Yeah, Winterstrike was the first StoryNexus game I saw (through this thread), and my first thought was “ah, this looks very much like Fallen London, not just in the mechanics but in the writing and structure, that must be the best format for QBNs”. Then I saw the Samsara playthrough which felt totally different and got a better sense for the versatility available.
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I think there’s an Emily Short review where she points out that a lot of StoryNexus games follow the Fallen London “house style,” in the sense of having lots of luxurious descriptions of luxurious settings, whispered conversations with elegant and secretive strangers, et cetera., which I don’t think can reasonably be attributed to the mechanics.
I haven’t played Samsara, and tbh I found the formatting of the let’s play thread kinda confusing so I haven’t really followed it properly, but from what I can see it does also seem to fall into that mold as far as the writing is concerned.
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There’s definitely still luxurious descriptions and whispered intrigue in Samsara, but it felt a lot more grounded to me than Winterstrike or Fallen London. I have a much easier time visualizing what’s going on, rather than it being couched in elaborate metaphors and fantastical terms, even when what’s going on is very foreign to me.
Yeah, Annwn Simulation feels (to me) more mundane still, even with the fae tech:
Earn some cash with a ward
Your favorite restaurant keeps getting burgled. Try writing a program to magically ward people from entering unbidden.
- Try a warding script (You remember how to write a program to guard things. Mostly.)
- Set a code trap (You could try to catch them in the act, if your programming skills are up to it.)
And if you choose Try a warding script (and succeed):
Try getting through that!
Your program is finished. When you type RUN WARD_DOOR, the door jamb dances with a faint blue glow for a moment. No one’s getting through that without permission – or a counterspell.
You succeeded in a Skill - Brains challenge! You now have 10 x Dollars.
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I guess if it’s the implicitness/vagueness that you’re thinking about, then maybe the mechanics actually do matter a bit, in the sense that maybe the format of showing choices with a title and a description (rather than just listing your choices as “Do X/Do Y”), and to a lesser extent the “cards” abstraction, nudges the writer towards a less explicit, more implied/metaphorical/vague way of describing player choices?
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One thing I found in experimenting with QBN is a twofold observation:
- The use of qualities in advancing a story is potentially very powerful, but woefully underutilized. You get rumors from X, which are used to unlock Y, despite the two not being technically linked. But, so very often there is so much going on it can be hard to clue in to that emergent narrative. “Vagueness” here is a boon though. I found in writing a resource gain like rumors I had to be careful not to specify the rumor too much, so it can remain universally applicable.
- Cards/opportunities are often designed to be played as part of a grind. There’s a limit to how novel the writing can be kept here, but it certainly wouldn’t do any good to have your character experience a memorable event with every single use of a card. I’d like to think regularly used cards are good for representing the mundane things in your life, so ideally, they also represent vague abstractions with the occasional variant text thrown in.
I will stand and defend the hill that the Comtessa storyline is one of Fallen London’s strongest, because it actually manages to present you with a storyline once, but calls back to it in random decks, which does a fantastic job of connecting your character to the world, ruminate on their past decisions and even giving you time to reflect on your choices. Despite the text not being unique every time, this one actually does a fantastic job at encouraging emergent narrative thinking.
To that end, I think a lot can be accomplished by just tracking the character state to some extent. I’m currently writing a QBN detective game called “Concrete Requiem”. It may happen in this game that you end up meeting a suspect from a former case. This is where I feel the author can accomplish the most. In Concrete Requiem, I’m basically keeping track of every single suspect’s relation to you through the cases, just so I can change the text from “I first met…” to “I recalled her from another case…”
Now, I’m a bit of a nerd, so I’m using a bitwise operation to store those character states in a very big integer, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, Fallen London does have a strong house style, as early dev logs of Echo Bazaar reveal their efforts in developing a unique voice for it, and I think it’s also a mindset you slip into as you start writing QBN type games. Just like, when people start writing Visual Novels, the pacing of the dialogue can also feel derivative.
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