Personas; displaying a Quality; triggers...

StoryNexus
1

My next wave of questions.

  1. What was that about manipulating Personas? Is that feature in or not? I’m especially interested in - devs! - having at least a &quotdummy&quot persona other than the player, to hang Qualities on without warnings to the player. It’s rather inconvenient that all variables in Story Nexus are what’s called local. Would be nice to have a separate function for globals - just a list of things I want to check for without having to make them a Circumstance, a Story Quality, an Ability and so on. It would spare me creative effort when it’s really not needed. I mean, right now if I want the system to know the player character’s had his leg crippled, I have to write up a description, several if there are severity levels, worry about what kind of Quality to make it, how to describe severity changes to the player - up and down, which is a really braintwister - and so on. With globals I wouldn’t have to tell the player almost anything. I could just put in &quotLame&quot or even 123 = 1 for myself and manipulate them like any numbers. Plus, some facts or changes in the world have nothing to do with the player character. If London is destroyed, it’s kind of strange to give him/her a &quotLondon destroyed&quot quality. Way too personal.

  2. How do I display a Quality inside a description box? Someone has answered that, I think, or not? What I want displayed specifically is not the level, 1, 2 and so on, but the &quotwordy&quot description. Related to this: is it possible to add up strings used in Quality Level descriptions? For example, if one Quality’s level 1 is &quotDamn&quot and another’s level 2 is &quotFool,&quot can I get &quotDamn Fool&quot out of them? I guess not, but this could be really valuable for all sorts of stringy stuff. On the Fallen London board, for example, I’ve posted a suggestion for a better story-writing system inside the game, where the player would pick text choices and they would be stored, then displayed in sequence to form a plot.

  3. Is there any way to trigger a Quality change without firing a storylet? What I mean is, I know how to set up a Must storylet that will go off on Quality requirements, but that’s just a way to get to that storylet from within another. What if I simply want an &quotif this then this&quot condition inside an existing storylet? E.g. if &quotAmmo&quot is 0 and &quotBayonet Attached&quot is 1, then set &quotAllow Bayonet Attack&quot to 1? The only way I can think of right now is to have a branch about bayonets and ammo with those two Qualities as prerequisites, and then say something about allowing bayonet attack, but that’s not what I want.

2

[quote=Von Prabik]My next wave of questions.

  1. What was that about manipulating Personas? Is that feature in or not? I’m especially interested in - devs! - having at least a &quotdummy&quot persona other than the player, to hang Qualities on without warnings to the player. It’s rather inconvenient that all variables in Story Nexus are what’s called local. Would be nice to have a separate function for globals - just a list of things I want to check for without having to make them a Circumstance, a Story Quality, an Ability and so on. It would spare me creative effort when it’s really not needed. I mean, right now if I want the system to know the player character’s had his leg crippled, I have to write up a description, several if there are severity levels, worry about what kind of Quality to make it, how to describe severity changes to the player - up and down, which is a really braintwister - and so on. With globals I wouldn’t have to tell the player almost anything. I could just put in &quotLame&quot or even 123 = 1 for myself and manipulate them like any numbers. Plus, some facts or changes in the world have nothing to do with the player character. If London is destroyed, it’s kind of strange to give him/her a &quotLondon destroyed&quot quality. Way too personal.

  2. How do I display a Quality inside a description box? Someone has answered that, I think, or not? What I want displayed specifically is not the level, 1, 2 and so on, but the &quotwordy&quot description. Related to this: is it possible to add up strings used in Quality Level descriptions? For example, if one Quality’s level 1 is &quotDamn&quot and another’s level 2 is &quotFool,&quot can I get &quotDamn Fool&quot out of them? I guess not, but this could be really valuable for all sorts of stringy stuff.

  3. Is there any way to trigger a Quality change without firing a storylet? What I mean is, I know how to set up a Must storylet that will go off on Quality requirements, but that’s just a way to get to that storylet from within another. What if I simply want an &quotif this then this&quot condition inside an existing storylet? E.g. if &quotAmmo&quot is 0 and &quotBayonet Attached&quot is 1, then set &quotAllow Bayonet Attack&quot to 1? The only way I can think of right now is to have a branch about bayonets and ammo with those two Qualities as prerequisites, and then say something about allowing bayonet attack, but that’s not what I want.[/quote]

[color=#e53e00]Rather than re-asking a question you suspect you’ve already had answered, go back to your post where it was answered. Please respect other posters’ time.

  1. Not possible. Qualities work as you’ve described - yes, you have to do level changes, or be happy with numbers showing. Lots of SN games have worked around this - play a few and see how.
  2. Cyberpunkdreams gave you the info for how to display them on this thread: http://community.failbettergames.com/topic20216-manipulate-strings-set-a-quality-to-eq-another.aspx
    As for stringing them together: try it. A lot of your questions are easy to resolve if you just test things - it’s far better to save forum goodwill for questions you’ve tried, and failed, to resolve.
  3. Short answer: no. Your branch idea is the normal way it is done.

A pointer on forum behaviour is this: do some trial and error before leaping straight to ask the board. [/color]
[color=#e53e00]
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[color=#e53e00]Everyone here is a volunteer/game dev who has learned through trial and error. Most have come here for help only when something is apparently unfixable. Most are concentrating on their own games, and can only help occasionally. It’ll be easier to explain things once you’ve got a grasp of the basics, and there will still be goodwill if you encounter an actually tricky problem and ask for help, rather than asking about everything as you encounter it. [/color]
edited by babelfishwars on 7/22/2015

3

I have a different model: you learn as you go along, now more, now less, and in difficult cases you ask for advice from people who’ve probably done similar things rather than build your own complicated tests only to find the basic logic was wrong. And I don’t treat goodwill as a resource. When it would give someone here pleasure to talk, he can. When it wouldn’t, then he won’t. I’m grateful to those who’ve helped, and I’ve absorbed much of the manual, but if you think my questions are so primitive they aren’t worth answering, why don’t you just let them lie instead of telling me not to ask, as if you’re contractually obligated to answer?

4

On point number 3: I’ve turned it every which way, and I think I understand why this can’t be done. SN doesn’t allow variables for Quality values. They have to be numbers, and 0 means you don’t have the Quality at all. Random distribution with [d:…] looks deceptively like a function, but it still gives you arithmetic rather than algebra, and citing another Quality with [q:…] produces 0 if that Quality hasn’t been defined yet or an integer if it has. So a standing Quality requirement is either locked-out, if it doesn’t have a positive number to pull, or it’s a definite value.

An example of how things could be otherwise:

Requirement for something:

a, where a can be defined from elsewhere as 10 Sulky Bats, 20 Searing Enigmas, 1 Alluring Accomplice… as occasion demands.
edited by Von Prabik on 7/23/2015