Ah I see, you want to know that the player knows what they don’t know, so they know to use the skills they don’t know to break reality.
My head hurts now.
That sounds like quite a fun scene which could go any number of ways. I would definitely get -1 bravery I think.
As someone whose game and its reviews were spammed by homophobic players, I read your message yesterday and had a think. Saying the negative comments didn’t affect me would be a lie. I was angry and sad (smad if you will). HOWEVER, the players who love Moonrise, the reviews that really tried to understand what I was trying to say in the game, the two (2!) people who said it inspired them and their journey in game development…that means WAY more to me. Yes, the game is flawed. Yes, it had a rocky release. Yet Moonrise is a success in my mind and in my career. It taught me so much. It got into the hands of people who needed it.
Which is kind of all to repeat what people said above: write for the audience that will love your work, not for the haters. It’s normal to worry about people disliking elements of your story, but when you’re writing for minority identities, write for them, the players of those seldom-seen identity. Write for the queer people seeking mirrors, and the non-queer people seeking windows.
Best of luck, you got this!!! 
Bad faith (or just bad) criticism is an occupational hazard in this line of work, and I think the best way to sift the good (even if it’s mean-spirited) criticism from the bad is to have a clear artistic vision. If you know the kind of story you want to tell and the kind of emotions you want to evoke, then you will have a much better idea of which critiques will let you tell that story better, and which ones will detract from it.
You’ll need to build the character a certain way to get any, after all!
Still debating with myself if I should follow my inclination to intentionally annoy people. Wouldn’t sound like a financially smart decision, but boy wouldn’t it be funny.
I am a troll descendant after all.
Wait I never even though of tracking stats like that. How do you do it, if you don’t mind me asking? Like are you keeping track in a spreadsheet how many times each stat is tested or boosted or whatever?
Yeah, pretty much. It’s not fine-tuned yet, and I really should look into a programmatical way of doing that, but spreadsheets are way lower-cost initial investment, and I don’t have the energy for the higher cost, so spreadsheets it is.
Would it be too much to ask for a screenshot of how this might look?
In my recent games I track how often stats are tested. If you look at the code for the free part of Honor Bound, or the demo for The Earth Has Teeth, there are variables called things like test_strength that are incremented each time they’re used. Then I do a big RandomTest check after I finish each chapter to see how often the variables reach certain thresholds. It means I can fine-tune how useful (or not) each stat is.
That’s how I check how hard the game is as well. I’m on my phone at the moment, but will grab the code for my stat balancing file when I have a minute.
I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand at a glance that the above symbols were meant to show potential negative stats. I’m not sure that it would be clear that negative stats mean “this is worse than bad” either - might it be clearer to have 1 as meaning “no skill” and 0 as “utterly ignorant of this and worse than incompetent”?
Edit: in the WoD rules as written, 0 in a skill means “untrained” and puts you at a penalty if you try to use it. Perhaps that sort of thing might be more understandable from player perspective?
Hello yall!
Been a minute since I popped into these threads, but I do check on em from time to time to see how everyone’s doing. I feel like May was a big month for many WIP’s, both positively, with a bunch of big updates dropped, and negatively, with some authors leaving or taking breaks from this space.
I feel for all the authors who may become discouraged, and I wish the best for yall and hope that any challenges faced can be overcome!
For a quick personal update, in TMOTD, I dropped a big update last month that wrapped up a branch of the flashback chapter. As happy as I was to get it out and move on to the next branch, I was actually surprised by how much it took out of me. It felt like I’d written a whole novella, and I needed a couple of weeks before I could even look at my work and implement bug fixes.
Good news is progress has been back on track, and I’m happy to be writing alongside yall. Best of luck to everyone and happy Pride month!
I’ve done this before, pacing stories to intentionally invoke ennui, or anger, or a sense that they’re being fucked with.
If you don’t let it drag out to the point where the player quits, and give them enough hints that this is by design and you are going to let them have their “revenge” for this, and then stick the landing, it can work.
But it’s a very thin tightrope to balance on.
I normally balance purely on vibes and feedback ,the way Saint Joshua of Irvine intended, but of course, that has its own pitfalls.
Do you find that Randomtest can emulate human patterns of play close enough to give you an accurate picture? Or do you still fill in the gaps with what your playtesters think?
Currently, yes. I have more a concept of one than a functional one, since I haven’t actually been doing any coding, so it hasn’t been usability-tested. It’s possible I’ll just make a mess of things.
That is certainly what a reasonsble designer would do, innit? Even if I wouldn’t agree that WoD rules always make all that much sense.
And I did consider that, originally, when I was hashing out the stat levels, for stat bars’ sake if nothing else. But the zero already means untrained in the reasonable sense! If I made the negative one 0 instead, then regular-untrained would be 1, and then I’m just BSoD’ing my brain.
(Not that the math itself is that important. It’s just that -1 makes sense to my programmer brain, so I’m using that on mechanical-concept level.)
I could, of course, get rid of the idea, but full (5 or 10, I haven’t decided yet) means “ridiculously overcompetent” (at which point you can break reality by being too good in a skill), and I like the symmetry of having “ridiculously incompetent” on the other end.
Not to worry too much, though. I want players to be well informed what they can expect to accomplish with what levels, so I’m going to explain it on stats screen.
(It would be ○┃○○○○○ for negative stat and ●┃○○○○○ for regular-zero, which I’d have assumed would be possible to intuit that the latter is better, but I’m going to use some kind of explanation labels and then a more in-depth explanation in some kind of user manual.)
Although I suppose I could simply make it six (or eleven) dots instead of five (ten) and set the one as “basic knowledge” instead of “untrained”, but… I really hate non-divisible-by-five dot amounts! Argh. Need to rebalance my math again.
Perhaps I’m strange but I quite like this as a narrative flourish. Having the narrator be in conversation with the player is a unique reading experience that’s only really possible in a medium like this.
About stats and testing and so on:
I basically borrow and tweak the below method to gauge how difficult my games are:
It’s pretty reliable - I used it to make sure that Royal Affairs was a bit easier to succeed at than Creme de la Creme, for example, and it helps me gauge how powerful stats are and even whether I should cut them from the game if they’re not pulling their weight.
In The Earth Has Teeth for example, one of my stats is Connect which is about connecting to someone on a social level or understanding them empathetically.
In startup I create the following:
*create con 35
*create con_very_lo 25
*create con_mid_lo 40
*create con_mid 50
*create con_mid_hi 60
*create con_hi 75
*create test_con 0
Here’s an example of a testing choice using Connect ingame:
#I try to make a connection with him so he drops his guard. @{stats [Tests Connect]|}
*set test_con +1
"If you're here to see the Superiors," you say, "you're in the wrong place. I can take you that way."
The stranger hesitates.
*if con > con_mid_lo
He glances over his shoulder, his grip loosening on the dagger. "We got in by mistake," he says, "we're not here to hurt anyone…"
*else
*set health -5
He looks for a moment as though he's convinced, but then he lunges with the dagger, slashing along your ribs. As you stumble back, clamping your hand to your side, he grabs you and slams you against the tunnel wall.
After my final chapter I add my stat balancing file to the *scene_list.
One of the sections includes this along with the equivalents for all the other stats. When I run RandomTest with line coverage lists enabled, it tells me how high or low the stats can go, and how often that happens.
*if con <= con_very_lo
*comment Connect [b]Poor.[/b]
*elseif con <= con_mid_lo
*comment Connect [b]Unremarkable.[/b]
*elseif con <= con_mid
*comment Connect [b]Commonplace.[/b]
*elseif con <= con_mid_hi
*comment Connect [b]Noteworthy.[/b]
*else
*comment Connect [b]Exceptional.[/b]
I also have this section. The exact numbers will vary depending on where I’m at in the game. The line coverage stats will tell me approximately how often a player will encounter a Connect test - ie how powerful/useful that stat is.
*if test_con = 0
*comment con 0
*elseif test_con < 5
*comment con 1-4
*else
*comment con 5+
It gives me a ballpark idea! I definitely fill in the gaps though. Recently @gracierocket came across a branch in The Earth Has Teeth in which a couple of early testing choices didn’t include Connect at all, which is annoying for players at the best of times but especially at the beginning, and that kind of thing is where RandomTest doesn’t give useful information. So I’d say it’s really good at top-level information and does help me have a broad sense of whether I’m in the right direction, but it doesn’t replace player feedback.
I like it too when it’s done well, there’s a nice voice in The Ghost and the Golem back-and-forth with the PC that I enjoy. I think there’s a bit of it in the delightful Choice of the Deathless as well.
I’d like to think I’ve taken the idea a bit further than that, especially in more recent work. I suppose if I have anything like a “house style”, it involves treating the narrative voice like an unreliable narrator, who reflects the biases of the MC’s chosen personality stats, and the biases of their assumed societal position.
Like, for example, A Time of Monsters has a hidden sarcasm stat, which determines not only how snarky your MC can be, but also how snarky the narration is.
As an example:
Again, smile and nod. The other guy—the real maintenance worker—smiles and nods back, before walking off with the rest of his crew, his flashlight slowly receding into a dim glow behind you.
That was easy.
Again, smile and nod. The other guy—the real maintenance worker—smiles and nods back, before walking off with the rest of his crew, his flashlight slowly receding into a dim glow behind you.
It’s amazing what you can get away with if you just shut the fuck up and let people think what they want to think.
Have you ever had a case where randomtest throws you a false positive because the RNG keeps going down paths which no reasonable player will ever do (like a combination of obviously contradictory decisions)?
I love this a ton, it brings me a great deal of joy to play and write, along with shifting the voice depending on the PC’s personality. Just a lot of fun bringing more texture in there!
I do remember with Royal Affairs, a continuity reader (the ones who read a RandomTest output rather than playing themselves) saying it felt bizarre being able to say you’d love to give everyone the vote, then turn around to say the opposite, then change your mind again. RandomTest being random had no consistency in the PC’s opinions. For some stuff I like giving players the opportunity to be weird, so I kept it but had characters respond so it didn’t look like a bug. I don’t know if any real players went for that series of options though!
One of the first things I was taught in software design was “never assume the users are going to be reasonable”, so I wouldn’t call that a false positive, personally.
I think the way I structure paths, if I’m giving someone an option it should make sense on some level. If the player has gone so far down a route where taking a particular choice would make no sense at all, I don’t give the option. But if there’s room for doubt, or a betrayal, or some other swerve in another direction, I do like including it, and giving the PC options about why they’re choosing this.
I call this the “presumption of competence”, where I ask myself if an MC possessed of the biases, socialisation, contextual knowledge, and a reasonable degree of self-preservation would consider a given course of action rational or not. If the answer is yes, I try to include it. If not? Then I don’t, and sometimes use the narration to explain why it’s not an option.
I think it helps immerse the player into the headspace of the main character, which is especially useful if the MC’s home culture (like that of a Tierran aristocrat) is very different from that of the average player.
…I realized I forgot to put down my goals for the month LOL 
After achieving my goal to work AND survive May, my goal for the June is finish Chapter 9’s edits. The major revisions are already complete and it’s all line edits from here. So. Should be doable.
IT’S PRIDE MONTH (in the usa)
YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.
ONE MILLION DRAG QUEENS NEAR ME
(seriously, I feel like there’s a great uptick in drag performances this year, it’s very fun and I wish I could attend all of them)
One of my favorite authors, Rien Gray, published another lesbian Arthuriana romance and it is so deeply good. The 20 minutes of work + 20 minutes of fun schedule worked very well for me on June 1st. Edited sapphic stuff for 20 minutes; read sapphic stuff for 20 minutes. This installment, Galeas the Keen, is more a de-toxifying kind of yuri, but if I need to toxify I will play ebi-hime’s Her Love, Like Poison. 