Suggestions

StoryNexus
201

[quote=Laralyn McWilliams]The new Social Actions sound great–just read through the info in the manual. One suggestion that came to mind as I was thinking through the implications of the system is for community-wide qualities. Imagine an event the entire player base is called upon to resolve. Everyone can contribute based on his character’s skills. When the overall contributions reach a certain threshold, it triggers the next stage in the event for everyone. For example, players can ally with Country A or Country B. There’s a new storyline added where those two countries go to war. Players on both sides are working together to create armaments, spy on the enemy, etc. When either side has reached threshold amounts for swords, ships, cannons and war plans, it triggers the next stage in the conflict. The writers could tailor that next stage to whichever side actually won.
Additionally, the system could be used by developers for quick story-based metrics. For example, each time a character starts a specific story line, you increment a community variable. You can then compare that to your overall number of characters to see what percentage that is of your player base. If developers can reset those community qualities at will (even on a live game), you could make some changes to make the story line appear more frequently, reset the community quality and a “new player tracking” quality, then test again to see if your changes had the desired effects.

All we’d need to do these sorts of things is the ability to have qualities at the story (rather than player) level. :-)
edited by Laralyn McWilliams on 3/13/2013[/quote]

+1. That’s a really neat idea. Actually this could be done by essentially adding a “counter” quality to every storylet that increments any time it is played in-world. This counter would show in edit mode for the author who could gauge traffic on the card. Within the branches, it could compare its own counter to a value. A world creator could also reset the counter to zero. Basically…a storylet trip odometer. There could also be an exotic effect “RESET_CARD_COUNTER” if you wanted the world event to be able to start over based on something a player did.

If you wanted a group task in world, you simply have branches that show before the counter reaches 1000 and a branch that shows after, and explain the card text “The entire town is working to clear debris from this passageway! It may take a while but you can pitch in and help!” or something.

“You press the elevator button. Ding! It looks from the row of lights above the door that the car is on floor 8310. Looks like you’ll be here a while. You might want to explore and check back. Like in a month.”

Another way to do this without adding a counter to every storylet would be to make a “turnstile” quality type. Turnstiles would be meta qualities that increment by however much they are specified to in a branch, but the quality holds this value for everyone’s actions in the entire world. A turnstile quality could be tweaked by the world creator. “Your village must gather 100 wood before that village does!” At 100 you get a new building and the quality resets.

This would go along somewhat with my suggestion for a “clock” quality which would be an odometer which increments based on every turn the local player takes.

Gordon suggested having this work via a Living Story which is also good - the Living Story would increment based on player turns instead of real time. The uber example of this would be giving a player a set number of actions within which she needs to defuse a bomb. The only thing that the living story wouldn’t offer as it stands currently is I’d get emailed that the bomb went off instead of it happening in - story.

The other suggestion that Alexis said to post here is to offer the action bank value as a comparable quality, but not one the creator could alter. This could be used to refer to actions diegetically within the game. For example, the player could be warned that he only has 5 actions left. Or in a game where the player is Rumplestiltskin, hitting the last action would force a card that tells you you’re going to sleep for a while.
edited by HanonO on 3/14/2013

202

[color=#009900]This is coming in some form… I’m just not sure which form it’ll be yet.[/color]

[color=#009900]1. The original intention (there’s embryonic code in there that does this now) is to do this at the instance level, where every setting can have one or more instanced versions, to allow people to play multiple versions of a world with a dozen players each time. This is much simpler to design for than a big persistent world (which is s a notoriously tempting and difficult task and which almost no StoryNexus creators have experience with… although, hi Laralyn!) but fiddlier to build and manage, and less fundamentally exciting.[/color][color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]2. Subsequently we considered having world-level qualities, because those are just much easier to understand, and the first thing people will think of. Also (and this is really important to us) they’re most useful for FL.[/color]

[color=#009900]3. Finally, we’ve considered making them group-level qualities, when character groups go live. This means you could have a group which is ‘everyone in the world, all x thousand of them’, or ‘everyone in my version of the world’ (in the same way that a tabletop group for a published setting tracks its own story information, which doesn’t need to be consistent with anyone else’s) and anything in between: i.e. it would allow for both big-world storytelling and micro-sharded storytelling. The downside is that intuitively it feels less exciting, that you’re applying qualities to ‘only’ a group rather than a world - even though the effects might be functionally identical. It’s also just more complicated, again.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color][color=#009900]We’re unlikely to introduce more than one of these because that really, really would be confusing.[/color]

[color=#009900]Thoughts welcome![/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]edit to add: you can do this in a limited, primitive way with living story broadcasting: use it to determine how many of your players have chosen which side, and write new content based on that. ‘Write new content based on that’ is a realistic possibility on SN, compared to big games with long pipelines. But this is limited, ofc.
[/color]
edited by Alexis on 3/14/2013

203

Could there be a way to view qualities/storylets from other worlds? Not talking about plagiarism here, but if I’ve created one world and it has a good framework of abilities, menaces, etc…I’d sorta like to be able to copy that over wholesale when building a new world so that I only have to do some tweaking, instead of re-creating every last quality. (yes, some stuff is going to change from world to world. Other stuff, like Wounds, is virtually universal).

204

I have trouble wrapping my head around option 1, the instance qualities. I can see how that would work in option 3, where my group is tracking its progress through Star Wars versus your group’s progress. My group just left Mos Eisley, while your group is about ready to take on the Death Star. Both groups are playing the same story (although they may make different choices within it). If the only social actions between the two groups are non-story actions like gifting, there’s no break in continuity for either group. You can send me a lightsaber battery without having to reveal that [SPOILER!] Obi Wan is dead (-ish).

Would option 1 be more like A/B testing, where I launch version 1 of Star Wars and I start on Tattoine, and you launch version 2 of Star Wars and you start on the ship and meet Darth Vader and Leia?

205

As I understand it - and I’m sure Alexis will correct me if I’m wrong - Option 1 is more like there being a constellation of Death Stars. Each character is assigned to a specific Death Star (and can’t see the other ones… there’s only one Death Star, from their point of view).

The difference, compared to Option 3, is as follows. Assuming the group of players in Option 3 is in some sense adventuring together, then they alone control the pace of the plot - the Death Star will only blow up when that particular group of players is good and ready for it to happen.

In contrast, with Option 1, you might just be pulling on your retro orange jumpsuit when - surprise! - your particular Death Star blows up spontaneously… because other players who got there earlier have been working on it in your absence. (Theoretically, that is. In practice, in this example, you’d surely design the game so it couldn’t happen that way.)

Cheers
Richard

206

So in essence - other players can affect some of your group-instanced qualities. SN worlds are pretty much “instanced” by player individually as it is now.

If I’m in a group and I encounter the Old Guard and choose the option that angers him and he yells “Get off my lawn!”, then someone in my group after that will not encounter him in friendly mode initially because I’ve already ticked him off and advanced the “Getting across the lawn” quality to 5 “The Guard is furious at you!”. As a smart author I should make sure the storylet at that point reads “One of you whippersnappers has already been here!”. The Getting Across the Lawn quality would be shared by people in the same group - people outside the group would not be affected and could experience him in a benevolent mood. Other players in my group would need to grind the “Offer cheesecake to the Guard” storylet to get his mood down again because the first player chose poorly.

Probably poor example, but does that sound right?

207

Alexis: from the options provided, (1) and (2) are the most interesting to me.

If I had to choose, I’d take world qualities over instance qualities.

Why? Instance qualities are sexier – they do a weird new thing – but I think world qualities are more broadly useful and would likely be easier to implement. Also, world qualities would likely be easier to understand for SN players, and there’s already a substantial learning curve that I don’t want to deepen.

EDIT: Also, full disclosure, I have waaay more use for world qualities than instance qualities in Zero Summer and SECRET_PROJECT.
edited by levineg85 on 3/16/2013

208

For general edification: what difficulty scaler % are you currently using in Fallen London?

209

[color=#009900]This is on the list. We’d also like to allow worlds to (optionally) expose themselves for use by others.[/color]

210

[color=#009900]The answer to that is more complicated than you might expect.[/color]

211

[color=#009900]To clear up the instance/world/group confusion - ‘instance’ is a less flexible version of ‘group’. In the Death Star example, actually, someone in a group or in an instance could blow up the Death Star early. There’s no in-principle reason a group couldn’t have a hundred members or an instance have four.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]Instances cover the “personal group story” use-case that groups also fulfil - but groups and group qualities coulddo other things too, such as guild-like groups or competitive leagues.[/color]

212

Oh sure - I realise that, but I’m trying to get at what the conceptual difference is. It seems to me that instances are much better suited to a model where stuff exists, and you drop into it and interact with it; whereas groups are much better suited to a model where your story happens, and stuff appears around you as required by the demands of the plot.

For example! Your city is filled with Taverns Designed For Level One Adventurers, as Knightly Tales so wittily puts it, and you can drop into one and participate in a brawl. In my mind, that translates naturally into an instance. And also in my mind, that progresses naturally to thinking that the brawl might already be in progress at the point that you turn up - a potentially interesting mechanic which, to me, flows from (even though it’s not mandated by) the instances model.

On the other hand, the groups model pushes me towards thinking you have a loosely- or tightly-defined party which is sort-of wandering around together, and the game presents taverns customised to the current abilities of the party. Which of course means that you’re going to have to have some sort of relegation system to deal with party members who fall behind… again an interesting mechanic.

So I don’t think you can just say that the two reduce to each other, or that one is a more flexible version of the other. I think it will make a real difference to the style of multiplayer games and, indeed, could Fundamentally Change The Whole Nature Of StoryNexus Forever! No pressure or anything.

(FWIW, I much prefer the group mechanic, because I think it’s a much more natural evolution of the existing model. But perhaps you actively want to break the mould.)

Cheers
Richard

213

[color=#009900]FWIW, in terms of functional spec and likely implementation, that’s exactly what I’m bound to say, because the explicit architectural intention of group qualities is to subsume instance qualities. And the original instance mechanic, inasmuch as it exists behind the scenes in the old Prisoner’s Honey code, was intended specifically for groups of 6-12 people playing through a scenario together. The main reason it stayed incomplete so long was that I realised how tricky matchmaking and drop-out issues were.
[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]In terms of semantics, sure, there’s a substantial difference, and it’s useful to see the reactions in this thread. I’ve also wondered about having ‘entities’ or ‘elements’ or ‘plots’ rather than ‘groups’, with players ‘attached to’ rather than ‘members of’ - so an entity could also be an NPC or a tavern - but that’s another step towards abstraction.[/color]

214

Suggestion/Request: Search by Text for Qualities.

215

[color=#009900]The answer to that is more complicated than you might expect.[/color][/quote]

See, now I’m really curious. Maybe I’ll just bug you about this for MS down the line… :) Thanks!

216

(apologies in advance; i’m particularly rambly out of the box today)

I’m seeing how this could make possible “asynchronous multiplayer” group adventuring. In Fallen London it took me a while to clear an infestation of rats in my lodgings. With instancing, you could lobby for a friend to help you grind through a large storylet and they’d be able to help more than the one time a living storylet offered - if they want to use their actions to do so.

(In a sense, this is like people asking for help/items on a forum…only you can now do this with people playing the game at the same time as you are.)

A specific special kind of instance (Instanced Area?) might allow an area in a world to display names of other characters currently in the same area. (“Who else is in Watchmaker’s Hill?”) Someone in the same area as you can look at your game profile and whatever qualities are shared (like on a public fireplace mantle the player could set qualities on). You can look at anyone’s profile in Fallen London - but consider in user-made games you only see that game mantel/profile when you are both in that location. In something huge like Fallen London that might mean “Who are the last five people to take actions in Watchmaker’s Hill before me?” - Instance might mean “We’re only letting ten total people in this area. After that there’s a new instance of Watchmaker’s Hill so you may not see your friend in the list of nine here…” Players in a “group” would stick to each other and land in the same instance of Watchmaker’s Hill when they travel so they can always see present group members…

If I normally play alone, but get to a place such as “Facing a spider queen blocking the door” that requires “Steady Sanity” at 30 to pass…I have 10. I need two other players with at least 10 in that quality to group with me and assemble in the same area (Spider Queen’s Lair!) to add to the quality pool. When three players with 30 collective “Steady…” quality are in the same area in the same instance, the storylet branch unlocks for all of them. “A crowd of people are no match for the spider queen.”

I have to clear a rockfall of boulders by grinding an evil reverse pyramid of boulders down to 0. My pick only adds +1 to my mining ability. I can find someone in an instanced area with a pickaxe +10 to join my group and help me clear boulders in my specific game quicker…then he can unjoin the group after I pay 10 copper for the effort plus the rostygold he found along the way.

217

Here’s a minor gripe I have:

Allow us to get rid of (any world) qualities or at least display them in a separate categories from other qualities on the quality screen? It looks a bit messy with these quality that I might not use being in the middle of groups of qualities.

218

I love the new reorder branches function. Can we have a similar function for reordering quality requirements/changes for branches and storylets?

219

Ooh, yes. Shiny.

ETA: and practical and functional and all those grown-up things too, of course. But predominantly, shiny.
edited by Richard on 3/22/2013

220

I like the reordering very much. Does this override/replace priority? Also - is it still standard that playable branches float to the top and locked branches move to the bottom?