Preach. Without fairmath, the only way to make a functional capping mechanism is to constantly check if the stat is between 0 and 100 and bring it back inside the interval if it’s not. Which is not only obnoxious, but also comes with its own set of potential problems.
And frankly, I find most complaints about the unbearable problems with fairmath to be kinda overblown anyway. As long as neither the author nor the reader is being completely stupid, it works just fine for personality and ability stats. Like no, a %-10 decrease isn’t going to flip your character’s personality instantly, just bring you down from 70% to 63% or something like that. Unless the game is using some extraordinarily large modifiers, jumping from one extreme to another isn’t something you’ll ever do by accident.
My only serious issue with fairmath is how using it for relationship stats makes the characters kinda neurotic, making them react to the MC better if they’re already pissed at said MC. But then again, modelling a relationship with a single stat is never that great of an idea anyway, and the more you rely on the actual history between those characters the better.
I don’t like it used in conjunction with personality stats, when it’s in a game where said personality stats are checked frequently and it can determine whether you pass or fail an important stat check
Fairmath is great for creating diminishing returns with stats that only really move one way.
But it gets frustrating with opposed stats, when you’ve actively worked to get a stat high, get a big dip from one single mistake/choice that goes against usual personality, and then have to make so many more ‘right’ choices to make up for the loss.
As a reader, you usually don’t know where the testing thresholds will be, so you usually want to get your stats as high as possible. And it’s justified, since not all authors seem to intuitively understand fairmath, and be able to ‘visualise’ it, so they might not understand that testing an opposed fairmath stat at 75 or 80 is really high.
Fair points! In the case of my project it’s because hitting 0 in the stat/resource is what triggers the scene I mentioned. It would feel, I guess, unfair that the resource lasted longer the lower it got, and causing something bad to happen before you actually run out feels wrong too.
I’m still not sure how people were getting to like -20%, my calculations had the absolute minimum as 5%.
One thing to remember is: people sometimes mod their files and then when there is breakage of one nature or another, this often gets left out of the reporting.
I’m neutral on modding in CS games, but this fact makes bug hunting and quashing more difficult regardless.
I am perfectly fine with modding or any kind of hacking with the sole caveat that once you touch my code, you’re on your own when it comes to support or bugfixing.
If you can learn to break it, then you better learn how to fix it.
True! I’ve had that possibility in the back of my head, it just seemed fairly incomprehensible that somebody would specifically lower that value and then call out that the resource ended up too low.
Is this a WIP we’re talking about? I don’t know how it is now, but it wasn’t that long ago that when dash restarted the chapter due to an update it didn’t always ALSO reset stat changes.
So it could’ve happened that someone played a chunk of a chapter that lowered the stat, you pushed an update which reset their game point but not the stat changes, and then they replayed the chapter with the same save which let them lower the stat again.
You may have done this already, but if not I’d recommend putting a temporary line at the end of your game saying: *if resourcevariable < 0 *bug
(but with correct indentation - I’m on my phone which isn’t behaving with the format)
and running 10000 RandomTests - this will show you whether it’s possible to happen when playing the game as intended because RT will fail if it’s under 0. If that happens you can investigate further. Once you’ve figured it out, you can just remove the lines of code.
I use this a lot for this kind of thing and for checking fiddly continuity where I’m concerned I’ve not covered all my bases, or where I want to make sure various things are mutually exclusive.
I absolutely hate using fairmath. If I had to pick the thing I am worst at, it would be stats and making challenges fair but also possible to fail. Doing that always feels like the video game equivalent of eating my greens.
During my bouts of insomnia, I often start my day’s work on Patchwerks early, which is good.
Tonight (or this morning), however, as I start the second ToDo item on my editing phase of the pre-beta copy, I find myself being sidetracked by a little thing I found deep in the details of a choice-tree.
I still have 35 distinct editing fixes to complete in the pass to check off my ToDo item, mind you.
My mind is fixating on this little detail it found and “wants” me to fix it before returning to my planned edits.
I know others feel the editing phase(s) are their least enjoyable tasks in making a CS game, but sometimes, even knowing I am not alone, isn’t as comforting as it normally is.
Insomnia lets me have these thoughts in the wee hours that only vampires and black cats should be prowling in.
Best of luck with the editing @Eiwynn. I had awful insomnia last week and very much sympathise - I hope it clears up soon.
Re fairmath and balancing, in my second game onwards I’ve used this method to set difficulty thresholds and gauge how hard it is to succeed and fail in a game. I’d been told that Creme de la Creme was relatively difficult, so when I did Royal Affairs I adjusted my target probability for successes pretty painlessly.
It’s especially good for opposed stats - sometimes it’s helped me notice that it’s much easier to get high Dutiful than Rebellious, for example, and can then course-correct.
The big thing I find challenging is making sure that the stats are tested evenly (eg Entertaining being as useful as Appealing, for example). It’s harder to view that information - though easier when there are markers on the choices that show what’s being tested - so it’s a lot more arduous to get through.
That’d be good too, but I’d be a little wary of trusting myself to keep it up to date. If it was a variable, you could use RandomTest to get a sense of what was going on in individual playthroughs, on average.
To be clear with Fairmath you literally can’t. Fairmath caps out at like, 3% I think, unless you use an utterly massive decrease. Same goes the other way with hitting 100%. Something to keep in mind
Really? On my first playthrough of Creme de la Creme I got everything I wanted with no real downsides, and I wasn’t using hints or anything. I remember failing a stat check twice, but there were no serious repercussions in either case. If anything, I was kinda annoyed by how low the base-game difficulty was, since it turned all these saves I made redundant.
And it’s not like I’m some COG genius who knows exactly how to manipulate stats in my favor. The mule management system in Choice of Rebels kicked my butt so badly I’m bitter about it even now, more than a year later. Those impotent equine bastards.
I like