Playtest: Pulp Project

Hello there!

I have been thinking of resuming work on my project but I would like to know if I’m going in the right direction with it.

http://pulpproject.storynexus.com

I’m trying to reproduce the feel of being in a movie like Indiana Jones or The Mummy, or in a game like the Uncharted series to some extent. At least when it comes to tone and setting. The gameplay would obviously differ.

For now, only the intro is available. It ends once you have done your daring escape from wherever you start the game :)

I’m looking for feedback on the writing, the general feel of the experience and how the gameplay works out for you.

Thank you!

On “How did you get here?” - You can see a biplan. Yourself, piloting it. And then what? So much noise and bright lights. (should be “biplane”?)

“The Broken Mirror” under “I’m a woman” Maybe it’s subdued or maybe it’s obvious, but you have an air of feminity about (should be “femininity”

Don’t miss a chance to set a QCD for zero - When I shut off the alarm it said “You’ve lost a quality: Alarm” when you could have it say something like “Finally, you’ve silenced the klaxon…” or something.

Should I be getting patrols if I shut off the alarm?

I got to the plane and ran out of actions. A bit anticlimactic since I got to the good part. I noticed most things I did didn’t take an action. Are you controlling this … so as to cause a cliffhanger, or was this just random? What is your action use strategy?

Overall not bad…I didn’t understand the alarm quality - it didn’t seem to make anything different and I could not discern additional danger when it was going off it seems like patrols should increase or something.

There are lots of choices. I wish I would have had a few of the initial choices be somewhat easier based on how I created my character…everything right off the bat seemed to be a high risk challenge. Maybe I made my character poorly, but I started just lawnmowering through the options that were available instead of picking what I would naturally be doing based on my initial choices and getting all the qualities I didn’t initially choose anyway. You’ve got what appears like a very open ended scenario - perhaps you might want to improve the qualities based on the initial choices a little more?

The writing was pretty straightforward and I would have liked a bit more of a hardboiled pulpy or noirish feel. If I were writing this I might try it in first person instead of second so you can get more of a sense of a character rather than having to tell the player “You do this…” all the time. Minor suggestion, you may have more planned.

I’m busy playtesting the WotS entries right now, but I can’t wait to have a look at this. Good choice of genres. :)

Fixed typos. Added a QCD for Alarm.

I tried to add more QCDs, but since they appear whether it goes up or down I’ll have to rethink how to describe things. For now, I’ve stuck to describing the lack of Alarm.

I have thoroughly modified the Alarm system as well as the Opportunities to, hopefully, have it make more sense. I don’t think “transient” existed back when I made this, and it’s really useful here. Hopefully it’s not too confusing when cards disappear though. Anyway, Alarm will now prevent you from progressing further until you deal with it. Some activities require more “quiet” than others.

I have also made the Patrol as a mandatory event. This should make Alarm more of a setback, though hopefully not to the point of annoyance.

The action economy was not really on my mind when I did this, to be honest. I have tried to fix this by making the whole character building no-cost. Beyond that, I think there’s always an uncontrollable part since things are random. If you keep failing at a given task, you will use more actions than others and might end up stuck until it refills.

I changed how much skill ranks you get from the character creation and lowered difficulties. A character should now be mostly efficient with his chosen aptitudes, though “active training” might still be needed for the later challenges. It should feel more natural and less “grindy” now, though.

My initial philosophy for the game was to get a high-adventure feel with daring actions and not too much risk. I also wanted players to have a larger choice of skills than what’s usually seen in Fallen London and perhaps other games on the Nexus system. This is still a proof of concept and it might turn out writing for so many skills is just not feasible in the long run, especially if it doesn’t bring more fun for the players.
Another thing is that I’d like to avoid the “skill areas” of Fallen London (Ladybones Road = Watchful). There would still be adventures and situations more oriented towards a given skill set but it is my hope that all “builds” should be able to work through all parts of the game to some extent.

As for the writing, I have to admit I’m not much of a writer and not a native speaker. I hope to make the various situations fun enough to make up for it… I will also note that I am definitely not going for a “noir” feel. Unless Indiana Jones is noir… it’s not, is it?

I have not thought of writing in the first person. I fear it might push me to impose my own thoughts on the player.

Thanks for your feedback!

Well, you’re doing an especially good job if you’re not a native speaker! I didn’t get that sense at all! You’re correct - Noir is not “pulp” and it was probably a bad suggestion.

I think your structure/concept is a good one. Since you want to allow multiple skills, the challenge is making multiple ways to solve a puzzle, with slightly different outcomes that hopefully avoid combinatorial explosion (You want to get the character to the same place via multiple routes instead of branching the plot ridiculously where it requires writing separate plot for different builds)

Ignore my “write in a different tense/person” comment - you are doing a great job. I’ll take another play and see what happens this time :)

I just went through another run so things should work. If you get stuck in limbo somehow, let me know, since I did change a few things with areas and settings.

I noticed something: some skills are definitely more useful in this intro. Actually, some are even required to finish it. I am currently unsure if this should be considered “normal” and let the player train in different skills… or if I should really thrive for a clear way out for every skill. Probably the latter.

I still have bits in my notes that I have not implemented yet which may alleviate that to some extent.

Well…I was in a plane and I got one move before I hit the barrier! Now I’m stuck with no cards. The way you can combat this is create a useable item in the player’s inventory that connects to a “restart the game” card. That way at least during initial testing your players can start over at will. See Richard’s great “Playtester’s Passkey” in the wiki for more ideas.

I have made changes which should hopefully bring you back to where you should be.

You should get a “Oops” event, maybe even two. One should bring you back to the right setting, the other to the right area. They are Must cards and should display automatically

If you don’t get anything, let me know your character name, the area name displayed in the banner and the values of your “Escaping (…)” and “Pursued (…)” qualities, if any.

For reference: back then I messed with settings because it was the only way to clear the hand of cards. Now I see there’s an exotic effect for this, so I can make things in a much simpler and cleaner way.

Now that everything’s back to a single Setting, the Debug card should also always be there, though it doesn’t do much right now, I will improve it to add refreshes and other debugging actions.
edited by leokhorn on 3/17/2013

So I went through the fixes and finished the flying the airplane section. Once again…it still kind of felt like I was lawnmowering through a group of choices that all had about the same chance of succeeding. It was kind of funny that I could “pretend to be hit” more than once. When i shot the gun you mentioned I had used up part of the clip, which made me think I needed to conserve bullets. But the next time I used it I got the exact same message, so I don’t believe I was actually measurably using bullets and just could have shot till I killed them. I didn’t catch if there was any sort of strategy to it - I don’t even remember needing to draw opportunities…but it seems like that would be the place to maneuver the plane - such as “try to get behind them” which would make me able to use the gun. “climb high enough to fake a stall” which would let me pretend to be hit…etc.

I restarted the game and chose to be influential with mind powers. I don’t remember using mind powers, but I very quickly got more than enough blueprints and parts to make a jetpack. I almost think your rooms should be opportunity cards instead of pinned cards to simulate me needing to move around the complex. Basically it feels like I’m sitting with a remote control gathering what I need.

It’s a good start though, and I’m sure it will get even better as you work on it!

Mhhh… what’s your grief here? Would you want some skills to be more appropriate than others at equal ranks? Say, Vehicles is defined as the best skill for a plane chase and such has difficulty X while all others have difficulty X+2? Or are you saying your character happened to have none of these skills and as such could use any without much “tactical” difference?

I’m trying to think of ways of making such scenes interesting but I’m not sure what would work best. I’m also not sure what players of such text games expect. Do people want to read without thinking too much about stats or do they actually want to game, think about their character build, strategies, etc…?

See my general question below. Fallen London does a lot of this. I do think it breaks immersion, but since the system doesn’t offer an easy way to randomize or go through a sequential list of different results (without cloning everything all over the place), I take it as a quirk of the medium.
That said, about this very plane sequence, would it have been better if it had been a single action thing? One choice, one result (bad or good) and then moving on to something else?

Sorry, it was just color added to the description :)

Overall, I wanted the plane sequence to be rather quick. I assume the player has spent quite some time in the air already at that point and might be in a hurry to get to something else. Plus, I couldn’t think of too many things that could happen during the chase.

From memory there’s a use to escape, then to find your stuff. Beyond that, mh… yes, it’s one of the less well served skills. Observant and Influential aren’t big during the introduction either.

Too quickly? I had a much harder build up for this in my first draft but I found it tedious, in a similar way to how you might complain the plane sequence is doing the same thing over and over :)

They were, in the first draft. I found it quickly became very frustrating to “wait for that *?!@ room to appear”.
One thing I’ve thought of though: make all rooms secret at first and have the player discover them through Opportunities. Once discovered, they appear as static cards (you know where they are, you don’t need to look for them anymore). Only risk is that someone might miss a given room simply through bad luck.

In general, I would also be interested in knowing whether any of the above critiques are specific to my project or if it’s things you have seen elsewhere (possibly in Fallen London) and have an issue with? I’m asking because some of the things you say are things I have encountered in Fallen London and have not always been fond of… but while I am trying to “fix” things in my own way, I also don’t want to make something utterly alien. Then, there is also the fact the very format of the game makes some game structures quite complicated to make (you could probably make turn-based RPG fights with it for example… but I think it would be quite painful).

leokhorn: I gave the opening a quick whirl. Wanted to let you know I’m enjoying Pulp Project so far! My only suggestion is that you might want to lower the difficulties in your opening section by several points. Everything was High Risk or Almost Impossible! for a solid twenty actions. Making the opening a gentler intro would probably increase your curb appeal.

For what it’s worth: I haven’t yet felt like I was “lawnmowering” through a list of choices. If you’re worried about that, though, you might consider using the Broad difficulty scheme. Broad challenges seem to make SN games feel more gamey. That said: I’d recommend you get feedback from a range of players before substantially altering your content. It’s been helpful to keep that in mind for Zero Summer from time to time. :)

Mhhh… what’s your grief here? Would you want some skills to be more appropriate than others at equal ranks? Say, Vehicles is defined as the best skill for a plane chase and such has difficulty X while all others have difficulty X+2? Or are you saying your character happened to have none of these skills and as such could use any without much “tactical” difference?[/quote]

Not a grief. What it felt like to me was that you had an extensive character creation process, where I chose skills that could route me different ways through the story. When I got to the story, I would be presented with four choices…and at least in my first play through it felt like all of the choices were at high risk and that choosing strong skills in character creations didn’t make a whole lot of difference. If I’m a magician who talks his way out of everything, the “Beguile the guard into opening the door” type of choice should be easier than all the rest. Since they were all of similar difficulty, I “lawnmowered” which basically means I tried every choice without really caring about how I played the character because every choice was just as viable as the others.

This may just be a matter of tweaking your creation process. Perhaps add a few more points to chosen skills so those corresponding branches that the character should be “good” at provide a visible better option. That’s role-play :)

[quote]

I’m trying to think of ways of making such scenes interesting but I’m not sure what would work best. I’m also not sure what players of such text games expect. Do people want to read without thinking too much about stats or do they actually want to game, think about their character build, strategies, etc…?[/quote]

Players want different things, and that’s what’s good about story nexus is we can offer varying shades of gameplay vs story. That is why I offer my opinion, but by no means should you take my opinion as the only one.

[quote]

See my general question below. Fallen London does a lot of this. I do think it breaks immersion, but since the system doesn’t offer an easy way to randomize or go through a sequential list of different results (without cloning everything all over the place), I take it as a quirk of the medium.
That said, about this very plane sequence, would it have been better if it had been a single action thing? One choice, one result (bad or good) and then moving on to something else?[/quote]

I think the difference is in Fallen London, the whole entire game is disconnected “fires in the desert” episodes - I tried rescuing the guy from the burning house like three times before I succeeded. It was an isolated episode carried out on one card that was drawn in separate instances after other things happened. I knew I was getting the same card, but my reaction at first was “my lots of houses catch fire here” and eventually "I feel like I’m guilty for not saving him the second time so I’m having this recurring flashback of trying to rescue him. In your story, skirmishing in an airplane is a continuous encounter over multiple cards, and having things repeat that shouldn’t repeat sticks out more - it felt strange that I could fool them in the same way twice. That card feels like it should be a rare powerful one-use thing you can do. AGain, just my opinion/impression.

[quote]

Sorry, it was just color added to the description :)

Overall, I wanted the plane sequence to be rather quick. I assume the player has spent quite some time in the air already at that point and might be in a hurry to get to something else. Plus, I couldn’t think of too many things that could happen during the chase.[/quote]

Quick is good. Quick with repetition, not so much. It makes sense that I try everything I can to win the battle - I might shoot three times and run out the clip in the gun. I might fake a stall once, then the second time they’re on to me and it shouldn’t work. Repetition should be attacking and maneuvering…I wanted to see some element of strategy involved - perhaps I need to maneuver behind the enemy planes before shooting the gun is worthwhile. Perhaps I need to be in front of the enemy planes to fake a fuel outage. Being in front and being behind enemy airships seems like it should have advantages and disadvantages that I need to weight to win the scenario. I appreciate you want it to go quick…but in a pulse-pounding “pulp” sequence, you don’t want to linger anywhere to let the story bog down. It can be extensive if I have something to do. If i’m not so involved in the choosing, it should be quick and well-written. Once again…opinion! :)

[quote]

From memory there’s a use to escape, then to find your stuff. Beyond that, mh… yes, it’s one of the less well served skills. Observant and Influential aren’t big during the introduction either.

Too quickly? I had a much harder build up for this in my first draft but I found it tedious, in a similar way to how you might complain the plane sequence is doing the same thing over and over :)[/quote]

There’s a balance between tedium and meaningful grind or puzzle solving. It’s hard to navigate, I will confess.

That’s an excellent idea…and that would let the character feel they are progressing instead of flipping the deck in solitaire.

[quote]
In general, I would also be interested in knowing whether any of the above critiques are specific to my project or if it’s things you have seen elsewhere (possibly in Fallen London) and have an issue with? I’m asking because some of the things you say are things I have encountered in Fallen London and have not always been fond of… but while I am trying to “fix” things in my own way, I also don’t want to make something utterly alien. Then, there is also the fact the very format of the game makes some game structures quite complicated to make (you could probably make turn-based RPG fights with it for example… but I think it would be quite painful).[/quote]

My comments are specific to your project, but you by no means are the only person to encounter these things. I have also, and that’s why I like discussing them. Seeing how other people do things helps my work, both with problem solving and nifty ideas that I interpret in my own way. I’ve gone “Aha!” from playing BELOW and Knightly Tales, and I’ve had other people comment that I’ve done things in my game that gave them ideas, and also made comments that made me realize I’d never do things that way again if I had the fortitude to start over.

Fallen London is not without some slight play issues, but they are the people who take advantage of the storynexus system the best. I mean - I can complain that a best-selling book has too many dependent clauses, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be rewritten - unless if the author is asking for feedback and help and they agree with my comments. Which - once again - my opinion is not the end all be all by any means. Definitely get more feedback before taking any single person’s advice to heart!

Glad to hear it!

Strange. I did give more ranks during character creation and lowered all difficulties as per Hanon’s suggestions. Any of the chosen skills should at least give a Chancy difficulty, while a skill chosen twice will yield a Moderate difficulty. At least this is how it went in my last playtest.

Considering Hanon’s new comment on this, though, it really seems I should reinforce the skill value some more.

Just checked the reference. I was not aware of this and will look into it.

Good point! This is also why I asked for more details on the existing feedback. It’s good to know why a given issue is an issue and then how many people it impacts.

As per above, this should have changed, though maybe not enough yet :/

That last bit is interesting: were you expecting unique “branches” for each type of character? While I have tried to offer choice in how you solve issues by allowing multiple skills to work, these choices have a very narrow scope. There is not really a “sub branch” with unique bits when you are Mysterious, for example. It may be interesting but may also bring its share of problems (“infinite” branching spreading resources).

There’s one specific “risk” I’m seeing here: while offering an initial choice in character building, the player would end up on rails for the rest of the game, always picking the “best-skill choice”, making things very linear and actually lacking in choice. It might still be interesting to play that way, I’m not sure.

I see what you mean. Fallen London does provide much more abstraction which helps ignoring the logical disconnects. I have definitely taken a more “zoomed in” approach here, thus the issue. I will have to think about this.

Right, repetition of generic actions, or “verbs” as they’re often called in game design, is fine, but not a repetition of description. Mhh… immediately, this makes me yearn for “random result descriptions” as a designer. Maybe it exists and I have missed it, too. Similarly, one-time-use storylets would be nice, but having to create one Status everytime seems overkill (and a pain to manage). Still, I’ll see what alternatives are available to avoid such dissonance and provide more interesting sequences.

Again, thanks for the feedback so far! It’s given me things to think about.