Overlap between Areas and Settings

I have a question about using Areas and Settings. The game I’m working on has exploration as a big part of it, but not in a linear manner where I expect the players to worry about things like turning left and right, but rather as they improve their skills they will be able to explore further into an area and unlock more stories in that area.[li]

But, also want there to be certain time phases in my game. The one I’m most concerned with at the moment is the very beginning of the story, which is semi-linear (the player makes choices to give them some starting abilities so that not every player starts out the same) and leads to an event that opens up the main story. However, I want them to be able to do some exploring in the mean time.

So if the player finds the library in the introduction, I don’t want them to find the library again once they are in the main story. My thought was to have areas like the library be set to (any) so that if they unlock something in the first part, it will still be unlocked in the second part. This would then mean that the introduction, and any content specific to it would take place in the default setting created with my world, and then make a new setting say called Part I that won’t show introductory (or default setting) content, but would have it’s own content in addition to the stuff with (Any) as the setting.

I may have answered my own question in writing that, but I was hoping for some confirmation before I put in the elbow grease, not to mention that this might help someone else struggling with a similar problem.

You could always use additional qualities to show or find content as appropriate, regardless of settings and areas. For example, if they’ve found the library, you could set a quality saying so; later in the game, the library would only been shown if that quality was not already set.

Personally, in my own game, although they’re useful, I’ve also started to find areas and settings a bit limited in what they can do, so I’ve also started keeping track of the player’s location with an additional quality.

Basing this completely on FL as I’m not too much into SN, but it sound like you could have some sort of quality such as Time passing to show introductory storylets, main-game storylets or end-game storylets and have a quality such as Discovered: The Library that unlocks the Library content?

[quote=cyberpunkdreams]You could always use additional qualities to show or find content as appropriate, regardless of settings and areas. For example, if they’ve found the library, you could set a quality saying so; later in the game, the library would only been shown if that quality was not already set.
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[li]
This was how I started out, but it didn’t seem to work. I created a quality &quotDiscovered the Library&quot which got set to 1 when the player find it. My problem may have been that if the play hadn’t found the library, I wanted the card to be in a sometimes deck as one of the possible places they might find and to not show up once the library had been found. So I created a storylet which was only supposed to show if &quotDiscovered the Library&quot was 0.

But when I play tested it, I only saw the card if I got rid of the requirement for &quotDiscover the Library&quot to be 0. (At this point I had few enough cards in the sometimes deck that I could see them all). I assumed this meant I would have to manually set to 0 all quality for places to be found when the character was first created.

You’re correct that SN does handle qualities differently internally depending on whether they’ve been set to zero or just never set - but I just tested it and it worked fine for me to have a random card with a max 0 criterion on a quality that had never been set. So I’m not sure what was going wrong for you…

One thing you might find useful as well (and apologies if you’ve already discovered this) is that if you’re trying to find out if a random card is triggering properly, the easiest way to do it is just to set it to “high” urgency temporarily. That way it’ll turn up instantly if it’s going to at all, and you don’t need to worry that you’re being unlucky with your draws.