New difficulty levels

Fallen London
81

I’m also incredibly unhappy with the new difficulty system, to the point where it will be a deal-breaker for me if it’s not overhauled. It just doesn’t scale well to higher difficulties at all, and the problem is only going to get worse as more content is developed and stat caps rise. For clarity, here’s how it works (from the reference link). Let’s say you have a Watchful challenge. That challenge has a difficulty number - say 20. Under the old system, that meant someone with Watchful 20 would have a 50-50 chance of passing or failing. Each extra point over 20 raises your chance of passing by 10%, to a maximum of 100% at 25. Each point under 20 lowers your chance of failing by 10%, to a minimum of 10% at 16.

Under the new system, there are three differences. The first one is that the base chance of success - with Watchful exactly equal to the difficulty of the test - is 60% rather than 50%. The second one is the important one - that instead of each additional point of Watchful raising your success chance by 10%, it raises your success chance by (60/[difficulty])% - here 3% (assuming a difficulty scaler of 60% which is default). The same goes for Watchful scores less than 20 - each point under 20 reduces your success chance by 3%. The third one is much less important - the minimum success chance is now 1% rather than 10%.

So at Watchful 20, the new system is still somewhat similar to the old one. Let’s see what happens with a Watchful test at difficulty 100 - that is, a test where Watchful 100 gives you a 60% chance of passing. Here gaining a point of Watchful makes you only (60/100) = 0.6% more likely to succeed. So to reach a 100% success chance, you need Watchful 167. And someone with Watchful 60 would still have a 36% success chance. Since success chance is displayed only to the nearest 1%, gaining one point of Watchful - something that generally takes 20-50 actions - may have no visible effect on your chances at all. In summary, the problems with the new system are as follows:

  • At high levels, gaining stat points becomes almost meaningless. Under the old system, after gaining a point in a stat was always a big deal - it meant that the storylets you were doing became significantly easier. Under the new system, there may literally be no visible difference. It takes a lot of the sense of progress when tests don’t become noticeably easier as you level up.

  • As a corollary, stat-boosting items become almost worthless. Paying 450 echoes for a Bengal Tigress makes a certain amount of sense when +4 Dangerous translates to a 40% higher chance of success. It makes no sense at all when +4 Dangerous translates to a 1.8% higher chance of success (at difficulty 130).

  • Many, many storylets and opportunity cards currently vanish when the relevant stat gets too high (more than 10 points over the unlock threshold seems to be the norm for storylets, about 20 points for cards). When having 10 points more in the stat made the storylet trivial, that made sense. Now it means that (at difficulty 50) it’s impossible to ever get the storylet above a 74% success chance.

  • Narratively, the game to this point has been built around the idea that a Watchful 130 character can run rings around a Watchful 70 character intellectually. High level characters get to do awesome things that low level characters wouldn’t be capable of. A Watchful 130 character has a 60% chance of passing a test with difficulty 130. A Watchful 70 character has a 32% chance. This is not a large difference, and it completely breaks the idea that a Watchful 130 character is significantly brighter than a Watchful 70 one.

  • As stat caps get higher, test difficulties will get higher and so stats will have even less impact.

  • As other people have pointed out, an inability to be certain of success means far more menaces and far more gear-swapping, both of which are annoying to deal with.

I understand the idea that lower-level content shouldn’t be completely trivial for higher-level players, and high-level content shouldn’t be completely impossible for lower-level players, and I’m not against it, but this specific implementation is badly broken and tuning it won’t help. No matter what you set the difficulty scaling to, as long as you’re using the broad system as you’ve defined it, stats are either going to matter far too much at low levels or far too little at high levels. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing it. I am a mathematician (or at least a PhD student) IRL and will be happy to look at the problem in more detail if you like, but as a first attempt, why not use a bell curve? When someone takes a test, generate a normally distributed random variable X with mean whatever the test difficulty is and standard deviation 10, and say a player passes it if their quality is greater than or equal to X. This would give success chances looking like the following at difficulty 100:

Watchful 70 -> 0.13% chance
Watchful 80 -> 2.28% chance
Watchful 90 -> 15.9% chance
Watchful 95 -> 30.9% chance
Watchful 99 -> 46.0% chance
Watchful 100 -> 50% chance
Watchful 101 -> 54.0% chance
Watchful 105 -> 69.1% chance
Watchful 110 -> 84.1% chance
Watchful 120 -> 97.8% chance
Watchful 130 -> 99.87% chance

And likewise at difficulty 50:

Watchful 20 → 0.13% chance
…
Watchful 49 → 46.0% chance
Watchful 50 → 50% chance
Watchful 51 → 54.0% chance
…
Watchful 80 → 99.87% chance

As you can see, the result is that individual stat points matter far more if you’re close to the difficulty level than if you’re a long way away from it, and stats don’t become less important as the game progresses. You can lower the standard deviation to make stat changes close to the difficulty level matter more and raise it to make them matter less - for example, with standard deviation 15 rather than 10, success chances at difficulty 100 become:

Watchful 55 -> 0.13% chance
Watchful 70 -> 2.28% chance
Watchful 85 -> 15.9% chance
Watchful 90 -> 25.3% chance
Watchful 95 -> 37.9% chance
Watchful 99 -> 47.3% chance
Watchful 100 -> 50% chance
Watchful 101 -> 52.7% chance
Watchful 105 -> 63.1% chance
Watchful 110 -> 74.8% chance
Watchful 115 -> 84.1% chance
Watchful 130 -> 97.8% chance
Watchful 145 -> 99.9% chance

This approach would mean that low level players do have a chance at higher-level content, and failure would be a possibility for higher level players, but individual stat points gained or lost would still give a meaningful boost to success chances in high difficulty tests and a player with higher stats is dramatically better - not just slightly better - than someone with lower stats. It would also mitigate the need for gear swapping, since the further someone is over the difficulty level the less individual stat points matter. You’d still need to make low-level storylets stay visible for longer and make either reducing menaces or getting second chances easier, but it would be a dramatic improvement.

If you don’t have much mathematical background, this approach might sound complicated, but it’s actually very easy (read: a few lines of code) to do using standard library functions. All you need is the ability to generate random numbers, which you already do, and the ability to calculate erf, which almost any language has as standard in its libraries. (And if it doesn’t it’s not that hard to write your own.) I’ll be very happy to give more details if you’d like. I’d also be happy to work up something different if you feel this approach leaves something to be desired - personally I’d rather have stats matter even more when close to the test difficulty without quite such a sharp drop-off as you get further away. I enjoy the game a great deal, I just really do feel this difficulty scaling is disastrous as it stands.

God I hope someone reads this. :)

82

Quick shot at a better version: take the cdf of X to be normal with mean [difficulty] and standard deviation 4, then dilate it by a factor of 5 after reaching difficulty +/- 5. That would give you a roughly 90% chance of success at difficulty + 5, then slow down dramatically to give you a 98.8% chance at difficulty + 25. and a 99.94% chance at difficulty + 45. Likewise for the failures.

83

I guess I play really differently, and I like the randomness that the game allows. I have aims and stories I actively pursue, but I like to see how the story plays out, knowing I’m not the author of my own destiny.

84

Totally agree with you, Tesuji.
Allow me to make a broad generalization: Players do NOT like it when they are penalized for a failure that is completely out of their hands, and that is EXACTLY what is happening in this new system change. Or, to put it more simply: luck-based challenges should not increase Menace.
Yes, I realize there are exceptions to the rule; when it’s made clear to the player that a specific action may have negative consequences, then obviously making those choices is a deliberate gamble that the player chooses to take. However, in Fallen London, actions that increase Menaces upon failure (or, worse yet, that have permanent story consequences in unrepeatable storylets or unrepeatable bronze cards) are a common, even iconic part of the game experience, and they are, for the most part, unlabeled. Under the old system, players were given a clear choice: they could grind for days until they reached a point where they had a Straightforward challenge, or else they could take a risk and try to complete the challenge with lower stats. The new system makes this completely unreasonable; under the old system, a Level 20 challenge was Straightforward at ~24 in the quality, while the new system makes Straightforward level to be 28. That’s not so bad…but now, move up to a Level 50 challenge, which would have been Straightforward at 54…and now is not Straightforward until ~72. That’s insane. And keep in mind, with the vast amount of content locked behind the PoSI stat wall, these are problems that NEW players are going to have to deal with, not just players who are already capped. (I myself have been playing just over a week, and found the old system a bit grind-y for my tastes.

This, of course, does not even consider the consequences of failure. I am absolutely terrified of gaining Menace, because I don’t want to lose the cards in my hand that I’m grinding to be able to complete. This is not a good thing; I’m not saying that Menace should have no consequences, but if I’m supposed to take risks for the fun of it, the consequences should not be overly severe, especially when failure is supposed to be a major element. I’m going to make another generalization: People don’t like taking chances when there are permanent consequences. How many people do you know who would run across a busy street because someone told them they had a 70% chance of making it across alive? People are more willing to take risks in games, where the consequences are non-permanent (at least in most cases); when the ability to just turn the system off and try again is removed, dying becomes scarier, and thus players take fewer risks.

Yes, I realize that player failure is a good thing for Failbetter Games; it keeps players in Fallen London longer, which increases ad revenue, as well as frustrating them, encouraging them to spend money on Nex. But this change, which dramatically increases failure, is not a good thing; it’s a blatant Skinner Box tactic that implies disrespect, however unintentional, towards their players. It’s a step in the FarmVille direction, focusing on the players as a source of income, rather than a source of loyal devotion and artistic feedback–or to put it another way, it’s a step toward making money rather than making story. From what I’ve read, this is absolutely not Failbetter Games’ intention, and so this change represents a step away from the company’s ideals.

So what is the solution? There are several: reverting to the old system (which, honestly, is not the best idea, based on FL’s style philosophy), adjusting the odds to be more in the player’s favor (fareseries has a GREAT solution, one I whole-heartedly support), and, most importantly, making the penalties for failure less severe. Of the three, this last one is most important, as it is most intimately linked with one of Fallen London’s most important concepts: that although one must live with their failures, they can also learn from them. From what I’ve seen of the game, this is a key theme of the setting, and it should be reflected in gameplay.

EDIT:

While that’s a fair opinion, I don’t need to play games to experience that sense of not being the author of my own destiny; real life is that way, as is virtually every form of noninteractive narrative (movies, books, tv shows, etc.). I play games BECAUSE I want to be in control of my character’s destiny. ;)
edited by Flipz on 2/14/2013

85

some consequences broad difficulties (I was bored)

Summary:
farming of anything takes a big hit (as second chances are ruled out)
Polythreme has been nerfed

farming is self-explanatory as a straightforward challenge may go from 100% to 80% for example

Explaining Polythreme will require some statistics but first a little background

I recently was able to get both Shadowy and Persuasive to 125 or better and decided I was going to get a room in the Lofty Tower at all costs by grinding Bazaar Permits. In order to do this you use opportunity cards and with any left over actions can get 12 romantic notions per shadowy attempt. 9 out of 10 successes are needed with your drawn opportunity cards to collect 2 permits. The most common tactic is to use the market card (50% or so) until failing once and only use the Zailor’s card (previously 100% with 125 persuasive) for the rest to achieve 13 Fascinating and collect the permits. This is now made next to impossible by the broad difficulty mechanic as I will further explain.

Broad difficulty works like this:[color=#ffffff] [/color][color=#ffffff]QualityLevel / DifficultyLevel * (DifficultyScaler%[/color] ) where default difficulty scaler is .6 [color=#ffffff]It has now been stated that .6 is not being used. Instead a larger number is in place. This skews the numbers below, and not in a good way. Using .6 instead of whatever it is now will increase breakeven significantly past 144 making the promenade a positively worthless method of collecting permits. It will be much better to simply grind romantic notions.[/color]

through some experimenting I believe the Zailor’s card has a difficulty level of 105. (I suspect the whole of the island is 105)
This creates a chance of success of
60% at 105
75% at 130
90% at 156
95% at 165
98% at 170
99% at 172

For the sake of the initial argument let’s assume you stop using the market card because this would lower your chances of success dramatically.

You must now succeed in 9 of your 10 attempts.

In probability terms there are 11 possible ways of doing this (succeeding on all 10 or failing once in each of those 10 spots)

In using 75% as your success rate (skill of 130)

The chances of hitting 9/10 or 10/10 successes are (.75^9 x .25) x 9 + .75^10 = 22.5%

In order to reach 13 Fascinating it will take four or five full attempts (although 12 Fascinating will still yield intriguing gossip)

The failure rate is high, but in this case I’m interested in the permits. Would it be better just to farm romantic notions? At this point it should be noted that within the equivalent Shadowy the success rate is also 75% If I include the cost of conversions up to bazaar permits I can make a direct comparison

134 (76% skill success) yields 13 Fascinating 33% of your runs which comes to 36 actions which is more than you would spend simply farming romantic notions

144 (83%) appears to be the breakeven point at about 29 actions for 2 permits

147 (85%) will yield success 50% of the time

165 (95%) will bring you back to about 13 actions for 2 permits

What does all this mean? It will take me quite a bit longer to get my lodgings in the Lofty Tower.
edited by DBHolder on 2/15/2013
edited by DBHolder on 2/15/2013

86

I’m definitely unhappy with the new difficulty changes, mostly because you’re more likely to get penalised for failure at high levels half the time (since there’s just a wide expanse of MODEST and then an insane amount of leveling before it becomes straightforward, ever) and because purchasing booster items at the Bazaar just seems…pointless. It’s really not well-implemented, imo, and it means that a lot of things are basically luck-based challenges now, which is incredibly annoying (THE FIDGETING WRITER STORYLINE IS BAD ENOUGH) and definitely might be a deal-breaker for me if it’s not fixed. :/

87

Has anyone visited A Slow Boat recently to see if they adjusted the difficulties for this change? (The steps had been staggered such that you could never do better than “modest”- as soon as reached a level that could be low-risk, that storylet locked and the next unlocked.) If not, then the best storylet to attempt may no longer be the best or second-best you can access, and a higher natural Watchful could become a disadvantage.

88

…so basically what Failbetter did was make it much more difficult to get something straightforward that I effectively spent 105 Fate on (option in the Rubbery Pupil storylet). Something that will probably consume expensive CP even upon a failure. The idea behind the change is good, but the implementation just doesn’t seem right. I like knowing that grinding stats will get me somewhere in a significant way, knowing that I have the option to buy equipment to improve my chances meaningfully. Now it seems as though none of that matters. Is there really no chance for this to change? No chance for more weight to be given to the value of stats while not completely barring players with lower levels from trying? I’m not entirely sure I can put up with this new system forever.

Edit: I apologize if I’m being too negative, but I’m just sitting here feeling like the rug has been pulled out beneath my feet. This just changes so much, and it’s upsetting me. I say this as someone who normally likes change, even drastic change. I hope that a reasonable compromise may be made so that I do not have to raise my Persuasive to something like 170 whereas before it was just a few levels away.
edited by Delmar Tramontane on 2/15/2013

89

A bell curve has its advantages, but I’m not even sure that the best distribution for this sort of thing is a symmetrical one.

Take, for example, a DL 130 storylet. Under the old system, this storylet is largely irrelevant to anyone with a modified stat < 130 (if we want to be generous, maybe 128). There’s also no chance of failure with a modified stat of 135+.

For a DL 130 storylet, the new system takes the 50% to 60% chance that used to cover 130-131 and stretches it over 93-130 (a stat of 55 is now equivalent to an old-system 128 for this storylet). On the other hand, you now need to reach 185 to get the same chance that a 135 stat character used to have.

I can see how the first issue is a problem, since it means that content for higher-level players is irrelevant to lower-level ones. Stretching the 0 to 60% curve over more levels increases the potential audience, which is probably a good thing. (To avoid creating other problems, you need to add in floors to unlock content, but the game largely already has them in place, so not much extra work.)

I’m not sure the second issue is a problem, or that “solving” it makes the game better. I guess this comes down to designer intent. If the designers think that a significant problem with the game is that players don’t suffer enough random failures and that there aren’t enough incentives to micromanage equipment, well, then I guess this takes care of that problem. That’s not my perception, but then it’s also not my game.

Personally, I think the better solution would be to use a hybrid system: If Character’s Quality is less than the Difficulty Level, have a slow increase from 0 to 60% over X levels; if Character’s Quality is greater than the Difficulty Level, have a rapid increase from 60 to 100% over Y levels. Seems like the best of both worlds to me.

90

Yeah, I’m not crazy about making guaranteed success dramatically harder either, but they’ve specifically said they want to make lower-level content non-trivial for higher-level characters. Within that framework, I’d much rather they do things in a way that doesn’t render incremental stat gains almost irrelevant and doesn’t force everyone to juggle their gear every ten seconds.

91

The new difficulty settings are rather distressing. At first I thought there was a bug, and that the difficulty of tests wasn’t changing when I swapped equipped items. But no, it turned out the percentage changed, but equipping 27 points of items still didn’t push me out of the “Modest” range for the challenge. = ( It’s very disappointing that things I used to be able to do flawlessly I will now fail at about a third of the time. Even if the new stat cap will let me train up another 10 points that will probably only get me a few more percentage points. I liked it better when all of my training and hard-earned equipment seemed more worthwhile.

92

Wow. OK, relative newcomer here (playing for maybe 2 months? stats ~80ish) but this shift combined with the UI changes - well, I see above that I should not be rude :). The balance before - choose to wait a reasonable amount of time for 100% versus try now but risk failure - felt right. The current balance does not. Which makes me sad: put me in the camp of those who bought a BIG chunk of fate, expected to do so again at some point but would not do so under current game-rules.

[Alexis, others have said it better than I; really I would just be sad if this pleasure lost its joy of tangible progress and perceived fairness. I would get a lot more work done, though, which I guess is good…]

93

I can’t get into the other StoryNexus games at all, really. They just don’t grab me. The travel and inventory system of Fallen London is part of the difference. Making all of the stat boosting items I’ve collecting basically meaningless is maddening. I went from 151 Persuasive to 110 Persuasive and my chances of success only went down by 20%; what’s the point in getting items at this point? I really hope that by tuning you mean overhauling the entire game to balance around the new paradigm.

94

I’m going to miss straightforward challenges on content I’ve done thousands of times already. Might not even continue my Overgoat grind, given how much less valuable it is compared to the time it takes to acquire one. I guess I could use it for scrap grinding, but eh. I hope this tuning can find a compromise between what the users can deal with and what Failbetter wants. I don’t think the users can deal with it as it stands, given the amount of complaints in this thread. Not exactly a sizable quantity of the number of players, but unless a poll goes out in the game itself it might be a bit difficult to determine whether it’s a majority or minority who are very displeased with this change. As for me personally, I’m unsure of where I stand. On one hand, challenges that were once almost impossible or high risk on my other account are currently over 50% likely to succeed. On the other hand, the range at higher levels is too wide for my liking. Especially if there are going to be situations in which you may only attempt something once.

To be honest I’m significantly more upset by the display issues involving luck challenges not being fixed yet. I know that CTRL F5 can fix it temporarily, but this is just tedious beyond belief.
edited by Sara Hysaro on 2/15/2013

95

I don’t see the point in increasing stat caps with something like this in place. At a certain point you start running into difficulty levels being high enough that you’ll have to grind for months to get the difficulty down to something reasonable.

96

I don’t mind juggling gear. I like getting use out of the items I’ve worked so hard for. But as others have said, it’s aggravating and unfun when that “use” is only a few percentage points better of a chance. Count me in with those who think this change is a seriously bad idea.

97

I’ve just had a thought… I really, REALLY hope this doesn’t apply to challenges using other qualities, like casing…

98

Judging by some of the challenges in Wolfstack Docks, those running battle storylets use the old narrow 1pt=10% system. Thankfully.

99

[color=#009900]Hi all[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]I can’t respond point by point, but here’s a giant post to cover the basics.[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]Firstly, we’re in transition. The situation now is not what it will be in a week or six months. We’ll be [/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]- making second chance use optional[/color]
[color=#009900]- adding new items[/color]
[color=#009900]- adding advanced Professions and other character-build choices[/color]
[color=#009900]- increasing the bonuses of existing items[/color]
[color=#009900]- or allowing upgrade options as with the ravens[/color]
[color=#009900]- changing existing content[/color]
[color=#009900]- adding new content[/color]
[color=#009900]- introducing higher-tier rewards.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]And this will go on for as long as FL continues - years, I hope. This change gives us room to grow. It allows us to make rewards meaningful again, it allows us to extend content lifespan, it allows us to build minisystems like the Heist content without resorting to Luck checks. The content lifespan in particular is a really big deal, given my own sharply limited resource and the near-infinite appetite for content.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]Second, thank you for your feedback, and not just in a passive-aggressive fsck-you corporate way. It’s not a surprise that some people are upset - that always happens with rebalances (some people may remember the house catching fire when we introduced variable cp rewards for challenges way back when). But it is useful to realise that we may need to tweak the challenge band descriptions so people can see the needle move better, and it is useful for people to point out bits of content where we may not have accounted for consequences (so e.g. now I have to go check on the Boatman).[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]Thirdly, the mechanic itself. It has to be intuitively comprehensible to people who aren’t especially mathematically sophisticated, because those people are not only most of our audience, but especially most of our StoryNexus creators. There are people who are both fine writers and good mathematicians, but they’re thin on the ground, and SN was intended to support creators who are primarily writers, not coders. Honestly, this one pushes the envelope on that requirement as it is.[/color]
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[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]Some other points.[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]“Many, many storylets and opportunity cards currently vanish when the relevant stat gets too high” ← You may have noticed we’re gradually removing this: as we rework content, it’ll gradually disappear. It’s a leftover from a bygone age, and it was never the best solution.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]Default difficulty scaler: actually, to ease transition pain, this is set higher than normal, so everyone’s chances of success are better than 60% at parity right now.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]“It’s a step in the FarmVille direction, focusing on the players as a source of income, rather than a source of loyal devotion and artistic feedback–or to put it another way, it’s a step toward making money rather than making story.” (1) You know I think someone has accused us of being Zynga, and called us crassly commercial, every time we’ve made a major change. And yet here we are, four years on, less like Farmville than ever, and still a tiny indie company with, I believe, the largest quantity of free content in terms of number of words available for, perhaps, any game ever. (2) Loyal devotion plus artistic feedback plus £2.50 will get you a cup of coffee. If I had relied on loyal devotion and artistic feedback, the game would have ceased to exist c. March 2010. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)] I am glad and grateful that people love our content enough to pay for it, and I’m not embarrassed about asking people to pay.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]“there are a lot of storylets that seem to have the assumption that, unless you’re a gambler, you just flat-out shouldn’t be playing them until you hit the 100% success point.” If you mean by ‘seem to have the assumption’ that this was our assumption when writing content, no this isn’t the case. Particularly risk-averse players (who are, obviously, the people upset by this) do the sums and do that, but the most popular choice of balance on the way up is to start repeated action at a 60-70% chance of success.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]“I really, REALLY hope this doesn’t apply to challenges using other qualities, like casing…” No, it doesn’t, and I have no plans to make that happen.[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]"Narratively, the game to this point has been built around the idea that a Watchful 130 character can run rings around a Watchful 70 character intellectually. " As the guy who built the game, I have to say, this was not what I built it around, narratively. :-) It’s just an unfortunate artefact of an early design decision when I never knew if the game would last a whole year. Fallen London characters are flawed legends who achieve wonders but can always fail; an FL veteran is scarred, canny and experienced, but they can never relax.[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]–[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]tl;dr: Trust us a little longer. We’ve been at this for almost four years now and we never, ever do a mechanics change lightly - we don’t like upsetting players, but even without that, it takes substantial time and effort away from other things. This is short-term pain for long-term gain.[/color]
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[color=#009900]EDIT: moved a misplaced sentence and acted to soothe the bad-words filter.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 2/15/2013

100

Thank you for the detailed response - a few points:

  • Making items dramatically more powerful and adding advanced professions (which would presumably have some form of stat training) will somewhat mitigate the problem of progress. But ultimately you’ll still run into the same problem - unless you’re really shaking things up, the primary form of advancement will still be through experience. And advancement through experience will always have the same problem - at high levels, it takes 25-50 actions to gain a level in a quality. As the game goes on, test difficulties get higher, and a single level becomes progressively less meaningful, that fact doesn’t change at all. So by level 100, where under Narrow you had to put in 25-50 actions to get an extra point in the quality and a +10% chance of success boost, under Broad you need to put in 425-850 actions to get an extra 17 points in the quality for that same 10% boost! Even if you are shaking things up that much, so that the primary source of advancement does become new gear, it would be a huge change in tone narratively - from doing awesome things because you’ve learned and grown to doing awesome things because you bought some awesome gear.

  • As for higher-level characters versus lower-level characters, I wasn’t trying to say that high-level character shouldn’t be able to fail at low-level tasks. What I was trying to get at was this: a character with Persuasive 60 has only just entered high society. A character with Persuasive 110 may feel that they have “done” the Empress’ Court. Narratively, the former character might be capable of doing anything the latter character can do given sufficient luck, but there’s a vast gulf of experience separating them - it might be possible, but it certainly shouldn’t be likely. So when the mechanical difference between the two, in a difficulty 100 skill check, comes down to one having a 36% chance at passing to the other’s 66% chance, it feels incredibly wrong.

  • If mathematical sophistication is a concern, you could get a similar effect without using any scary phrases like “normal distribution” by giving people the ability to patch Narrow distributions together. Something like this: if your quality is equal to the difficulty, you have a 50% success chance. Each additional point gives you 5% extra success chance until you hit 90%. From there, each additional point gives you 0.5% extra until you hit 100. That would give you a clear 56 points of difference between 0% and 100% success chance, while still making individual stat increases meaningful. I’d even call it simpler than Broad difficulty in terms of visualising how it works. (In any case, I’m not advocating removing Broad difficulty from StoryNexus altogether - only introducing a new Focused difficulty for use with Fallen London.)

  • I genuinely don’t think this can be compared to past design-change drama. The worst case when introducing variable cp rewards was accidentally turning the game into a grindfest (which didn’t happen). This, on the other hand, is gameplay that impacts on story. Not the text of the storylets, but the entire wider story of a character over months or years of gameplay. Think about the Seeking Mr. Eaten’s Name content - there’s a reason so few people keep pursuing it, and that reason is that people value their characters. They don’t want their stories to end with… whatever happens to people who find the Name, and that’s because they care about the wider story. And the worst case scenario for Broad difficulty is that it could change that.