More Advanced Questions

StoryNexus
1

I’ve been fiddling with my world for a while and I’ve got the hang of the basics. But there’s some other stuff that doesn’t seem to be covered in the manual at all that I’m wondering if it’s even possible.

First, Fallen London had the formerly eponymous Echo Bazaar where you could sell stuff for echoes and buy stuff at extortionate prices. Is there any way to recreate this mechanic for a standard Story Nexus game? I’d like to be able to give my players the ability to sell off large quantities of Things in order to buy other Things that they need more.

Second, there’s a Menace I have that I want to trigger the standard “switch you to an altogether less pleasant Setting” trick, but only when it gets higher than a certain quality. The idea is that this quality steadily degrades if you’re careless, which makes it harder to avoid this Menace catching up to you in regular play. There’s no way to increase the quality that protects you, so you’re supposed to conserve it, or else the game will become consistently more difficult. Unfortunately, I can’t find any way to make a Must storylet trigger only when a certain Menace is higher than a certain other quality. Is this doable?

Third, is there any way to have the maximum amount of actions the player has or the time it takes for a single action to refresh be affected by events in-game? I would imagine not since that’s intimately tied to Nex purchases in a way that might be easy to bork and rob a customer by mistake, but there’s an event I’ll want in my world (pretty far into the future of its development, granted) which in narrative terms gives the protagonist about twice as much time in the day to do things in general. It’d be nice to reflect this somehow. My backup plan is to have nearly every storylet advance a certain Menace, and that Menace switches you to a Setting which exists basically for no other reason than to rob you of your actions while you find the way out of it. If this sounds terrible to you, it sounds terrible to me, too, and I’d really rather just let the player have a few more maximum actions instead if it’s at all possible.

2

“Bazaar-like functionality” is supposed to be on the roadmap for March, although… well, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a particular date. It’ll surely come, though, because they need to do it before they can move Fallen London onto the platform. In the meantime, you could have a Thing called Gold Pieces (or whatever), and have storylets which let you trade stuff for Gold Pieces and vice versa - with bulk options to address the “large quantities” point. See Maelstrom for an example of this.

Not really. If the two qualities are clamped in a small range (say neither can go above 8), then you could have 8 almost-identical Must storylets, one for each possibility. Or you could possibly make the protection quality an equippable item which reduces the Menace, though there are issues with that which were discussed on the Suggestions thread recently.

But in terms of what you really want to do - compare one quality to another - no. People keep asking for it so maybe it’ll come along.

As you predict, no, you can’t do that. I wouldn’t describe the workaround as “terrible”, but it’s certainly unsubtle, and risks being annoying unless you find a way to make it fun… You might want to have a look at Below, or (plug, plug) http://fetchtheengines.storynexus.com which both sort-of do this, but waste actions by dealing unhelpful cards into your hand. Or, you could make some things costs zero action if you are in possession of a certain quality - though unfortunately that would mean cloning branches.

[Edit to add:] Oh, or there is a way to grant the player a few extra actions, using what’s charmingly called an “exotic effect”. The coffee in Fallen London works like that. It doesn’t affect the action limit, just gives you a few actions back. Maybe you could achieve what you want to using that somehow… though note that there has been an Official Pronouncement that this feature is only to be used sparingly, because of its potential to cause unbounded server load.

Looking forward to seeing your world; it sounds like you’ll have some interesting mechanics in there.

Cheers
Richard
edited by Richard on 3/8/2013

3

I’m curious if they’d give us a way to compare the action bank as a quality…not one we could affect…but one that could fire a card on the last action saying “watch out, your actions are running out” or “wow you’re going to need to rest soon” so we could make actions a diegetic part of a world.

4

+1. I’d like that very much, primarily to stop new-to-SN players coming up against a crunching and frustrating barrier without warning.

5

[color=#009900]Chuck this on the Suggestions thread, guys. There may be a substantial piece of useful work combining this and Hanon’s clock qualities suggestion, to have a more versatile action economy, and I can see the wins. (Not any time soon though, alas!)[/color]

6

Thank you for the responses, they’ve been very helpful. I have a few more slightly more advanced questions.

First, in Fallen London there’s a few storylets that give out randomized payouts on a success (off the top of my head, when you’re fending off the rats in your apartment there’s the option to interrogate a rat to find a hoard, the contents of which vary greatly). Is there any way to do this with Story Nexus?

Second, the “exotic effects” have been mentioned, and while I won’t be needing it for a while, how exactly would I make an exotic effect that hands out a few extra actions once every 24 hours?

EDIT: Oh, and third, is there any good method of figuring out how many opportunity cards a certain area should need?
edited by MCJohnnyQuest on 3/9/2013

7

[quote=MCJohnnyQuest]Thank you for the responses, they’ve been very helpful. I have a few more slightly more advanced questions.

First, in Fallen London there’s a few storylets that give out randomized payouts on a success (off the top of my head, when you’re fending off the rats in your apartment there’s the option to interrogate a rat to find a hoard, the contents of which vary greatly). Is there any way to do this with Story Nexus?[/quote]

I don’t know if they have a special tool we don’t have to distribute from a loot list, but the actual way to do this would be to have a success result and several random rare successes which hand out different items. The last time I tried to make multiple rare successes, it seemed like the UI only wanted me to have one rare success and one rare default per branch. It didn’t used to be this way, and I don’t know if I just had a temporary glitch or it’s a bug. I believe the intention is for us to be able to create multiple rare successes; we have been told that currently there is only supposed to be one rare default result allowed but this may be changed.

I actually circumvented this by creating a Loot Deck. When I want to award a random prize, I give the player a “loot!” quality which makes the Loot Deck show up. They draw up to three cards which are set as transient, pick from three that look identical, but the result is different on each - it gives a piece of loot and takes away the “loot!” quality which makes the deck and dealt loot cards go away.

You can’t make an exotic effect. They are located in the exotic effect drop down in the result on cards. One is “refresh_actions”. When you want to refresh actions, you set this in a result on a card. I believe currently it gives 10 actions. If you want to grant extra actions every 24 hours or some period of time, the best bet is to create a living story that fires every 24-48 hours and gives an action refresh.

FB have warned that refreshes should be used sparingly in normal play as they don’t want people to play for unlimited turns. This moderates server use, and if they detect a game with inordinate activity they reserve the right to take steps. It is pretty common during playtesting to offer a toolkit branch that only playtesters have to refresh their actions for convenience. There’s a great article in the Wiki about how to create a “playtesters passkey” that does this.

It’s up to you and your game. I’ve had decks with one card. I tend to create qualities that represent regions…such as “indoors” “in the cave” so I can limit the “Flock of bats attack” to multiple cave areas and “The sun beats down on your forehead” for outdoors.

8

[quote=Hanon Ondricek]

FB have warned that refreshes should be used sparingly in normal play as they don’t want people to play for unlimited turns. This moderates server use, and if they detect a game with inordinate activity they reserve the right to take steps.[/quote]

I’m assuming a once-daily action refresh that gives you 10 actions on top of your regular 10 actions won’t be a problem, since just giving players 20 actions all the time is an option built right into the system.

[quote]

It’s up to you and your game. I’ve had decks with one card. I tend to create qualities that represent regions…such as “indoors” “in the cave” so I can limit the “Flock of bats attack” to multiple cave areas and “The sun beats down on your forehead” for outdoors.[/quote]

Okay, sure, but that doesn’t really help me figure out how many cards I need to add to a deck to try and alleviate the feeling of grind. Obviously that’s going to vary based on how long a player is expected to spend in one location, so the answer is probably going to be some kind of ratio of actions players are expected to take in an area to cards provided in that area’s deck.

9

I would also assume this.

I just don’t think there’s an answer to the question, though :-) Whether there’s a “feeling of grind” is such a subjective thing. I have a pretty low tolerance for it, but there are plenty of people who positively enjoy it, along as it delivers a reward at the end. And it depends on the style of your game… if it’s a classic D&D-type setup then there’s perhaps an expectation that you have to whack a rat 10,000 times to go up a level, whereas if it’s a flowery literary kind of thing then views might be different.

To try to be a bit more helpful… What I did, was to work backwards from the average number of times I wanted the reader to see each individual piece of text (twice, in my case, though I suspect that’s on the low side), then try to design the deck to make that happen. There’s a lot more to that than the number of cards though - I also had to take into account the number of branches, and phase the way the cards were introduced so that people would reliably see both the success and failure texts.

Cheers
Richard

10

[quote=MCJohnnyQuest][quote=Hanon Ondricek]

FB have warned that refreshes should be used sparingly in normal play as they don’t want people to play for unlimited turns. This moderates server use, and if they detect a game with inordinate activity they reserve the right to take steps.[/quote]

I’m assuming a once-daily action refresh that gives you 10 actions on top of your regular 10 actions won’t be a problem, since just giving players 20 actions all the time is an option built right into the system.

[/quote]

Well, yes, that’s probably fine…but if you only are allowing ten actions at a time, the bank is going to refresh on its own pretty quickly unless you’ve set the refresh rate to a really long period of time. Giving someone a once-per-day refresh might be superfluous. In Fallen London, I get a candle of ten actions that refreshes one every 7-10 minutes. So I can play a full hand of actions and come back an hour and a half later and play another round. There’s no reason you couldn’t do this anyway if you really want…and I guess since the living story emails or twitters the player that they have new actions you’re keeping the game fresh in their mind by doing so. Depending on how long and engaging your game is, I might get weary of the game pinging me every day or every other day and end up muting the world if it did that all the time after I was done playing.

Personally I think ten actions per day on a game that isn’t FL is a bit spare, especially if your narrative has any sort of continuous thrust and doesn’t go for a similar “fires in the desert” approach. My experience with user created games is that if they have a really short action bank and don’t get-up-and-go in some way in that first round of play I’m not coming back for a second round. But I’m picky. I didn’t even like Fallen London for this reason for the longest time, and they are doing it as well as it can be done.

Some games do remedy this by refreshing you at the beginning till you get through the prologue, but I think you need very skillfully written content to play in such tiny bursts. If I’m in the middle of a story beat and I run out of turns, the cliffhanger is going to frustrate me rather than entice me. I’m of course not suggesting your content isn’t skillfully written, but that’s just my experience - if I only get ten turns at a time, and I’m not coming back for a day, I want a complete story beat on every single card. That may be what you’re intending, but I’m the complete opposite - My game is cards ahoy and you couldn’t manage to open your eyes and step out of bed within ten turns, so take this with all requisite grains of salt.

[/quote]

[quote][quote]

It’s up to you and your game. I’ve had decks with one card. I tend to create qualities that represent regions…such as “indoors” “in the cave” so I can limit the “Flock of bats attack” to multiple cave areas and “The sun beats down on your forehead” for outdoors.[/quote]

Okay, sure, but that doesn’t really help me figure out how many cards I need to add to a deck to try and alleviate the feeling of grind. Obviously that’s going to vary based on how long a player is expected to spend in one location, so the answer is probably going to be some kind of ratio of actions players are expected to take in an area to cards provided in that area’s deck.[/quote]

Well, it’s hard to answer your question because all games are designed differently. It depends on what you want the player to accomplish on any given storylet. You could write a perfectly brilliant game in one area with only ten cards with lots of branch manipulation. Cabinet Noir is an entire game with only 60 cards in total. Many games will use only one card for their prologue and make the character keep drawing it and changing it. A different creator could do the same with ten different cards. I will say my only real personal expectation for games where I’m not in a prologue and not in a special situation is that when I draw to a blank hand I should get three cards. I am also disappointed when drawing multiple times always gets me the same three cards (once again, without good reason.)

I apologize if it seems Richard and I are both being pedantic, but it’s the same thing when writers ask “How long should my story be?” The answer is always “As long as it takes to get to the end.”