"Talon City: Death from Above" by Eric Moser

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I just observed something I think might be pretty relevant.

The blurbs on Steam and Google Play, and the mailing-list release from CoG, all just say “by Eric Moser.” There’s no mention of any of your previous work.

I would have bought Talon City no matter what, because I buy every Hosted Games release - and I like mysteries, so I wouldn’t exactly have been dreading it. But the reason the weird owl lawyer game made my list whenever someone asked what games fans were most looking forward to in the near future is that I trusted Eric Moser, author of one of my top-tier favorite series, to come up with something well-written, well-plotted, and entertaining.

I wonder if the reason the game was so much more successful among the “hardcore HG customers” is that we know who “Eric Moser” is? Whereas more casual fans who may well have played CCH and enjoyed it but don’t know the author’s name might have been more willing to at least give the owl lawyer noir a chance if they knew it was by the same guy?

If I were going to market this, I wouldn’t rebrand it. I would just slap “NEW FROM THE CREATOR OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE HERO” on every available surface.

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I feel abit mean posting my opinion here, but the opinions you have received have been from people who like the premise of Talon City. Sorry if I’m overstepping my bounds but I wanted to provide an opinion opposite to someone who is not drawn by animal media.

I started reading your games a LONG time ago with your first book, CCH1, and I loved it. Since then I’ve experienced a wide variety of stories and I think it’s safe to say I know what I personally like. Which of course, does not mean others should think like I do. However, what put me off personally was the premise of being an Owl and the whole alien aspect to it. To further elaborate, what drew me to Choice of Games in the first place was being able to experience narratives that I would love to experience myself. For example, the freedom to be free of the social heriarchy and wreaking havoc in Fallen hero or being part of something bigger than myself like in The golden Rose.

This leads to why I chose not to experience Talon City, I have no interest in being an owl or doing owl like activities - nor do human stuff as an owl. I find it hard to relate to non-human entities, especially ones that are not humanoid in shape. I fully admit to pre-judging and assumption based on one fact, but it does put me off regardless of my human failings. I suppose my specific problem is that I like to self insert and use these stories as escapism from stress. I also think my perception of animal protagonists has been warped by years of being on the internet.

I really don’t want to snub work that you have quite clearly put heart and soul into, not to mention hours upon hours of your life, but hopefully this incoherant rambling gets my thoughts across. Regardless, I think writing what you love is important and if that is Talon City, there are ways to keep it alive with or without interactive fiction as a medium for your vision.

I wish you success in your future projects :slight_smile:

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I’m in the boat of loving the story/world/characters - I liked the detective noir mystery and my Owl BUT I really disliked the game mechanics and dice rolling even though I play tabletop games irl. I had very bad luck while playing and my Owl died close to the end. I wouldnt mind if I failed because it was one of my choices earlier coming back as a consequence, but dying because of an uncontrollable game mechanic bugged me - because even when going with options correlating to my highest stats I still ended up rolling 5s and failing so my owl just embarrassed himself

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I kinda now want a T-shirt “An imaginary bird hurt my feelings”

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Yea, would second this idea-sometimes using your previous cred can help make a piece of media that is a bit more out of the box a bit more appealing…or at least more willing to stick around before dropping it.

To me, this game feels like it will hit cult classic territory, like Re-Animator for Horror Movies or Mother 3 for RPGs-something that pushes the envelope and is quite good in quality, but is doomed to be overlooked because it doesn’t hit the general appeal.(A lot of times, said cult classics do contribute to giving ideas to big hits, however-see Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and Earthbound for their contributions to Undertale 's big rise)

Hopefully, once you don’t have to worry as much about the financial aspect- you can come back to this odd little universe and tell more tales for it…if you feel they need to be told, of course.

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I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and I honestly think that RNG systems like this are worse for this type of story based game because they encourage a focus on the numbers and not a focus on the story. As an example of what I mean, let’s take a scenario sorta like one in Talon City. I want to get into a club, but the bouncers won’t let me through the door. I can either beat the bouncers up or try to sneak in when they’re distracted by something.

In a stat-based game, my thought process goes something like this: “I’m really good at fighting, so I could almost certainly beat up a couple of bouncers, but that would cause a scene and maybe draw attention, and they’re probably just dudes doing a job who don’t really deserve a beating. I’m not the best at being sneaky, but I’m okay at it and if they catch me I can just beat them up then, so I’m gonna try to sneak in.” This is an in character roleplaying focused approach, choosing something I’m not great at because the thing that I am great at might cause collateral damage I don’t want to deal with.

In Talon City my thought process goes like this: “I’ve got a 67% chance to win a fight and a 33% chance to sneak in and I lose the game if I fail too many times, fighting is the slam pick here.” No thoughts about roleplaying or what the character might want to do in these circumstances, just take the highest chance every time because failures are punished by losing and you never know if you’re gonna need this point in the future after you hit a couple of sixes.

I also feel like it’s worth noting here that when we were talking about paths through the game, not one of us mentioned the story or any kind of roleplaying concerns about which choice to make, because there are no real choices like that to make. You make three choices at the start of the game and those three choices pretty much determine what choices have to take through the game if you want to stay alive, even though the choices that determined the stats are completely unrelated to most of the choices that use the stats. None of the choices have been brought up in any kind of story-focused “which is the better outcome” kind of way, it’s all been “Yeah Beak+Wings maximizes the efficiency of your stat bonuses” type stuff.

Most of the fans of your games are going to be fans of your storytelling and characters. That’s the case for me, at least. If you start making games that make storytelling and immersion secondary to math, which is the case with Talon City, you are working against your strongest point as an author. IMO, it would also be damaging to your brand. Personally, I know that Talon City has changed me from “I liked his other stuff, this is a day one buy” to “I don’t trust his RNG systems, I’ll play the demo and run some numbers and maybe wait for reviews”, because I would not be interested in another game that uses a system that places math over story.

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107

I do wonder, though-tabletop games also have RNG based mechanics and yet are able to give story-centric experiences if the campaign tilts that way(like rolling charisma or Intelligence skill checks)- what makes the RNG much less accepted here?

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Table top games have a DM that changes the mechanics and even the story plot lines as needed to facilitate the roleplay, game, whatever…

The difference is the DM’s storytelling flexibility inherit in a table top

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In a TTRPG, you can influence how often stat checks are rolled by how often your character attempts something unlikely or difficult, and exactly what stat gets checked by exactly what field of study or training you are attempting to use.

In this game, every playthrough sees the exact same number of stat checks (well, excepting deaths), and every stat is tested an identical number of times. Hence the people above saying there is no way to skillfully alter your probabilities: the challenges the character faces always occur as often, and with the same stats tested, no matter what.

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110

What about an option to hide the mechanics? Explain how it works in the beginning, then let the player decide if they want to see the percentages in the options and the outcome of dice rolls. That way, those of us who want a more immersive roleplay experience can have one.

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I like the recent deployment of the story-teller mode in a few of the recent releases, and feel this has added a lot to the games in question. (for example, in clarifying ambiguous choices.)

With that said, the main issues I see as being in question here have more to do with actual game design and what is preferred by the game’s players.

For example: One such issue is the min-max shenanigans that are baked into rng mechanic solutions.

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The problem people have brought up here is not that the stats-to-be-checked and probabilities-of-success values are displayed on the screen. One problem is the high-level structure of the story; the other is the low-level design of every stat check, such that success or failure in it—and, as an aggregate of those results, in each act of the story—is effectively arbitrary.

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I was referring to what @KZV had said about the mechanics leading to a focus on the numbers rather than a focus on the story. I’ve done only one playthrough, and I didn’t have a problem with the mechanics, but I did find that the focus on numbers inhibited my immersion and led to my making stats-based decisions rather than roleplay decisions, as KZV suggests.

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Hiding the numbers wouldn’t fix the problem; the math would still be the same. It’d still be the optimal choice to use your best stat in every choice rather than using your worse stat. All the stat A vs. stat B choices are mechanically identical, none of them branch the story or gate any content, so there’s no benefit to making a roleplaying decision over a numbers-based one. The only thing putting that value in the #option line does is save the player from needing to open their stat screen on every page to remind themselves which of those two stats is higher.

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Goodness, it’s hard to keep up with the conversation!

So, about mechanics, first I wanted to explain why I deviated from the standard approach…

  1. With standard (*if charisma > 65) approach, sometimes your character will either be totally greyed out from taking an action (if the author chooses a gatekeeping approach) or otherwise your character is doomed to fail if they take the action (another approach) or perhaps they can partially succeed by failing the action but still pumping up that tested attribute as a bit of a consolation prize.

  2. But with all of the above, it’s usually a blind guess; you’re left guessing whether your attribute is “good enough” with no real context to make the decision (although it’s possible greyed out choices might mention the stat needed to explain why it’s greyed out).

So with the die mechanic…

1)I felt it brought more transparency (you know your chances)…

  1. and I felt since nothing was ever impossible, you could take a risk on certain actions, because there was never a guaranteed loss awaiting you.

BUT…I found myself nodding to much of what @KZV said, that putting the numbers out there and being transparent and relying on die rolls almost certainly draws players’ attention to the mechanics, perhaps to the detriment of the story, and I HATE HATE HATE the idea of that, because I feel much more comfortable in my storytelling abilities than with my mechanical approaches. As someone said in another thread I think (or maybe it was this one?), video games can almost always do mechanics better than we can with IF, but we should definitely be able to do story better.

So where does that leave us?

The advantages of the ‘regular system’ are that you can always code dive and figure out how to succeed on a subsequent playthrough by building your character in a certain way, so there’s that, but it still pushes people to play to their highest stats over and over.

With the die roll mechanic, nothing is off the table, anything is possible, but perhaps it draw too much attention to the math, and it makes it impossible to build your MC a certain way to guarantee victories (unless a ‘blackstop’ mechanism is included to make sure MCs with like 90 strength don’t fail simple strength rolls by rolling unluckily rolling a 10.

So what’s the lesson here?

Rewards - focus more on the rewards/secondary variables you earn with each victory, and how much of them you win? So if you could win double XP by choosing an action that just-so-happened to test one of your lower variables, would you 'roll the dice?" This seems interesting to me, but it still seems like it would reduce game play to a mathematical exercise.

Are Failures Bad? Okay, yes it’s bad to die in Talon City, I accept that, but outside of dying, is it “bad” to fail some rolls and be embarrassed? In this story, no I don’t think so. It’s not really a power fantasy, and the natural beats of a story generally include some “yes buts” or “no ands” where your character experiences failure but either finds a new way or gets some help. I personally think failing some die rolls in Talon City enhances the experience, because you can maybe sympathize more with Feeders and other birds with lower societal ranks than yours. There’s not as much tension when you win win win.

In a power fantasy, I guess I’d see the appeal of having no stat checks at all, just letting the MC do as they pleased, with making the emphasis on WHY they do what they do, and how their actions impact others.

I remember playing this Marvel table top rpg with my brothers when I was in middle school, and I just remember that whenever I was Thor, I would play like this:

Swing my hammer!
Swing my hammer!
Swing my hammer!

It was both Thor’s best chance to hit and his biggest damage-dealer. You could not convince 11-year-old me to adopt any other approach (it’s possible a good GM could have done that); left to our own devices we just went with our characters’ strengths every single time, and it got really boring. So I don’t want to make games like that. If I failed with Talon City in that regard, that’s all on me, and it would be an error I regret. I just wanted to try something different, I wanted to make all wins possible, and I wanted players to have a better idea of their chances of success (but yes they are still “chances of success,” not “promises of success.”)

Now this whole discussion is making my second-guess all the work I’ve put into Final Monologue, which is VERY stat-heavy.

Anyways, here are some more questions as I engage in stream-of-consciousness typing…

About Balance: If you played Talon City and then afterwards I told you, “Yeah, Talons gets tested a lot more than the others,” what would be your reaction? Would you be like, “Why? That seems to be the author telling us the best way to play!” or would you be like, “Cool! :smiley: I’m gonna roll a fighter MC next time then!”

There seems to be a big split in people’s approaches to that. I thought I was doing right by the players to balance all the stats, to make none of them better or worse than the others, to encourage a variety of builds, BUT…do people actually want unbalanced? Do they response positively to certain stats being more OP, because then they get excited about rerolling and playing an OP character? Or maybe they say, “I’ll stay away from Talons to make more of a challenge for myself!” I don’t quite understand the consensus, I guess.

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I prefer balance, rather than a single dominant stat, but I’ll be interested to see what others say.

On the wider issue of regrets: you know I’m an “art for art’s sake / write for my own satisfaction” guy, but I think even from an extrinsic rewards perspective, the regrets don’t need to be quite so bitter as some of what you’ve expressed above. Entrepreneurs take risks. Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don’t… but the latter outcome doesn’t mean it was dumb to try.

There are so many more successful subgenres in just about any area of pop culture than when I was a kid. That’s the result of creators trying new things. There’s no way to know before you have a try whether your particular innovation is going to find an audience or not.

Not every creative person is an entrepreneur; not everyone can afford to be, and of those who can, even fewer have the risk appetite. It’s fine if you don’t want to be. You’ve got a terrific angle on superhero fiction, arguably CoG/HG’s most popular genre.

But I think it’s great that you also took a shot at being the guy known for kicking off a bird noir genre. And you realized the concept well… notwithstanding the debates over mechanics (which I’ve also had in spades – lots of readers HATE XoR chapter two) you’ve had a host of warm reviews. None of us are writing to perfection, but it would have been hard to serve your novelty up much better to the whims of the buying public.

Those whims are out of our hands – whether we’re asking them to try something unusual or to take a chance on enjoying our version of the 1,000th gritty fantasy empire epic out there. It’s fair enough for you to decide this experiment failed and not pour time into a sequel…but I’m glad you tried the experiment.

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That doesn’t give me enough information. I’d need to know the high-level structure of the story.

If it’s linear like TC, so that every playthrough sees all the same checks, then it’s irrelevant during play, after chargen is over. If stats are tested unequally in the linear case, it’s a return to the old CRPG problem where you can lose the game right in chargen, before you even start to play, by building a party of all white mages, or a fighter with poor strength, or a wizard with poor intelligence and vitality, or whatever unplayable (or vastly more difficult) build that will turn out to be unsuited to the challenges upcoming in the game.

Whereas if the story can go down one path that will test Talons more, which forecloses other path(s) which test Talons less, then that’s an interesting choice—as long as that difference is signposted at the moment of the choice. And if those two paths have different narrative outcomes (as in not just mechanical pass/fail, stockpiling another success, but instead picking one vs. the other affects different things going forward), then that presents the player with a narrative or character-based, not game-mechanics-based, reason to head down one path over the other. And if the path they want promises to be more difficult mechanically, then that’s an interesting dilemma for the player; will they take the safe but boring option, or the risky but potentially higher reward option? But again, this is only fair as long as these potential differences in narrative outcomes are signposted at the moment of choice, as well.

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Drat. Reading this made me realize I missed the obvious… ‘hoo-dunnit’.

I really did like the story, and of course, I had already said I was interested in a sequel; but I can absolutely understand the reticence to invest free time into something that underperforms. Wish I could have helped move more eyes to it for you.

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One important thing that I think hasn’t been brought up yet is how heavily entwined the concepts of repeatability and replayability usually are in these games. Most of the time when I replay one of these games, I am hunting a specific outcome. Maybe I want to go through an old favorite storyline again, maybe I want to go through a specific new path. New romance, new ending, hunting an achievement, whatever. If my ability to do this is hindered by RNG mechanics, the game loses a lot of value as far as I am concerned. It sucks when the RNG causes you to miss a story part you were looking forward to, and it really sucks when your only real recourse is to restart the game/chapter and make the exact same choices all over again hoping that you’re luckier this time, and it really really sucks if you have to make it through multiple RNG checkpoints before reaching that point.

And if the RNG doesn’t have big effects, then what’s it really doing? If it’s not actually changing how the game goes, what’s the point? IMO, it ends up being a situation where meaningful RNG often ends up harming a game more than it helps it because what I usually want out of these games is being able to dependably reach the parts of the story I want to see.

I think you are overestimating how many people will jump on a 15% chance because ‘maybe there’s a chance!’. Personally, I think this will decrease the amount of people willing to take those kinds of options. I look at it this way: During my first few playthroughs I won’t know the results of any of the checks, since I haven’t made them yet. These, then, are basically random. There could be anything behind that door, after all. Maybe the check is particularly generous. Maybe there’s a twist. Maybe there’s a partial success if I’m just a little low. Who knows? Anything’s possible. On the other hand, if that door’s got a big “85% FAILURE RATE” sign on it I’m probably gonna pass it by, because I’ve got a pretty good idea about what’s waiting for me on the other side of it.

Think of it this way: In a purely stat-based system I will not know if a choice is impossible, but in an RNG-based system I will know when something is improbable and that has a huge effect on decision making.

The thing about this is that RNG won’t solve this problem. I mean, the game you’re talking about seems to have had an RNG factor to it and at age 11 you looked at it, identified the thing with the best odds, and went with it. Why would you expect other people to do differently now? Would choosing something else simply for the sake of choosing something else have really been that much more fun?

You’ll never get people to stop picking the hammer by offering them the chance to pound nails with a wrench at a 30% success rate. You get people to stop choosing the hammer every time by giving them problems that they can’t fix with a hammer.

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I also would love to get away from the “swing my hammer” /best stat is only stat I can use style that choice script seems to tend toward. But I also agree that pure chance can be a distracting if not outright frustrating for readers.

What if you used a hybrid system? A certain level can auto succeed but other stats can have percentage based success? Perhaps with an experience based improvement of subpar skills to reward readers who take chances on using them?

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