The Fidgeting Writer [spoilers]

Or, more specifically, the number of actions you can burn, and literally make no progress. Not slow progress, literally none at all.

And then you run out of Tales of Terror and have to go farm some more… It’s a good story, but I’m glad I had a run of luck and managed to finish. I don’t feel any urge to go back.

[color=00ffff]You’re right. We’re actually addressing the Shadowy issue in content we’re working on at the moment - we’ll talk more about it fairly soon.[/color]
[color=00ffff]
[/color]
[color=00ffff]There’s certainly a theme of gradual corruption running through Fallen London, but requiring people to be flat-out criminals steps on too many character concepts.[/color][/quote]

is excited!

I find myself…edging into grey areas quite frequently! It’s just…there are so many things to explore and so much less stigma attached to a Lady here in the 'Neath than up on the surface if she chooses to do something. A bit of play with an urchin crew, well it’s to be expected really. Time spent roaming around a museum? Well really, it’s quite lovely art!

/ooc I do think some of the choices, when we hunt things down for the story/lore, well we may choose to leave those out of our RP. I know this is common habit in other games I’ve played.

~MF
A Lady exploring

The storyline actually feels out of character for Echo Bazaar to me.

  • It’s played out entirely in your Inventory, but unlike the item conversions, when you click Onwards you don’t go back to Inventory where you can continue, but back out into Story.

  • The whole slot-machine aspect bothers me – I can’t think of another storyline where every step is based on luck alone, and if luck fails you that round, you’re back to the beginning. When I played through the stories where you had to build up a characteristic, I somehow didn’t mind as much if, for example, I lost all my Running Battle if I lost the duel; just bring your Running Battle up higher next time, and then you win the duel. With Fidgeting Writer, there’s absolutely nothing I can do as a player the next time through to change the outcome.

  • At each stage, you get exactly one of the item needed for the next level, and there’s only one thing you can do to progress in the story. You could cash out, alternatively, but by the time I hit this storyline I didn’t need any of the cash-out items. It’s reminiscent of the stories out in the islands, especially Scientific Expedition islands, where there’s only one path to follow – narratively sparse, you might say, but then you get whacked over the head with that luck thing again and lose your place in the story anyhow, until it’s not only sparse but repetitive. Repetitive. Repetitive. Repetitive …

So far, one of the most annoying storylines I’ve ever encountered. I suspect the Fidgeting Writer played it shortly before becoming its subject.

It’s not a luck based mechanic, it’s a grinding mechanic! :)

Imagine, instead, that in order to get the end reward you had to spend 100 actions of mindless clicking, in much the same way one does when building up Investigating and the like, and had to spend 20 Echoes worth of stuff as one does in, say, the Mr Wines Revels’ storylet, but there were no luck checks. Would you be equally frustrated despite the fact that the results are the same?
When you sit down for the Fidgiting Writer storylet, you can’t view it as something you will win in one go. You have to view it with statistical probability. You know you aren’t going to win the first try. Or the second try. But, given enough tries, you will make it. If the storylet were a skill check, you’d be done in one round and a healthy amount of story would be swallowed up and spit out with little regard. The luck check not only pads the length of the story, it makes it a hard winter’s night of grinding. You are going to click and you are going to lose. Then you are going to click again. This is the same mechanic as the rest of the game, only in this one, while grinding, you get a lot of pages telling you you “lose.”
You can’t view losing a luck check as a loss. You have to view it as a statistical inevitability and part of the storylet. It is not a judgement on you, your character or how well you are playing the game. It’s not even a proper “loss.” It’s just part of the grind.
It’s been pointed out elsewhere that if you stick with the story, statistically, it is quite profitable. Trust the numbers, stick with it and stop viewing the grind as a slot machine.

If I were a mechanical player, that would work, but alack, I persist in being too human, so I buy too much into the story. When it’s stated that it’s luck, it somehow feels different.

Also, since it plays so differently from the rest of the game (no Try Again button no matter how many you have of the requisite element, the Onwards button bumping you out of the story), I am unusually motivated to finish the story as soon as possible, so I can be done with it before I forget how to play it. This is a peril of being as antique as I am.

Oh, by the way, where is the Sleepless Poet through whose story one finds a Lens of Black Glass? … :headscrat:
edited by Genny on 3/21/2012

The issue though is that it is not a grinding mechanic. If you grind, there is guaranteed progress, no matter how small. With this, there is no progress at all. You may (with a very small probability) get it on your very first try. You may never get it, no matter how many times you try it. That’s the issue with a luck-based mechanic - results fit a curve with a long tail. And someone will be on that tail. The average will fall into an acceptable range, but for those whose luck does not run to the average, things may not be quite so good.

Nope. In a grinding mechanic, you make PROGRESS. The more actions you spend on it, the closer you get to the end.

Here, that’s not true. If you’ve spent 100 actions and failed on the last step, you are literally at the same point in progress as someone who never started the story at all. And I’m not using “literally” just for emphasis, but in its dictionary definition - once you’ve had a loss, the expected number of actions to finish the story is the same as for someone who hasn’t started it yet.

The end results are not the same. If I have to spend 50 actions in mindless clicking, then after that I’m halfway done, and have 50 more to go.

Here, with the Fidgeting Writer if I spend 50 actions clicking, after that I still have an average of 100 left to go. And if I spend 50 more, I still have 100 left to go. And so on and so forth.

The very fact that it’s probability makes that guarantee not true, unless you’re rigging your random number generator. In a standard grind, it IS true. Given enough clicks, you will make it to the end; you can see the qualities increasing and not going down, you’re collecting up the echoes you need, and so on and so forth. Here, there is no finite number of clicks that you can make to guarantee a success - or even to guarantee any progress at all TOWARDS a success.

Except for the part where, unlike other grinds in this game, this one actually IS a slot machine.

Just because both a grinding mechanic and a slot machine both take a lot of clicks for success doesn’t make them equivalent.

I have to agree with M_L_G here. It is indeed quite frustrating, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do at all to boost my odds makes me feel very uninvolved. An important part of an RPG is growth – the feeling that your character is improving and becoming better. When there’s nothing you can do to alter the odds, it starts to feel very hollow and pointless.