I’m a little stumped with creating skill challenges.
How exactly do I create them? How do I set their difficulty?
Go to the user guide under “Storylets and Qualities - Success and Failure”
In a nutshell, on the branch where you want to test the quality, select the quality as a requirement and put a value in “Difficulty” column.
When a player plays a branch with a Difficulty quality requirement, their character’s level in the relevant quality is compared to the level in the Difficulty requirement. The chance of success is 50% plus or minus 10% for each point of difference between the PC’s quality level and the difficulty. There is always a minimum 10% chance of success.
So if you approach a branch with a Strength difficulty of 10 and your strength is 8:
50% chance - 20% (10% x your strength being 2 lower than 10) = 30% chance of success.
If I approach the branch with a Strength of 14:
50% + 40% (14 is 4 higher than 10 x 10%) = 90% chance of success.
There is always a 10% chance of success.
If the quality check succeeds, they will play the success branch you create (or a rare success if that % chance succeeds). If they fail, they will play the default branch (or a rare default if that % chance succeeds).
If the quality you check is a Basic Ability, the character earns points to increase the quality even if they fail the quality check. This is for abilities you want the player to “learn by failing” at.
Also something I’ve learned - Your first impulse will be to create an early challenge with a high requirement on a basic ability that the player is meant to come back to later. Remember if you give them a very difficult task early, the player can very quickly and easily grind that stat up to your difficulty level because attempting a “nearly impossible” difficulty challenge awards them lots of points for failing. So in general, I’ve learned to set difficulty only as high in an area as I want them to get the quality to (or a tad lower). Once their skill reaches that difficulty, grinding there will quickly diminish in value.
edited by HanonO on 12/23/2012
edited by HanonO on 12/23/2012
I’m not having any luck with setting up challenges - i have one set at difficulty 1 and it always comes up as a nearly impossible challenge with a 0% success rate regardless of how high the skill being tested is. I’ve read through all documentation on this and have noticed that the documentation refers to things that don’t appear to be options (i.e. narrow and broad difficulty). Though I understand how they should work, I cannot seem to make them behave properly. I’m fully at a loss here and would appreciate any assistance.
Could you take a screenshot of one of the misbehaving qualities in the quality editor? That might help us diagnose. :)
Here are screencaps of the result in playtesting and the code snippet, respectively.
http://i.imgbox.com/adeqvrK1.png
http://i.imgbox.com/acvEsvfM.png
Did you by chance have this quality created before challenges were split into Broad and Narrow categories? I know I had some weirdness with that, and I ended up remaking a few qualities. Try this to troubleshoot: Change the challenge from testing your Tough quality to some other quality and see if you have the same problem.
I don’t suppose you have two seemingly identically named qualities and you’ve got the wrong one selected?
(Oh, and huzzah if that’s the World I think it is :)
edited by HanonO on 3/6/2013
Well that’s the thing, i don’t know when things changed or anything. I made that like day before yesterday-ish so 3/3 - 3/4
I have tried to make other types of challenges but can’t seem to get any to work, so I wouldn’t imagine it is specific to any single quality.
However, are there situations in which one cannot make challenges at all? Are only specific types of qualities testable through challenges?
Am I supposed to see options for broad or narrow types of challenges in addition to the box for the difficulty? Or is that a deprecated feature?
I’ve thought about this a fair bit and it really seems more buggy than it should be. I’m trying to refrain from just starting another world due to the inability of deletion as that seems like a waste of server space.
You’ve definitely found a bug - it’s not supposed to be possible to have a 0% chance of success, no matter what (the lowest is meant to be 10%).
The best way to raise a bug is by sending an email to support@storynexus.com.
The option to choose “Broad” or “Narrow” difficulty is on the page where you set up the quality itself (“Qualities” not “Storylets” on the menu). But that’s definitely not the problem here - it should still be a “straightforward challenge” whichever system you’re using.
Cheers
Richard
(edit - sorry, I’m a bit out of date - lowest possible chance of success is 1% not 10%, according to the manual. The point still stands.)
edited by Richard on 3/6/2013
oho. I think it has to do with the setting for difficulty on the quality. It seems to work to some degree now. Thank you very much for stating that the broad/narrow option was on the quality itself. I put a 2 in the box next to where it said broad and a 4 in the difficulty box on the storylet branch start and am now getting 4%. I’m assuming the blank (difficulty modifier?) field on the quality itself was what had caused the issue, I’d previously not realized what that field was. It is a bit odd that it doesn’t default to 0 or something.
Oh, bah. There is a really egregious angry-making bug here which I now understand - I’ll email the support address myself, since it won’t really contribute to the sum of human knowledge to explain it here and suggest that you mail it in.
To get you going, I recommend you type 60 in that box (the one “next to where is said Broad”), which will basically mean it gets easier at a decent clip as your skill quality increases.
At some point though, you should definitely understand the difference between “Broad” and “Narrow”, which is described in “Success and Failure” in Ch.5 of the manual. I wouldn’t do that right now - it’ll make more sense when you’ve played around for a while - but don’t leave it too long, because it’s a major decision which you’ll need to factor in when you’re designing your world. Changing it later may prove controversial ;-)
Cheers
Richard
Yeah I’m pretty good with the differences. I just couldn’t find it earlier, I thought the difficulty on the storylet was the only one that had to be set. I’m not entirely sure how i missed that it existed on the quality. It does seem to show the default settings once you have entered a number and then reselected either broad or narrow, thus providing one with 60 or 10 respectively. Would having those fields default to broad 60 be ok or would that mess up other things? It just seems a very user friendly type of fix. Thanks again for pointing me to right area though as it has been a few days without me noticing and figuring it out.
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to default to Broad 60, and just doesn’t. I’ve just sent a bug report.
I’m also feeling guilty about saying “egregious angry-making”, so I hereby put on record that I’ve written plenty of egregious angry-making bugs in my own time.
Cheers
Richard
[color=#009900]You’re absolved by reason of some quality community support. Shallot actually PMed me and I said, could you ask on a public thread? I don’t do support by PM - trusting that you guys would tease out whether it was user misunderstanding, technical glitch or both. And indeed you f did![/color]
[color=#009900]
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[color=#009900]For clarity, the DiificultyScaler field should indeed default to 10 or 60 depending on type, and if it doesn’t that’s a bug.[/color]
Just confirmed it. When you create a new quality, the difficulty is set to Broad with a blank field beside it. If you manually select Narrow, it populates that field with 10, and if you then manually reselect Broad, it populates the field with 60.
Until you realize what’s going on, it looks like all of your quality tests fail regardless of difficulty… and I was just about to type up a separate “what am I doing wrong” post about it! :-)
Good catch. If it’s still doing it I would report it at support@storynexus.com . That’s a very newbie unfriendly bug.
[color=#009900]This should have been fixed a week ago… I’ll talk to my guys.[/color]
[color=#009900]EDIT: and in fact, I can’t reproduce. Could you drop us a mail to the support address with browser and whatnot so we can work out when it’s happening? Thanks![/color]
edited by Alexis on 3/19/2013
Just sent the email in. In case anyone made qualities in the interim, here’s what seems to be happening.
Qualities made a couple weeks ago either have zero or ten as the scalar. Qualities I make today have ten and Broad. If I change it to Narrow it stays at 10, then if I change it to Broad it resets to 60. It doesn’t look like even new qualities created today are created with 60 populating the field.