Do you have any plans to address the 10 to 12 gap for players already through the bulk of plot?

Also, if you're moving this way, do you plan to do anything about the storylets that advance a quirk to the cap, while continuing to lower another quirk, even while past that cap? I could be wrong but I feel like that where my other quirks went.

adjusting high-level quirks...

while glimpsing fragments of a larger narrative.

This could start with a translation of quirks above a certain level (8, 10, 15?) to x item/quality like "historical acts of hedonism" (people have written about what you have done, so you may still have currency via reputation even if not reflective of your current personality.)

How I could see this work: some person has 200 Hedonist, 18 Heartless, and 4 Daring. The system provides him with 200 Historical acts of Hedonism and 18 Historical accounts of Heartlessness and his qualities are 15 Hedonist, 15 Heartless, and 4 Daring.

That would have been my suggestion for quirks, to move in a more Notable direction. The two are almost identical already except one is balanced and the other is not. The key difference? Notability keeps grinds in check with a weekly bleed and quirks don't. That's my suggestion, bleed the quirks with TTH and make it more in line with your more successful already established reputation system. Everything else can remain more or less as is and it'd bring story into balance with grinding. It's a much more consistent build that way, rather than having two disparate reputation systems.

do you know what I'd do with the Quirk system, if I wanted it to be a solid indicator of weighty character choices and nothing else? Pave it over and start again. Reset all Quirks to zero, and remove all Quirk changes from repeatable content. ... implement a survey-style storylet that checks the relevant story qualities (if any)

We talked longingly about being able to do this, and I would love to have been able to, but we looked at the number of players with very high Quirk levels and realised it wasn't practical. The rant upthread notwithstanding, we don't like to erase people's lived choices.


Honestly, there used to be times when I *dreamed* of a wipe. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and walk away from Failbetter entirely rather than constantly have my nose rubbed in the consequences of undoing some decision I made at 3am five years ago. But now, f*ck it, we all live with the consequences of our decisions, and it's good training for a designer. :-)

But I think it's having one Quirk very high that makes getting the opposing Quirk equally high, difficult. So you can have Hedonism at 15 and Austere at 10, but having both at 15 should be incredibly difficult.
I don't think they're making it impossible, but more difficult..

Is the long-term plan to just completely disable any means of accessing Scarlet Saint, out of curiosity?
edited by Jeremy Avalon on 7/18/2015

This is something we've discussed internally, and rejected for [reasons] - sorry, I have a day of meetings and may talk in more detail later. But one of the minor reasons is that we plan to do something similar with Connections, ultimately, and quality bloat is an issue.

One-off content (like Ambitions) or more risky content (like a laudanum habit) will allow them to rise as high as 15.

Re: Paving it over.

This could start with a translation of quirks above a certain level (8, 10, 15?) to x item/quality like "historical acts of hedonism" (people have written about what you have done, so you may still have currency via reputation even if not reflective of your current personality.)

[...]
It's likely that this sort of approach has already been batted around internally, but it seems like Alexis's top concern was treating the embedded player base with respect for what they've accomplished, and I think this system does that.
edited by Theus on 7/22/2015

There would be some good things about this approach, but this is the kind of thing I mean when I say that we have to balance the needs of different kinds of player.

A crate of laudanum is probably cheaper, if more unsavory.

Brad O'Connell wrote:

Do you have any plans to address the 10 to 12 gap for players already through the bulk of plot?

Yes. Mostly, as Sara suggests upthread, through more plot. We're going to be adding story for a long time yet.

Brad O'Connell wrote:

Also, if you're moving this way, do you plan to do anything about the storylets that advance a quirk to the cap, while continuing to lower another quirk, even while past that cap? I could be wrong but I feel like that where my other quirks went.

No. If you do something massively un-Heartless, we want to reflect that even if you're already very Magnanimous.

Here's a drum I want to keep beating, because I want to be sure engaged players understand it well enough to explain it to the rest of the community:


We do want to make it slightly easier for someone who has a really specific long-term agenda for their character to keep high-level Quirks in line with this. There will always be surprises in story outcomes, no matter how carefully we signal - language is imperfect and people misclick.


We don't want to make it easier for people to collect 'em all, or to massage their Quirks up high without following one-off plots. We don't particularly mind if people find ways to do it, but it will never be a design goal.