Think of it this way - even in, say, action movies, the heroes inevitably ends up needing to break the law because of injustice and some such, if only for a bit. If they make the earlier, petty thefts justifiable for players more concerned about the law, then they don't really have to touch the later contents beyond the early game.

And as that it's fine, but I think a solution needs to be found for players like these as well. And there used to be one.
It might have bothered me less if the option to get through Persuasive content without romance or heavily romantic-coded relationships had been impossible from the start. But it was possible, you could get through with art or honey-dreams or whatever you wanted.

TheThirdPolice wrote:

Another idea could be a new option that lets you bypass a tier if you have a much higher value in the relevant attribute; basically a version of the old system that's opt-in and easy to implement.

That sounds like the best of both worlds to me - you'd have the guideline, but you'd also have the option to take the harder path and grind past a certain level to bypass whatever you don't want to do. Leading to more varied character possibilities again and the option to go for the coherent guideline path, which sounds like a win-win to me.

It's very much intentional:

Alexis Kennedy wrote:

dov wrote:

s not the case, because this will make Fallen London a single track story common for all characters, despite appearances of being an Open World RPG based on player choices.

Design notes. This is and has always been intentional. If you don't like violence, it's very hard to advance Dangerous; if you don't like criminal activities, that rules out most Shadowy; if you don't like sex, drugs and poetry, Persuasive is a bust. People will always find ways to break the system for their own purposes, and that is not only fine but great, but we don't go out of our way to support it. Fallen London isn't an 'open world RPG' - it's a linked cycle of non-linear stories with strong elements of exploration and a lot of choice-based outcomes.


But even if it were - any 'open-world RPG' I can think of offers way less choice about character activities than Fallen London. The Witcher 3 and Skyrim are superb, but try playing a poet or a cat-burglar in either. Ultimately, any pre-written game will rule out the vast majority of roleplaying options. We can't be responsible for what characters players choose - we rule out a hundred billion options so we can focus on a hundred.

Quoted from this thread.

I think this is a brilliant suggestion. That's the kind of additions I'd absolutely love to see to the game, although as you say it will probably take a large amount of work to make all the ends meet.

Design philosophy or not, I reckon that the reason they chose to set things up as they did was mostly to avoid over-burdening the writers. I see no real way in which adding choices such as these could make Fallen London a worse experience, the only downside being the added workload.
That is a very real downside though, unfortunately.

• The typical player only has one character. In most RPGs I can keep a save file for the righteous paladin and a save file for the cutthroat swashbuckler. I get to explore all my options (including mutually exclusive decisions) without breaking roleplay.
• The story never comes to an end. In most RPGs, the roleplayer crafts their story arc to a satisfying conclusion, ignoring quests that don't fit that arc. In FL, nothing tells her to stop playing, so she logs on daily to see a big blinking doorway saying "more content, but not for you."
• If the RP conflict happens to lock a large amount of gameplay behind it, it could represent weeks of real-life time (in short snippets of course), versus two or three evenings for most RPGs. The content quantity may be comparable, but the medium makes the loss seem larger.
  

I must say I mostly agree with the point in the first post. This new approach is a role-playing nightmare.

We are being forced to do things that could be extremely out of character in order to gain access to further content. While this has been the case before as well, now it's a straight "block all persuasive stories until you engage in a romance" kind of thing, which is way worse.

Frankly I've mostly given up on serious role-playing in Fallen London long ago, when I discovered you have to be all the things at once (aka murderous lustful cleptomanic artist-scientist) if you want to advance in the game.

I've accepted this as a design decision and I'm mostly just enjoying things without thinking of them too personal. Now if I have to kill and steal to advance I just close my eyes and think "this is not me, this is just pushing buttons" and go on playing (which is kind of psychotic, if you think about it!). Breaks immersion? Yes. But does not break enjoyment, at least.

Setting aside the asexual / aromantic question for a moment, since I think it could be dealt with differently -- the new Persuasive tracker content has seven levels, each with a chunk of story attached. The Shadowy tracker would presumably be similar, and it'll be about the story of a specific criminal career -- one that probably involves area-diving early on, then following the Affair of the Box to the Flit, maybe pulling off a Heist, going on to Mahogany Hall to worm your way into the Kashmiri Princess' dressing room, and maybe eventually starting your own newspaper in the aftermath of the Box affair.

There would be a couple options to handle "law-abiding" characters in this kind of story:

- add law-abiding choices throughout, which would probably look something like "the constables approach you to go undercover for them and area-dive / heist." Notably, the beginning of Affair of the Box already has something like this -- where you refuse to do a crime, and end up snarled in an intrigue anyway. This is probably an extra couple storylets per section -- but it does present some further narrative problems in that the character of the Shadowy tracker, as it continues to extend, has to be assumed to be EITHER a criminal OR a mole. It's not double the work, but it's a harder story to write. You can replace "mole for the Constables" with something else, I guess -- "associate of criminals who refuses to ever get her hands dirty" I suppose? But that's the same level of writing snarl with less drama.

- just leave it as-is, and if law-abiding characters don't want to do a crime, then they never advance in the story; they miss out on six out of those seven chunks of story. This isn't that different than if you choose to roleplay a character in Skyrim who has zero desire to become the Dovahkiin or wants nothing at all to do with fighting dragons, getting powers from mysterious monks, etc. You can still play the rest of the game; you could make an alt who you do play as a dragonborn-dragonslayer; there's plenty of other stuff to do, but you don't see the rest of that storyline with that particular character because you're just not the Dovahkiin, unlike most other player characters. Or similarly, some FL characters (mine included, for 5+ years of existence) have never gotten exiled from Court, perhaps because they don't trust that oily Privy Counselor or don't find any of the reasons (in http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/Why_are_you_doing_this%3F) compelling enough. And that keeps you out of Foreign Office and Carnelian Coast, unless you change your mind. Note that even with the Persuasive tracker, there are plenty of ways to raise your Persuasive... but you can't ever get into the Shuttered Palace if you play someone who refuses to ever toady up to Society snobs. That was true even before the tracker was added, and was a tricky choice to rationalize for my own character way back when. But you can roleplay all sorts of things if you don't mind the game not acknowledging them.

- I suppose there's a third in-between way to add a "moment of truth" choice in the first real criminal activity ("ok, you've earned their trust, but now you actually have to cosh the night watchman and break in, and they're looking expectantly at you -- can you do it?") where law-abiding players can make that huge decision NOT to be a criminal, and maybe betray criminals to the constables instead, ending the story early and sealing the rest of the Shadowy tracker. (Unless you redo the story and change your ways for the worse.) This acknowledges roleplaying, and points out "not being criminal" as an option, but doesn't try to accommodate both criminals and law-abiders in the Shadowy tracker story.

Now, the aro/asexual stuff, on the other hand, I think could be addressed with some language tweaks. There's nothing mandatory in the current Fascinating... content that implies you've ever done anything sexually with any of the people involved, for instance. You can break off your relationship with the Barbed Wit or the Acclaimed Beauty after they fall in love with you by chastely revealing that no, you're not actually interested in them that way. And that bumps the Persuasive tracker to the next level. I think this might satisfy the roleplaying requirements of an aro/asexual character, as long as you're willing to play the Persuasive game by being fascinating and charming enough to fall in love with?

If that's not your character -- you don't either pursue romantic passion OR ever risk toying with others' affections, intentionally or not -- then well, you are not the Dovahkiin of this story, which is about social-climbing, charm, and manipulating personal relationships for gain. There are a few places where I think the Persuasive tracker COULD use some language tweaks, though; the bridge of the Seduction: Honey-Sipper arc where you cash in your Fascinating... to continue implies that you are actually dating your Honey-Sipper for a few weeks, then breaking up. It's a rather odd story-beat anyway, and I don't think it even made sense to me until a close re-reading just now, but I think it could be massaged similarly: you're fascinating this person (maybe not seducing them, since that implies more) and then you're either keeping them on a string, declaring your undying love and proposing marriage (a current choice for the jewel-thief) or ditching them (which does happen in several of the subsequent storylets, and bumps the tracker to the next level).
edited by metasynthie on 8/17/2015

Eh, it's not strictly impossible to advance without killing or stealing right now.
edited by Katistrophe on 8/17/2015
edited by Katistrophe on 8/17/2015

I just came back in the middle of brushing my teeth to comment on that, actually! XD It came to me a few minutes after I submitted that and walked off. I see no reason why it couldn't be supported even if the player character's love becomes a big central theme.
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edited by Sara Hysaro on 8/17/2015