What is possible?

I really don’t want to be that guy who hasn’t read the user manual - I have read various documentation about how stories are made in this tool - but I’m still having trouble getting my head around some of the core concepts.
So if someone has a moment could you highlight the benefits of SN?
So far it seems to me that it is more like - for example - Borderlands the video game where you get given a bunch of main missions and side missions and you go off and do them at your leisure as opposed to the fighting Fantasy books style which makes you play through one storyline with a win or lose outcome.

I really love the idea of this and though it seems complicated now I hope to create my own story to rival Fallen London in time!
But if anyone else remembers having a mental block on understanding the mechanics of decks and settings etc and you remember what made it all ‘click’ in your head, please share your wisdom!

Hi Mike! This might be a good opportunity for you to check the Creator Worlds forum and play through the World of the Season games to get an idea of what people are doing with the tools. :)

[quote=MikeErty]I really don’t want to be that guy who hasn’t read the user manual - I have read various documentation about how stories are made in this tool - but I’m still having trouble getting my head around some of the core concepts.
So if someone has a moment could you highlight the benefits of SN?
So far it seems to me that it is more like - for example - Borderlands the video game where you get given a bunch of main missions and side missions and you go off and do them at your leisure as opposed to the fighting Fantasy books style which makes you play through one storyline with a win or lose outcome.

I really love the idea of this and though it seems complicated now I hope to create my own story to rival Fallen London in time!
But if anyone else remembers having a mental block on understanding the mechanics of decks and settings etc and you remember what made it all ‘click’ in your head, please share your wisdom![/quote]

Casual convenience; Borderlands is not exactly something you can do in bite-sized chunks, chipping away at one storylet or another over three coffee breaks and a morning coffee. :) Flexibility; the worlds don’t require that you be able to work on multiple storylets at one, but they certainly allow it. Subjectivity; there’s a lot more room for players to fill in the blanks than I remember from the Fighting Fantasy books, because the nature of the game–snippets of text–allows you to evoke and reference things other than the rather mechanistic descriptions of those books.

I think of a deck as a set collection of what you can do–the quests or actions available to you in the moment, for example, although some people have suggested using decks to simulate companions.

A setting is the state you’re in when you do something. What made it click for me was the line in the manual about how a Setting could apply across different areas. The closest Borderlands parallel is phasewalk, I suppose–honestly, the movie Beetlejuice works as well. Your setting could be being alive, or being a ghost-in-the-world (with different options available to you than if you were alive in that area), or being in the Afterlife Bureaucracy (not in the real world at all).

(Mind, I was the person who completely missed the rather obvious suggestion of using an Area for character creation, so I might not be the best one to answer. I’m rambling - back after coffee.)

L&c,
F

thanks Gordon for the recommendation, heading there now.
and thanks Torrain that’s exactly the kind of breakdown i was after, i feel I’ve levelled up my understanding stat to 1!

I used the Borderlands example as I make games for a living and spend most of my free time playing them (as well as photoshop painting etc) so any time I need to give examples for clarity I always turn to some game or other :D I just suddenly felt very self concious about appearing to be a child!

More on the Setting vs. Area distinction… Because changing settings clears your hand of opportunity cards, but changing areas doesn’t, you’ll want to be careful building your decks, if you intend to use multiple locations. Think about whether the opportunities should be relevant to the setting (e.g. a whole city) or a specific area (e.g. a neighbourhood), and whether you want players to be able to use the cards they’re still holding after they move from one place to another. Right now, it’s possible to play an opportunity card, as long as it’s in your hand, and you meet the requirements for the branch you want to take, regardless of whether it has an area requirement. This is probably a good thing, because one of those branches should probably be a discard branch, with no requirements, anyway, or you’d never be able to get the damn thing out of your hand, without switching settings.

Pinned cards are easier. If you make them specific to an area, they go away, when you leave it.

Also on the ‘things I wish somebody told me’ list, since luck is a zero stat, if you want to make a luck challenge easier than ‘could go either way’, use a negative number for the difficulty. I screwed around for a good forty minutes, before I figured that out.

[color=#ffffff]>Borderlands the video game where you get given a bunch of main missions and side missions and you go off and do them at your leisure as opposed to the fighting Fantasy books style which makes you play through one storyline with a win or lose outcome.[/color]
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[color=#009900]That’s not a bad way of putting it. :-) Although Torrain’s clarification is well made.[/color]
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>Setting vs. Area distinction.


[color=#009900]The key point (as Ruaidri said) is that Settings clear your hand and Areas don’t. So Settings may be a better fit for geography, and Areas often for softer things like moods, or rooms in a house.We want to clarify this, which probably means a rename for these two concepts (Setting is a misleading term left over from a much earlier version). ‘Hard zone’ vs ‘soft zone’ is the best I’ve come up with, but I’m not very happy with it. And this:[/color]
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[color=#ffffff]>[/color]Right now, it’s possible to play an opportunity card, as long as it’s in your hand, and you meet the requirements for the branch you want to take, regardless of whether it has an area requirement

[color=#009900]…was something we dithered about, but it’s now here to stay (and we’ll remove the erroneous ‘you can’t play this’ message)[/color]
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 10/25/2012

Excellent. I’m at level 2 understanding now!
That all seems to make a lot more sense, i seem to be imagining them as layers in photoshop or dependent hierarchies in toon boom.
The setting was misleading me as mentioned but practically I see myself uising this as York city with seperate areas being - as you say - specific areas like the Shambles (the name of my story) where Shambles related shenanigans can take place but as we are still in the city we can still carry out city-based shenanigans as the setting hasn’t changed.

Am I right in thinking that a deck refers to a storylet? The top card being the one you can see and the ones underneath branching off depending on choices you make?
I’m thinking specifically of Fallen London where you get an ambition - is that ambition a dedicated deck that contains everything that storylet needs from start to end and all the branches in between?
edited by MikeErty on 10/25/2012
edited by MikeErty on 10/25/2012

No, a deck’s a collection of cards–each card has^W can have a storylet. It’s like… hmh.

Each card is like a single Fighting Fantasy section: one setup, multiple branches (options for what to do–some may be hidden or locked if you don’t have the right qualities), and one to four results for each branch–one if there’s no challenge, and either success or default results if there is a challenge (and you can have normal and rare versions of success and default results). Does that help?

The branches you pick can change your qualities, and the qualities can then determine what cards are shown out of the decks available to you (whether that’s the Pinned deck, where the cards are always present but cost an action to play, or the Opportunities deck, where you spend one action and randomly draw three cards out of all the ones available).

ETA: in terms of Fallen London, the Pinned deck are the options that show up when you’re in an Area. The Opportunities deck is what you click on to draw your two, three, or four cards (dependant on the grandeur your Lodgings). The individual steps in your Ambition might be individual storylets, or might be individual branches on a Storylet, revealed in sequence as your Ambition Quality increases.

(someone please correct me if I’m wrong? especially up for clarification on “storylet”)

L&c,
F
edited by Torrain on 10/25/2012
edited by Torrain on 10/25/2012

Also: not sure if http://wiki.failbettergames.com/start is what you’re looking for, but I find it really helpful.

L&c,
F

thanks a lot - yeah i was looking at that but as my brain was overwhelmed with possibilities and terminology i came here for clarity.
Got a long weekend off work now so i’m gonna start putting some things together and see if i can’t get my head round it now :)
thanks everyone for all your advice.

This is also the kind of system where it’s easier to figure things out by doing. Fiddle with some storylets, muck about, and play through them. It was a good week and a half of me pounding my head against walls before I really started to get it. You’re not alone on having a learning curve. :)