a Setting (not Area) that was the Codex Setting, and then create pinned Storylets that had an Area as a prerequisite, with the assorted branches being the Politics, Factions, etc? (Area is the fifth field in the second column of the Root event Storylet.) And you could have a pinned card that then switched them back to the default Setting when they were done browsing.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re saying, but I’m on four or so hours of sleep so I’m a zombie today. Here’s what I’m getting:
Send them to a separate setting for the codex (also, props for this, I’ll probably do it so that there’s no clutter from the couple dozen or so properties that players acquire distracting them) and then use the setting as a requirement for certain storylets within the Codex which contain the information.
This is going to reveal my relative lack of knowledge about the system, but if you go between settings will you preserve knowledge of the area you are in for other settings? Or would it be necessary to give an area-based quality? Can that be done across setting i.e. give a quality “Location: Phoenix” or “Location: Character Creation” from being in the appropriate place that would then be applied to the character across settings?
That’s what I’m saying. The game does drop you in an Area, and tracks that quality, which remains static unless it’s changed by a storylet; if you look under the Advanced Options of the Qualities Affected part of the branch results, you’ll see where you get to change Areas and Settings. You can create more Areas and Settings by using the Edit option on your worlding page.
So in your game, what I’m suggesting is that your Area can be “Tokyo” (New Mexico, London, Reykjavik, the Lunar Arcology), and your Setting can switch between “normal” (the game world) and “Codex” (putting the game world on pause for a moment to go dig up information). Because the Area doesn’t change unless you the game designer set up something to tell it to change, you can limit information that way.
Imagine you’re creating a ghost story. (This is a clunky analogy, so bear with me–I’m on six hours sleep, but I haven’t met my coffee yet. :) ) Your character can have a Setting of “Alive” (which puts you normally in the real world), “Dead” (which limits your ability to interact with the real world, but lets you see/do some interesting things), or “Getting a Lecture on How Being Dead Works from the Intake Officer” (this one looks like a separate Area, but really isn’t; you’ve simply entered a sort of abstract info-dump mindset). The Area is different from the Setting–the Area can be “The Creepy Old House” or “The Place I Died” or “The Church”.
(Despite my examples, the Settings don’t have to look very different. You can be hitting the game’s in-world Wikipedia page, sure; you can also be grabbing a moment to go down to the Gentleman Loser and pick Automatic Jack’s brain on the way of the grim and rainy world.)
So then areas are setting independent; that is, you can have an area across settings? So if I send someone to the codex from Tokyo they’ll go to the codex in Tokyo, if I send someone to cyberspace in Tokyo they’ll go to the matrix in Tokyo?
That’s interesting, I may limit/change certain things depending on the physical area people access the network from; New California will have more anarchist/traditional democratic leaning articles while Phoenix would have an oppressive regime’s censored internet. This would work? Also, does that mean that I could send them to the codex any time they’re not in a storylet and they’ll return exactly where they are?
Settings and areas are independent, yes. If your settings are Above and Below, and your areas are Paris and London you can be in Paris/Above, Paris/Below, London/Above and London/Below.
The first key difference is that You can set content to ‘Any’ for areas, but not for settings. So one storylet could appear in Paris/Above and London/Above. But not London/Above and London/Below.
Also, changing settings discards all your currently held Sometimes cards. This doesn’t happen when you change areas.
You can lock cards by area, though. Will that make them be discarded when the player leaves, or will they remain there? If they remained then I’d have some issues (for instance, you probably won’t get mugged walking down a city street in New California because there are no cities left).
Is there a way to remove them? Would it be better to have each city be a setting and have individual places in each city be an area?
I’m still early enough in story development (character creation) to make this feasible.
EDIT: Though I suppose I’ll probably go with an In Transit setting, actually, which just serves to wipe away cards and confirm where the player wants to go. edited by Kyle Willey on 11/17/2012
Asking players to spend a precious Action (and a few clicks!) to discard their hands isn’t great design practice.
A much better way to handle it: the Transient option! Any Opportunity cards with the Transient option selected will be discarded whenever the player fails to meet any of its requirements. I think that includes no longer meeting the Area requirements. It definitely includes Quality requirements.
The Transient thing looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you for pointing it out.
As far as the discarding thing, it’d be a once in a while thing (moving to a new city, switching factions [if implemented], getting hideously and totally maimed). Also, I thought you could set the action cost of certain things to 0, which would be used for those confirmation screens so people didn’t wind up stuck In Transit for a while seeing that instead of a grim description of their location. Or is that not something that works in practice?
Okay, then. I was actually considering using the Action cost thing as a replacement for death, sort of akin to how some video games from way back when it was okay to kill off the player used waking up in the hospital/morgue/cloning vat as a resource-expensive respawn. So for instance, when you get shot off a cliff courtesy of an assault VTOL annihilating the train you were on you’d have an action cost and wake up back in Tokyo.
However, this action cost thing also means that I’m going to have to change the way the codex works. Is it possible to create another Always-esque deck that will be separate on the screen from the Always deck? Since it’s not possible to use one action free storylet as a directory for the other storylets in the codex, it would make things more distinct and keep the many information-bearing cards in the storylet from bumping into the exit Codex storylet. edited by Kyle Willey on 11/17/2012
That’s still doable. But you need to get a little more creative. Have you played Fallen London? Their resolution (and ours in Zero Summer) is to send people to a “Menace state” when a Menace gets out of hand. You could do the same with “dying.” Menace states are effectively a resource and Action sink: you give players a set of Opportunity cards to play through, each one reduces the Menace (or controlling Quality, or whatever), and once it’s gone you’re dropped back into the rest of the world.
This has a couple of advantages:
Losing Actions feels lousy. When you take a bunch of Actions away from the player, you’re punishing them – in this case for “dying.” When you send them to a Menace state, you’re still eating up Actions, but you’re rewarding them for “dying” by giving them access to content they couldn’t otherwise see.
If your Menace states are contiguous with the rest of the game, you can start a questicle in the Menace state and pursue it in the rest of the game (or vice versa). I think FBG does this in Fallen London. In Zero Summer, we have a handful of questicles that start in our Menace states and can’t be pursued until you get back to the standard setting.
It’s about a hundred times more work to create a good Menace state than to just dock players’ Action pools, but it feels a thousand times better. It’s also a chance to turn a penalty into an upside. Or at least hide it in the upside.
(You might also want to ask yourself whether it’s a good idea to be penalizing players’ Actions at all. Why disincentivize players from playing your game? Why not beat up their other resources instead, thereby encouraging them to re-collect them?)
Interesting. So should I then make a Must storylet with injury conditions? That’s probably a better way to do it, since it also simulates wound accrual using a multiple failures before defeat system. That would allow some interesting possibilities, and I could customize it for each place. Also, it would probably keep people playing longer.
EDIT: Also, as you said, it provides a lot more potential for new content; depending on when you got beaten up during an mission it could be well and truly failed or it could just set you back in terms of the amount of time you’ll spend trying to get through. Plus, with a currency system and a skills system that’s kind of complex, there are great ways to do “death penalties”. edited by Kyle Willey on 11/17/2012
Kyle: re: Must cards: yes, you need one to transition players into and out of the Menace state.
(“Keep[ing] people playing longer” is one of the advantages of the Menace state, especially if – as in FL and ZS – it also knocks down a player’s BasicAbilities or whatever.)
Menace states really are a great design choice. Kudos to the FBG team for conceptualizing them.
I’m just curious, pyramid progress applies to loss as well, right? Characters are going to have a ton of skills that would take penalties upon dying, and not a whole lot of ways to rebuild them relative to their use, so if all the skills fell two whole ratings it would be absolutely brutal to characters in the late game (25-30ish).
Just to poke in - dunno if this is still relevant, but I’ve noticed that sometimes cards that can only be dealt in one area do hang around, but the area does not seem to affect you playing them. This is a weird thing because the card mouseover says you cannot play it. I don’t know if this got changed. It’s useful for me because you can have, say, a monster card that pursues you if in your hand.