Story Tellers, Frustration and a good story

[rexx1888]

i am currently very frustrated with the storytellers. which makes it hard to write objectively about them.
However, i think we need to have a chat about them, because they are always making me frustrated, regardless of what day it is or how long or short i play with them or which ones i play with. An if that isnt an indicator to me of a problem, i dont know what is.

An i see my constant frustration as a problem because A) I cannot be the only one and B) no good story was ever told that involved the teller being furious. We arent talking about Dark Souls here. RW isnt a specifically hard game to grasp, and difficulty is created by the way enemies interract and the number of them and the way the actual world behaves. However, if thats true, then the AI Storytellers shouldnt change the way they create challenge depending on what difficulty they are on, and my frustration isnt caused by how difficult the challenges are. Its caused by the way they appear, the frequency with which the more infuriating ones are thrown, and the way in which they are thrown at the colony.

For instance. I get that the ship piece is a difficult challenge. its supposed to hurt a colony... but it isnt actually able to kill one. Since colonists dont leave colonies they are unhappy at, it just sits there being a constant annoyance(making them shittier an shittier until they break, fall unconscious, rinse repeat. not actually fun though). An so you go out to kill it... except it just so happens to be loaded with the most powerful enemies vanilla has to offer. Thats sort of shitty, considering the ship itself cant actually kill a colony, it only makes the damn things a pain in the arse to try and run, an it makes the annoyance a pain to get rid of. Of course, it gets better though, because if you kill the damn thing after all that teeth grinding pain.... its very possible the story teller will just drop another one on you five minutes later.. which sort of takes the novelty out and highlights the problem with the event itself. An the thing is, you could just cheese the ship. Build a stronghold around it to give yourself an advantage, but is that really the story you want to tell. The rad colony pissed itself when a chunk of metal fell out of the sky. Built a bunch of walls and all sorts of ridiculous stuff around it, an then they poked it with a stick. Not before though, An they did all this while also trying to kill each other because they walked to the other side of the map to do it. Thats not really that interesting a story though is it :\

Its the same premise as if a solar flare happens when you are trying to grow long form crops, or if many sieges are spawned in a row. The Storyteller has no idea of arcs in its challenges, an it certainly doesnt care about giving the player breathing room. An that could be interesting, if it was a specific type of event that dumped a bunch of painful stuff on the player in quick succession. Its not though, its the status quo. Its how they behave all the time.

An thats a  problem. I think its a larger problem than the combat ai. I think its an actual serious mechanical flaw. The Storytellers in some ways are the selling point of the game, an yet atm their design makes them an infuriating mess. They need more nuance in their decision making than "is the colony rich an is it currently in a bind, if no launch problems". An yes, i am including Randy in this. I know hes the random guy, but hes also apparenly the way the game is meant to be played, an hes possibly the most obnoxious one of the lot. I mean, its great that he lets you have lots of colonists, but otherwise hes a shitlord. Its not interesting to just have the random guy be all "lol random jk hahaha". He still needs to actually make some decisions about the challenge hes about to throw at a colony an whether its actually appropriate and/or interesting to do it.

Which brings us to the other side of this coin. The events need a pass. There isnt enough variance, and that exacerbates the problem. On top of that, the "good" events just arent that interesting.. or that good. Im sure there is situational goodness to them "oh thankgoodness, i was starving and food fell out of the sky" but lets be honest, does anyone actually get excited about the fifteenth time stone falls off a ship in your backyard.

ATM id say that events come too fast an too furious, and that they as a rule arent all that interesting. I dont mean this to be rude, but it needs to be said.

An since id be a jerk for saying this an not adding something constructive to it, ill provide some basic solutions i can see fixing the issues.

The storytellers obviously differentiate between very bad events and bad events, but that isnt nuanced enough. They need a grade, and they need some events that scale up by grade(so if its a nice mild event, it drops a few berries, a medium event drops a bunch of different berries, and a super great one drops a boatload of food types as well as meals). This extends then to the bad ones as well, and id want the scaleable version too. So a ship event thats mild is just the ship, no guards. Maybe it drops multiple pieces of itself or some such. A medium one is the ship plus guards, but for the love of jebus give them behaviour that makes them attack a colony if its only down to a few members(put us out of our misery or force a confrontation) an then with the final stage dump a bunch of parts, set the scream to superduper and have a boatload of mechs charge. An i would then apply difficulty scaling after this stage scaling. It means your events go a bit farther. you could even use five stages instead of 3. Point is, variance via code rather than having to create each individual event.

On the side of the storytellers, they just need a bunch more nuance. Atm they obviously decide what they are doing via looking at how many colonists are standing and how "wealthy" the colony is. The problem is that RW doesnt really lend itself to tiered play. So, the colony may be "wealthy" but it might also have no guns. Since wealth includes how much medicine the colony has an what its made of etc, the storyteller gets a false picture of how well the colony is doing and sends challenge that doesnt fit. As such, id create more variance in what the ai tracks and why it tracks it. It might look at wealth of a colony, and offensive power, and then decide it needs to send a raid that steals stuff. Setting the objectives of the raid after checking the numbers. It needs to track more, but it actually needs to use those numbers to monitor what its doing. It needs events that mess with beauty, so it needs to track that in order to make a decision about how much to mess with. It needs to actually look at a colony an decide if plague is appropriate( i mean actual plague that infects everyone, not the one shot cold). Thus, it should avoid sending siege after siege, because it should already note that it sent one five minutes ago. It needs to track what it does as well as what the players have, so that it not only varies things but actually gives room for a denoument.

Having said that, another thing i would look at creating are event 'groups' or 'series'. Basically, rather than one event, it creates a bunch that launch over time. So a raid might send scouts first. Thus, the numbers on your colony will change over time and the storyteller can adapt its strategy to compensate(so a low weapons colony might suddenly gain a bunch from the scout mission, making them able to deal with the follow up fight better). Then the storyteller sends a raid party, and another, an so on. The staggered approach to the events keeps it varied, while giving the player a little breathing time. an the storyteller, now knowing its sending multiple groups, wont necessarily send other ridiculous things at the player. Id also get the storyteller trying to send good an bad things at the same time everynow an then. since i assume a visit from neighbours is a good thing, itd go a long way to providing help if the storyteller goes to far.

Really though, at the end of the day, failure in this game needs to be fun. An atm its not. Too many of the events feel like a kick to the nuts insead of being a fun novelty. So failing stops being about the rad story and more about how you just got fucked by algorithms.

[starryknight64]

tl;dr plz?

I actually read all the way through it and your suggestions sound good to me. Hopefully a developer takes a look at this!

[RemingtonRyder]

I've already taken some of this on board with my Less Incident Trolling mod. I changed Cassandra so that yes, she does have the short threat cycle that she's famed for, but the MTBs for random events and bad stuff are increased.

MTB being (as far as I remember) mean time between. So this means that Cassandra will on average give you some breathing room between potentially destabilising events.

Solar flares? One a year, or less.

Unfortunately, increasing the MTB for random events means that it can take a while for traders to stop by, but I think that on balance, that's okay. They usually have enough silver to buy everything you've managed to scavenge in the meantime.

[Tynan]

I'm actually planning on addressing this just by adding a bunch of new and interesting incidents. I'm trying to come up with ones that are optional opportunities or optional challenges or long-term condition changes.

E.g. White stag - a super-dangerous but peaceful creature wanders through the map. It's leather/horn are amazingly valuable. You can attack it but it'll go into a rage. Or you can just leave it. Or you can try to provoke it to attack your enemies...

E.g. Fallout - An upwind nuclear detonation puts fallout into the atmosphere. People outside slowly get poisoned. This lasts for weeks or months.

Lots of ideas... but overall I think this is really a matter of incident design, not so much trying to make the storytellers do more with their currently very limited palette.

[Kegereneku]

About the original post, Tynan, I think there a aspect of the mentioned frustration-source you've forgot to address :

Will there be a storytelling-linked logic at work behind events-generation ?
or,
a nonrandom logic at work behind events-generation ?

The presentation of Rimworld mention themed Storytellers, (e.g increasing challenge vs randomness) but I think of this as within any storyteller logic.
e.g : traders (inconspicuously) selling cheaper bionic/prosthetic when a colonist need one.

I'm not making judgment on whether random versus random-looking storytelling is better, just curious on how you envisage the question in Rimworld.

[NoImageAvailable]

E.g. White stag - a super-dangerous but peaceful creature wanders through the map. It's leather/horn are amazingly valuable. You can attack it but it'll go into a rage. Or you can just leave it. Or you can try to provoke it to attack your enemies...

I can already see it: in the future joining minstrels will no longer be butchered for meat, they will be preserved in cryptosleep caskets until a white stag appears. Then they are sent out to poke it with a stick and suicide charge straight into a camp of sieging pirates.

[Frankenbeasley]

Lots of ideas... but overall I think this is really a matter of incident design, not so much trying to make the storytellers do more with their currently very limited palette.

How reactive to colony conditions are the storytellers? I know they keep an eye on population, for instance, and wealth, but do they take into account any other markers when picking an event?

I was just thinking that some of the more subtle statistics for a colony might be  good markers for interesting plot devices. So, for instance, should a colony be too heavily invested in a particular crop (I have been known to try and corner the Devilstrand futures market) there could be a blight that affects only that crop, a blight which is slow and a cure for which must be researched before the last plant dies or that crop becomes forever unavailable.

Also, combining events might be interesting so that if you get an eclipse, say, in the first three months, local tribes become convinced that you are responsible and launch an immediate raid.

You might also use sub-species of some current events. The alphabeaver threat, as one example, could be mutated. So, instead of alphabeavers, perhaps a migrating herd of muffalo happen to be en route and you have planted your crops in their path. The won't stop for walls, they'll just bulldozer their way through, eat your crops, and destroy every man-made obstacle in their path. Or the local tribes turn up as winter falls to hunt every animal on your map; do you starve or go to war?

The other thing I was wondering was whether you could add a couple of story-tellers whose challenges stem from starting conditions. So maybe one is set on a world where electrical devices are unusable, so that your survival depends on the more rustic (campfires only, no refrigeration) this storyteller might not have mechanoid attacks but have more tribal incidents. Or, you might have one on a world where your colonists arrive in power armour and with charge rifles as space marshalls sent to sort out a planet that no longer has tribes but does have one lone outlander settlement and lots and lots of pirates or mechs.

Of course, I am fully aware that my airy suggestions fail dismally to take into account any of the effort and grind you have to put in to this.