Could it be your browser overriding…perhaps set to"open new pages in same window"?
That would be quite a surprise, given it hasn’t happened before.
Yes but this doesn’t do the same job. Take a riddle for example. Giving your character a quality that says they know the answer to a riddle is far removed from posing a riddle to the player and having them attempt to answer it.
Uberman: Sure…but shouldn’t the character be the person answering the riddle in world instead of the player? If I know the answer to the riddle, it seems as though I could skip a section of the story that the character is supposed to experience in search of the answer. I know what you’re going for, I’m just saying that it kind of breaks the conceit of a character in the world if the player is doing the work.
You might be able to make a similarly interesting riddle if the answer were an object (quality) that the character had to acquire and equip in hand to “answer” the riddle.
For example: (to borrow an example from the DaVinci Code)
“The door remains resolutely closed, until the knocker comes to life and speaks:
In London lies a knight a Pope interred.
His labor’s fruit a Holy wrath incurred.
You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.”
It pauses, then hisses “Bring me the answer in-hand!”
The answer to the riddle would be to equip an apple and engage the door again.
I would like to humbly suggest a new type of Quality.
Many of us have elements in our games that use some type of timing mechanic, and we’ve discussed different ways to make this happen.
For example, if I plant some seeds, it is reasonable that they wouldn’t grow and bear fruit immediately. One way to simulate this is to use a living story, which delays a quality change for an amount of real time. I can make the plant grow after one real-time hour or one real-time day from when the player plants it and this works splendidly for some sorts of concepts. The player can go do other things in the game during this waiting period, or they can quit and ostensibly leave the character standing there, staring at the patch of ground, which will have sprung forth the next time they play the game.
Another thing in many games is a day/night time cycle or travel elements. I might have the player jetting from the UK to the US, then down to Brazil for a storylet. If I’m using a living storylet to simulate the time it takes for a loaf of bread to bake in the oven by delaying for a real-time hour, the player can globe trot willy nilly to finish up a quest, return home, and find they still don’t yet have a loaf of bread.
The current way to avert this is to introduce some sort of manual timekeeping into the story. It’s tedious, but every single card that can be played can be set to increment the “bread baking” quality by one if it’s greater than zero “Bread in the Oven”. That way we can have the “Flight to Argentina” card increment the “bread baking” quality to 100 “Your Bread Has Burnt Along With Your House!” to simulate the perils of baking and travel.
Perhaps that is a bit pedantic, but there are lots of elements we’d like to simulate in StoryNexus worlds. For example - a time passing cycle. In my game I divided a day into twelve increments and introduced three “time passes” cards that are always in the deck. The player can use one of these cards to wait for the clothing shop to open if it’s too early, or if they dawdle and get three, they can’t draw until they use one of them, forcing the game clock to move. This has good and bad points in that it’s very easy to game the system and keep it tea-time for as long as the player wants with shrewd setting changes or by whizzing about the city without drawing sometimes cards. The other alternative is to make every single card tick the clock forward, meaning I have to add a quality on every card that represents an activity that takes time.
So, long story short (too late) I submit for your consideration a type of quality called a “Clock Quality”.
At bare-bones minimum, all this would do is declare a quality which increments by one every time a storylet is played through a result branch (essentially at the time the player clicks ONWARD!) when the clock quality is greater than zero.
So my “Something in the Oven” is a clock quality. At zero, nothing happens. When I put bread in the oven via a storylet, I increase this quality to 1 which causes it to increase every time I finish a storylet. At 10, the bread is done. At 15, it’s burnt. At 25 “Sirens in the Distance” At 50 “Good Lord, What Happened to your House?”
While that is a pretty dull example, it would allow gameplay elements such as thirst and hunger, a proper day/night cycle, or even an actual in game clock - for a timed murder mystery a creator could tick an “Hour” clock quality from 1 to 24 to represent hours of the day which pass with each action, then trigger a must card which resets the “Hour” to 1 and increments “Day of the Week”. For a longer game, a creator could schedule an apocalypse and give the player an in-game month to avert it. For non timing specific games, creators could create spells that grant a bonus for a short period of time that doesn’t require keeping absolute track of.
The clock quality would have all the same traits of normal qualities such as QCDs and QLDs “Monday” “Tuesday” etc.
I don’t doubt that most creators would do all sorts of things if a clock quality was simply a self-incrementing quality as I’ve described. If you wanted to add fancy things, there could be quality variables such as:
- Tick Increment (number field) How many storylets a player can result before this Clock Quality increases by one.
- Tick Limit (number field) How high this Clock Quality will increment before stopping or cycling
- Clock Quality at Limit [Cycles/Hold] (dropdown) Cycle causes a quality with limit 12 revert to 1 instead of 13. Hold causes the clock quality to remain at its limit value once reached.
- Tick Direction [Increase/Decrease] Sets the clock quality to increment or decrement on each tick. Without a limit the Clock Quality will continue increasing indefinitely (or to a hard limit, like 1000). A decreasing Clock Quality will tick down till it hits zero and the quality vanishes, at which point it is shut off until reset to a higher value. (good for spell duration limits). [If there is a limit to how much a clock quality can tick, Creators would be encouraged to increase tick increment or use multiple counter qualities at levels like an abacus.]
As a bonus - calculate cycling qualities to account for math. If my character sleeps for eight hours, allow the Creator to do a change that just says “increase hour by 8” and if the hour is 20 with a limit of 24, StoryNexus would realize this and include the cycle: 20+8 sets Hour to 4 instead of 28.
edited by HanonO on 2/22/2013
Could we have Menaces positioned somewhere else on the sidebar? I’m fine with them being on the front page, but having them mixed in with Sidebar and Basic Abilities is confusing.
Agreed, Gordon. If not in a their own space, perhaps if they were tinted differently or had a border and grouped at the bottom or top
Ooh! Me too, me too!
I’ve been avoiding raising this for ages, because I thought it was just my faintly obsessive tendencies coming through, but… to me it seems “obvious” that the Menaces should be lower down. Or best of all, apply the Ordering across everything that shows on that tab, so that individual creators can decide what makes most sense to them.
Cheers
Richard
Also I would really like to be able to edit rare success/rare default %s.
Hi! I have been working on a game with StoryNexus for a couple of weeks now, and it’s really cool. I have also worked up to a list of about a dozen things I would like to suggest, either minor but easy changes, or hard but important ones, but at the moment I will stick with the two I am finding most difficult to live without:
- The ability to test one Quality against another. (Or, have [q:Quality Name] work in things other than text). For example, in my game you acquire Injuries but instead of saying that something might happen at, say, 4 Injuries I would like something to happen when their Injuries reaches their Toughness. I can simulate this by having 10 branches in a storylet, each a Toughness challenge… if Injuries is 1 then the difficulty is 1, if Injuries is 2 then it’s 2, up to 10… but it’s a really tedious workaround that only works at all if I assume their Toughness can never be more than 10. I have already had to employ this workaround in 2 separate situations for a total of 120 branches where 12 could have been sufficient. So… please. You would make me SO happy.[/li][li]This is a bit of a two-fer, but the ability to a) disallow the player from equipping or unequipping certain equippable Things, and b) an Advanced option which allows a Branch result to equip or unequip a Thing to its slot. Continuing with the Injuries example: every time the player receives a point of Injury in my game, they also receive a Potential Wound which reflects how they got the Injury and what it means. An example of this is “Painfully Sliced Arm” which you might pick up after failing a combat, and which has the Enhancements “-2 to Combat” and “-1 to Agility”. If they succeed their Toughness check, they shrug it off and the Potential Wound goes away. But when they fail, I would like to forcibly equip it to the Wound slot, and I don’t want them to be able to remove it manually. Currently, I’m on the honour system with this… but I don’t think I could even put this game into Beta with the major penalty being optional. (Bonus points if trying to force-equip a Thing they don’t have is just ignored, so that I can go through all the possible Potential Wounds in one result instead of many).
Thanks so much for listening!
PS. Why not the same Suggestions format as for Fallen London? With the easily searchable and the 10 votes and everything? I can’t imagine this way is easier for you, since you already have the infrastructure for the other way…
This feature has just been added Gordon.
[color=#009900]Yeah, young Liam here snuck it through in a fit of enthusiasm.[/color]
Oh Liam. You are and remain my favorite. Thaaank you.
This feature has just been added Gordon.[/quote]
Thank you. 1820s Edinburgh is tonight festooned with celebratory balloons.
Cheers
Richard
Ah, looks like Chris Gardiner suggested a workaround that should mostly work for me as well. If I make every Potential Wound give “Wounded + 1”, then I can check to see if you have a Wound Slot (granted when you fail your challenge) but not Wounded and force a Must storylet until you’ve remedied the matter. The player can still (maybe) click into a storylet, unequip the item, and choose their branch - the negative qualities are still displayed but I suspect the game will actually check the quality without the item when it actually does the challenge… but that’s a pretty determined player, who would do that between every action. It’s also pretty messy, but I can live with it for a while longer.
Sorry 'bout that. Nine pages is a lot of reading.
To be honest I don’t think that workaround is a good solution in your case. Two issues with it:
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I think it would quickly get quite annoying to play. The game pauses and you have to go and mess around in your inventory, for no reason other than that it tells you to.
-
You’d also have to give them the clunky out-of-band instruction to “hit Refresh or press F5”; the branch won’t unlock otherwise.
(I did see that you said “it’s pretty messy”, but you might not have spotted just how messy.)
I’m curious about why you want to do this with equippables, rather than just by changing the qualities directly? You’d still need to give them something which indicated the wound (so that you could recognise it when you come to reverse the effects later), but if they don’t have to equip it then the nastier rough edges go away.
Cheers
Richard
[color=#009900]Force-equipping and dynamic quality effects (plus possibly dynamic quality requirements) will be along at some point - we’d like them to.[/color]
[color=#009900]In theory, Uservoice’s features mean you don’t get duplicated ideas and the voice of the masses is perfectly manifest. In practice what happens is that 100 people start 50 threads for the same request and then another 50 people chip in waspishly and say ‘don’t you know there’s another thread for that’. And meanwhile everyone else just makes suggestions on the forum.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]So we thought we’d have an informal pool of requests that we check frequently in the context of a community where people are used to making relevant smart comments anyway :)[/color]
[quote=Richard]To be honest I don’t think that workaround is a good solution in your case.[/quote]
It’s not, but it pushes it out of the realm of “the two updates I most need”, because it does work. I have just implemented it to make sure, and I can live with it. For now. :)
[quote=Richard]I’m curious about why you want to do this with equippables, rather than just by changing the qualities directly? You’d still need to give them something which indicated the wound (so that you could recognise it when you come to reverse the effects later), but if they don’t have to equip it then the nastier rough edges go away.[/quote]
It’s a thought. Keeping track of that would be harder, though, I think. Rather than having one Heal storylet that removes your Wound Slot and all potential wounds (a bit messy, again, but live-able) then I would need a separate one for every possible wound. Maybe not so different from having a separate Thing for every possible wound, but I would also have to note whether they had 0 so that “Agility - 1” going to 0 doesn’t bring it up to 1 after I do “Agility + 1”. (And I’m not sure how other equippables might interact with that…)
I would also worry that it would be a bit confusing to the player, because of the way that I’m doing skills. I don’t have them increase by succeeding challenges. Instead, I have major story arcs earn you a Skill Token and then you can spend your Skill Token to increase one skill of your choice. (I’m highly influenced by tabletop role-playing games). Additionally, you can’t replay major arcs, so Skill Tokens are a limitted resource. Which means that the player might get really worried when a 5 Charisma becomes a 4.
At any rate, if force-equipping is coming along, then chances are pretty good that it will be here before I’m ready to have actual players. So I’ll keep it as it is for now.
Thanks, though. I hadn’t actually thought of that solution.
Awesome! Thank you.
Ahhhh. Yeah, I can understand that.
Ah, I had (foolishly, embarrassingly) failed to think about what happened when a quality reached 0. That’s pretty much fatal to my way of doing it. Full steam ahead with yours, then :-)
Have you played Below, by the way? It too has a very parsimonious approach to skill advancement, so you might pick up some tips from it. The way it approaches penalties is completely different to what you’re doing though (it doesn’t penalise stats, just makes things unpleasant for you in a range of novel ways).
Cheers
Richard
Oh my god Liam that slider is golden.