I’m gonna go ahead and spitball a lab rework. I have zero hopes of FBG actually using any of it, but it’s fun to armchair game design.
I’ve done a fair bit of laboratory research irl, and I find the way research works in FL to be completely unrepresentative of that experience. I’m never waiting for opportunities to work with colleages or with particularly interesting pieces of equipment. I always have everything set up beforehand, and then the process of lab work is just a grind until I’m done. I think this experience is actually something FL is equipped to handle well. If anything, "grind until done" is the quintessential FL experience.
If it were up to me to redesign the lab, I’d do my best to recreate the experience of real research, which largely consists of two parts: first you set up everything you need, and then you grind until you’re done. The better your equipment, your knowledge and your team, the more efficient that grind is. If a particular sample is going to be useful, you know I’m going to have it next to me always. That is to say, it really bothers me that, for instance, during amphibian research I can only study my occular toadbeast when it shows up in my hand and also when the Airs of London are right. Why wouldn’t I have my frog by my side always, ready to study?
With this in mind. I would rework the lab by introducing a single new quality: Lab Efficiency. Lab efficiency would be calculated at the start of each experiment based on your equipment quality, your assistants, your skills and your possession of relevant items. For example, if doing rubbery-related research, I would add the level of lab equipment, the level of Shapeling Arts, a bonus for each assistant (better assistants giving better bonus and assistants which are particularly suited to the task giving an extra) and then another series of bonuses if the player has a fluke-core, a rubbery dragon, a pulsating amber and/or a perpetually festive rubbery friend (These are the current options in the Shapeling Focus card). There would also be penalties for the sum of your levels of all main menaces and a big penalty for disgruntlement among the students (maybe scale it quadratically).
Once all these calculations are done under the hood, you have a single number that represents how well-equipped for this particular experiment your lab is. That number is the amount of research you get from a single storylet in the lab simply called "do research", which is a broad watchful challenge whose difficulty rating varies by experiment (which, I think, makes more sense than the current system where all experiments are equally hard).
A failure in this check would yield less research and also add a few CP of a quality called "mishaps at the lab". Once Mishaps at the Lab reaches a certain level, it autofires a Complication storylet which functions similarly to the Bundle of Oddities in that you roll a value that randomly decides what went wrong. Maybe equipment failure caused you wounds. Maybe a specimen got out and wounded someone, raising nightmares and suspicion. Maybe some of the research was lost, or turned parabolan. Naturally, you’d have options of using resources to mitigate the damage, or if you have students at the max level, you could get them to handle it in exchange for disgruntlement.
Instead of students leveling up randomly when they help out, they would level up at the end of the experiment, adding disgruntlement if at max level (This, I feel, makes a lot more sense).
Of course, there’s one big drawback with this system: We’d lose all the delightful flavor text. The admittedly shoehorned solution I’d have is to add all that flavor text into the main "do research" storylet as 0-cost branches. The description of these storylets would also tell you how much this item or quality adds to your Lab Efficiency, and locked options would give hints to the player of how they might improve it.
Under this system, the lab would become about exploring London and managing your team so that you are best-equipped to research whatever you want to research. Increasing your MAGCATS stats would have tangible consequences in the form of increasing lab efficiency for relevant experiments. As an aside, the broad watchful challenge at the center of it all would be more interesting than it seems, because the gains from it would potentially be affected by MAGCATS and so it might be worth it to equip more Artisan of the Red Science even if it hurts Watchful a little.
Obviously it’s not gonna be done, but I think this would be a neat system that we haven’t really seen implemented anywhere. I like the idea of having an activity where making investments and having a wide variety of cool items is the key to improving efficiency. I guess this is part of why I really like the idea of paying a dividend to the shareholders.
edited by NotaWalrus on 1/29/2021