A natural 250 is impossible. One can only get 15 Notability.
Unless there has been some drastic change.
So does this change mean that we are now 100% committed to the concept of "opposing quirks"? That is to say that having one quirk high level excludes you from having another because it would demonstrate "inconsistency"?
Because that does seem a little weird to me to be honest. Especially since a lot of the early mentions of quirks were like "how can an individual be both magnanimous -and- heartless, or daring and subtle? Simple people are complex beings with many facets and attributes. A person who is generous in some situations may be heartless in others, and your quirks reflect this." It’s a bit of a drastic change in message and direction.
edited by NiteBrite on 7/19/2015
I don’t think this is ending diametrically opposed Quirks. I have Austere at 9 despite my Hedonism, for example.
I could have it at 10 if I wasn’t frightened to death of losing half my Hedonism if I accidentally went into the Tomb Colonies.
But I think it’s having one Quirk very high that makes getting the opposing Quirk equally high, difficult. So you can have Hedonism at 15 and Austere at 10, but having both at 15 should be incredibly difficult.
I don’t think they’re making it impossible, but more difficult.
Plus, I like the idea that there aren’t repeatable actions that boost up your Quirks. Your high Quirks are the results of consistent in-character decision making. So if I make, for instance, consistently Melancholy choices in all storylets, it isn’t as special if someone else can come along, play a repeatable storylet that afternoon and get an equal amount of Melancholy.
Quirks should be special, and I think that’s where this is headed.
Because no one should have to spend months worth of actions just to get a Quirk for in-character reasons…
…like I did.
I’m not sure why daring and subtle are necessarily opposed. Subtle and FORCEFUL, that I get.
I’ve echoed the results from the code ring, if anyone’s interested.
[quote=Nigel Overstreet]But I think it’s having one Quirk very high that makes getting the opposing Quirk equally high, difficult. So you can have Hedonism at 15 and Austere at 10, but having both at 15 should be incredibly difficult.
I don’t think they’re making it impossible, but more difficult…[/quote]
[color=#009900]This is the case. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]We want Quirks to be primarily a reflection of player choice, and at some point, choices become about mutual exclusivity. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]People are complicated, but if you can subvert the choice between Magnanimity and Heartlessness by doing both, then that undermines the drama in the choice.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]This is always going to upset people who really want every number in the game at a competitive max - but that’s not the way the game is designed. (And many folk here will take that as a challenge, and try to get all those numbers up anyway - which is fine! but we’ll never be putting effort into making that more feasible.)[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]Quirks aren’t necessarily ‘opposing’, either. Austerity and Hedonism are pretty much opposites, but sometimes a Daring choice will be the rejection of a Subtle choice, sometimes of a Forceful one.[/color]
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]The mechanics of the Quirk Polisher are there for a very specific strategic reason. As we continue to adjust Quirks, they’ll function more effectively to track your character’s actions, and it’ll be harder to manipulate them. So we wanted a method of last resort already in place to help out late-game players who lose a treasured Quirk point. They have a very aggressive stat / Notability requirement to prevent them from being used carelessly by players who won’t benefit.[/color]
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[color=#009900]The fiction’s there because I had a long plane trip and I rarely get to write anything these days. Enjoy![/color][/quote]
I like the intent, but feel, as a player who has gone through a lot of content already, that I will not have the opportunity to actually get my quirks where I’d like them. I only have Magnanimous at 15, which is fair, I’ve been pretty magnanimous. However, we’ve had little guidance as to whether a particular decision would affect quirks and sometimes how it would affect quirks. I think I’ve had at least melancholy above 12, but not to 15, but I don’t really know that I can get that or other qualities (Steadfast, Ruthless, Hedonist, Austere) up to where I could use any of these items, though I may have been able to (and likely would have) in the past.
As an aside, I thought the Ruthless, Steadfast and Melancholy did a good job of reflecting my character’s choices as one with the Nemesis ambition. Then, I saw the Hedonist and Magnanimous quirks as more outlets for things the character would not have done were the Nemesis ambition not driving him.
Do you have any plans to address the 10 to 12 gap for players already through the bulk of plot? Perhaps something like the review of the exceptional stories card or the choice about the spider council, where we could influence quirks if we are past the point where we can influence quirks to this level.
Also, if you’re moving this way, do you plan to do anything about the storylets that advance a quirk to the cap, while continuing to lower another quirk, even while past that cap? I could be wrong but I feel like that where my other quirks went.
Fun thought, at least to me: maybe the changed by the iron republic quirk/quality could be spent to alter one’s quirks. Seems like that would actually make sense.
You can already do that! Although, it costs 10 fate and your quirks cap at 10 (or maybe the option locks when your quirks are at 10?).
[color=#009900]Yes. Mostly, as Sara suggests upthread, through more plot. We’re going to be adding story for a long time yet.[/color]
[color=#009900]No. If you do something massively un-Heartless, we want to reflect that even if you’re already very Magnanimous.[/color]
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Here’s a drum I want to keep beating, because I want to be sure engaged players understand it well enough to explain it to the rest of the community:[/color]
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[color=#009900]We do want to make it slightly easier for someone who has a really specific long-term agenda for their character to keep high-level Quirks in line with this. There will always be surprises in story outcomes, no matter how carefully we signal - language is imperfect and people misclick.[/color]
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[color=#009900]We don’t want to make it easier for people to collect 'em all, or to massage their Quirks up high without following one-off plots. We don’t particularly mind if people find ways to do it, but it will never be a design goal.[/color]
If it’s too easy to juggle opposed Quirks, to be a Scarlet Saint, build a hoard pellets for your Noman and so-forth – then the point of these odd enterprises is lost in any case. They’re fun in part because they’re edge cases hovering outside the primary use cases – reflecting player choices in a character personality, giving a long-term building block for character style that feels meaningful because it’s 120 CPs long, etc. They’re also fun because they’re narratively eccentric in the best way (I thrash my gang of hoodlums regularly and use them as patsies, but I care deeply about lost souls!) and because they’re multiply difficult: they take a long time, they’re slightly toooo easy to lose to a misclick, and to find high levels takes poking around, off the well-lit paths of design intention. Someone go see if the Iron Republic is still as weird as it once was! Etc.
It’s the stuff of good emergent gameplay, and I think I’m glad that they’re getting less easily grindable and more "keep an eye out for this opportunity" and so forth. The great thing is that different ways of approaching Quirks do feed off each other a bit – using "Quirk decreases only if no greater than 10" is good insurance for a proper long-term agenda roleplayer as well as an eccentric quirxotic juggler; if that juggler made a choice to help the CVR and be Magnanimous, then tanking it to gain Ruthless has a specific meaning, and you’ll have to choose which quirks to juggle first while sacrificing others–and the shape of a character still sprouts, no matter what.
I do hope for more of the "no decrease if above 10" conditionals, if only to reduce the amount of quirk-loss paranoia. Some paranoia and hard choices are nice, though, even if you’re juggling multiple quirks. Would I rather risk losing a point of my Hedonist 15 or Ruthless 12, if I’m looking at a slightly-but-distinctly signposted narrative decision in a new Exceptional Story? Argh… teeth gnash… probably Hedonist.
edited by metasynthie on 7/20/2015
Once I’m done with my latest delving into Flute Street, I’ll have to do some CVR work and see what the Reliquary action is like. Odd that there’s no +Magnanimous -Heartless/Ruthless option, though.
[color=#009900]Yes. Mostly, as Sara suggests upthread, through more plot. We’re going to be adding story for a long time yet.[/color]
[color=#009900]No. If you do something massively un-Heartless, we want to reflect that even if you’re already very Magnanimous.[/color]
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Here’s a drum I want to keep beating, because I want to be sure engaged players understand it well enough to explain it to the rest of the community:[/color]
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[color=#009900]We do want to make it slightly easier for someone who has a really specific long-term agenda for their character to keep high-level Quirks in line with this. There will always be surprises in story outcomes, no matter how carefully we signal - language is imperfect and people misclick.[/color]
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[color=#009900]We don’t want to make it easier for people to collect 'em all, or to massage their Quirks up high without following one-off plots. We don’t particularly mind if people find ways to do it, but it will never be a design goal.[/color][/quote]
If there is sufficient plot ahead, my concerns are abated.
For the other I was more thinking of Weather at Last, where I cannot use the card without incurring quirk loss and no option raises a quirk, but it isn’t really obvious that it does so, unless you look it up or take every option. I guess my issue is more the transparency of quirk options; most options don’t seem to affect quirks and I can’t really tell without looking it up whether any particular choice will actually raise lower or do nothing for any particular quirk.
Okay, I’ve calmed down and come back with a more productive version of my original question.
The post announcing the sweeping changes to the Quirk system reads, in part:
Is "risky" content now considered inappropriate for third-tier quirk gain because no matter the costs it’s still repeatable, or was laudanum decided specifically to not be punishing enough for the Hedonism it gave?
[color=#009900]Yes. Mostly, as Sara suggests upthread, through more plot. We’re going to be adding story for a long time yet.[/color]
[color=#009900]No. If you do something massively un-Heartless, we want to reflect that even if you’re already very Magnanimous.[/color]
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Here’s a drum I want to keep beating, because I want to be sure engaged players understand it well enough to explain it to the rest of the community:[/color]
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[color=#009900]We do want to make it slightly easier for someone who has a really specific long-term agenda for their character to keep high-level Quirks in line with this. There will always be surprises in story outcomes, no matter how carefully we signal - language is imperfect and people misclick.[/color]
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[color=#009900]We don’t want to make it easier for people to collect 'em all, or to massage their Quirks up high without following one-off plots. We don’t particularly mind if people find ways to do it, but it will never be a design goal.[/color][/quote]
This makes a whole lot of sense.
But as things currently stand, it’s not just surprises in story outcomes – to be honest, if it’s for a story, I’d be okay taking a hit to, say, my carefully polished Hedonist 15, so long as I thought the story made sense for it.
Story is why I’m here. I am willing to set almost anything on fire to in the service of marvelous story – almost anything.
I don’t really care about the high numbers except inasmuch as they reflect how I see my character, and how they reflect her significant actions.
But most of the ways quirks change is through grinding.
I’ve played for just over a year across several characters (one with Exceptional Friend for a year & ongoing), and story has not seriously altered my quirks, with the rare exception of Hedonist – grinding and common card playing has, which has trained me to keep my character-appropriate quirks high via grinding (just as they are lowered through grinding).
For example, lots of us lost high numbers of quirks to the Zee festival, which literally forced the player to nuke some or all their quirks to continue. This was, admittedly, very funny, especially the jokes about how war doesn’t change people, fishing does, but doesn’t seem to fit the stated design goals, but something more like "not even the most interesting person can fail to be average after getting in that boat!" (Note: I still think this is super funny, this is not meant to be mad or anything! I loved that festival, after all. :))
It IS consistent: generic options are the most likely to change quirks, usually by decreasing them. Using most options on Connection Cards, remembering the Surface, or clicking another option out of boredom during a grind in Wilmot’s End or hunting dangerous beasts – all these are hardly doing something massively out of character, yet they certainly will bring the most EnQuirked down to levels of average-ness right quick, in the most non-story way imaginable (unless I’ve missed some significant changes – if so, I apologize!).
Yes, you can come up with reasons for why this could make sense, but it also leaves the player with an unfortunate choice:
(1) drastically decrease the variety of the experience of playing FL once the content cap is reached, by ignoring a swath of repeatable options, or
(2) ignore quirks, and allow them to all be decreased – over a relatively short period of time, if you play a lot – to about 5.
This second choice also has the plausible effect of negating a literally infinite amount of new one-time story quirk changes, because those are one-time, but cards and grinding can continue to decrease your quirks forever.
If Church fetes can’t increase Austere above 5, why can they decrease my Hedonist if it’s above, say, 10? If Eris is not actually becoming more Austere by attending that Church fete, why must she become less Hedonist?
(Of course, I know there’s now a mechanic in place that can allow for that. If the plan is to apply that to generic/repeateable storylets, then I am being totally redundant! It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve held forth at length about Stuff Everyone Already Knows, haha)
Although, we are on a bit of a different topic, here – these quirks polishers are rather marvelous, particularly for the story they tell.
I feel the words "plot" and "grind" get thrown around too loosely around here without a lot of care as to what each word means. There are many ways to express oneself and their strongest traits and choices. “Plot”, or one-offs, are important single choices that happen once then go away. “Grind” is the day to day circumstances and choices which require constant reaffirmation.
If you think of story as a marriage, then plot is the ceremony and grind is everything afterwards. Is the only criteria of a good marriage that its ceremony was spectacular, with no thought given to anything that happens afterwards? Or is it the constant reaffirmation of one’s love through day to day choices?
I feel, that the move to one-off only based quirk advancement is much like saying “only the ceremony matters”. It makes me feel like the day-to-day lives of our characters don’t matter. That they could go on zee trips every day for months on end and shove thousands of stowaways into the zee, but never be seen as -that heartless-. "I mean, it’s not like you wore that incredibly heartless ‘go team snake’ t-shirt in last month’s fate content, quit cheapening my shirt wearing choice with your piracy."
Is that really what you think about grinding? That a person could pour their heart and soul into living every moment of every real life day reaffirming their quirk of choice, and yet, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t come with the ‘plot seal of approval’? Are these lived choices really intrinsically inferior to spur of the moment clicks and plot twists that take maybe an afternoon to complete at best (people finished the HD update in less than a day for example). That’s the message I am getting here from these changes. That the long-term doesn’t matter, that it should be shunned, and anyone who enjoys it -erased-. There is only plot and the spur of the moment decisions.
[Edit: deleted offending content - NiteBrite]
edited by NiteBrite on 7/22/2015
Wow. I do hope it’s all right to quote you on some of that, NiteBrite, because your first four paragraphs, especially, are some really high-quality intense thoughts about grinding as a labor of love. Thank you, bravo.
Hmmmm. It’s an interesting problem. I’m just thinking aloud here, but do you know what I’d do with the Quirk system, if I wanted it to be a solid indicator of weighty character choices and nothing else? Pave it over and start again. Reset all Quirks to zero, and remove all Quirk changes from repeatable content. Have them only be raised and lowered by one-off story decisions, and by a level at a time rather than by the change point. For we end-game players who have already decided everything, implement a survey-style storylet that checks the relevant story qualities (if any) or asks us what our decision was (if not, a la the Spider-Council), and changes our levels accordingly. Repeatable content that previously gave Quirks could be toned down and/or alter Menaces instead. Thus, we could look at someone with (say) 10 Daring, and know that they’ve made 10 bold and exciting story decisions (or, perhaps, 12 bold and exciting decisions and 2 timorous ones, but it’s the 10 that people will remember.)
Edited to expand: The new polishers would make more sense in this system - +1 in one Quirk at the cost of -1 or more in one or two others would be a sensible investment for someone who really wanted to raise one quality and/or atone for one past bad decision. Also, folks who’d reached very high Quirks under the old system could be awarded an Apple of Discord-style trophy, to mark that their achievements may be gone but were not forgotten.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 7/22/2015
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[color=#009900]‘Daily affirmations’ is a good phrase! But the way you described this was the way I built Quirks back in 2009, and it didn’t work as intended.[/color]
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[color=#009900]1. For ‘daily grind’ players, quirks rose to very high levels. For new or less number/grind focused players, they didn’t. This huge range meant it wasn’t practical to use quirks to unlock branches, or pass difficulty tests, because it was impossible to balance for something that could be between 1 and 150.[/color]
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[color=#009900]2. So we needed to put a limit on quirks, or else relegate them purely to being bragging labels without story consequence.[/color]
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[color=#009900]3. But we couldn’t just cap them, or, because of the way our numbers work, it would be possible to grind very quickly to the cap, and we wouldn’t have be able to signal or reward big, dramatic moments.[/color]
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[color=#009900]4. So we went for a soft cap that allowed players to keep existing off-the-chart quirks for the time being; that allowed day-to-day choices to be reflected; that encouraged exclusive choices of the kind we favour for story and drama terms; that limited the upper reaches to rarer choices.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Balancing the needs of different kinds of player - from the daily, passionate, numbers-focused grinder to the equally passionate enthusiast for one-off story and the minimal number of clicks - is difficult. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]We’ll keep tuning the experience, but c[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]areful design means hard decisions, compromise, and occasional heartache for core players. That’s how it is in every long-term game ever. [/color]
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[color=#009900]This idea that we’ve deliberately begun making quirks changes in concert with EF as some sort of nefarious way to soak our players - no, we haven’t. Obviously there will always be a lot of EF subscriber content, and obviously it’s one-off dramatic events so it will tend to be Quirk-y. But look, you complained in this very post about the non-EF quirks content I just wrote, and you sent us a long rant about a high-level Quirks effect in the Heart’s Desire content just last month. :) So we’re not doing it on purpose, and in fact we’re not doing it.[/color]
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[color=#009900]OK, now I have to lay down some mod.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Nitebrite, it’s not OK to copy-paste a bunch of anonymous comments from another community channel into this community channel. There are well-established Internet Reasons why that’s not OK, I’m sure you know them. Please don’t.[/color]
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[color=#009900]It’s also not OK to send us a number of long, long emails on this topic, and when we respond to those emails, to repost a bunch of those points here. You know we’ve heard you. Please respect our position as designers, and the amount of time we already spend on listening to feedback, seven days a week. Please don’t try to browbeat us or to go looking to mobilise sentiment against a design change you dislike. You’re better than that.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]You obviously feel strongly on this topic and you’re obviously having a hard time filtering it: please, next time you feel like posting a rant, take a deep breath and step away for a little while first.[/color]
[color=#009900]We talked longingly about being able to do this, and I would love to have been able to, but we looked at the number of players with very high Quirk levels and realised it wasn’t practical. The rant upthread notwithstanding, we don’t like to erase people’s lived choices.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Honestly, there used to be times when I dreamed of a wipe. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and walk away from Failbetter entirely rather than constantly have my nose rubbed in the consequences of undoing some decision I made at 3am five years ago. But now, f*ck it, we all live with the consequences of our decisions, and it’s good training for a designer. :-)[/color]