Newbie Questions about how Adventures Work

[Panpiper]

I have been playing the game for a few days now, trying various starts and building strategies for various characters. I've started to get a clue as to how to build an effective character and am looking to start a few adventures. However I am not sure of how they work.

 

If I start an adventure and fail a critical skill check, is that adventure now gone? Am I able to retry it later when I've beefed up the required skill? If the adventure requires a given skill that it turns out that I do not have, does that requirement (likely having failed an attempt) at least 'unlock' the required skill so I can train it up? Or am I doomed to hope for it to pop up 'someday' as a random skill playing with the Sphinx or something?

[cymrean]

You can try again and again and again almost always. One aversion i found so far was at the end of one quest where failure meant it was over for good. I don't know if all last phases are like that because i just made it to the end of one quest line.

[Panpiper]

You are saying Cymrean that in your experience, the preliminary stages of a quest can be retried, but the last stage of it is a one shot hit of miss? How does one know when one is at the last stage (without checking the WIKI of course)?

 

What about the unlocking question? Does failing an adventure step because one does not have a required skill unlocked, at least unlock the skill?

[cymrean]

As for the quests: i only reached one end stage and it was do or die. I don't know about the rest. And i knew it was the end because the description outright said it.

 

I haven't really paid attention but i do think they unlock, the same with random events. I have lots of skills at 0, they had to come from somewhere.

[Mikka]

Basically: it depends. Not very helpful, I know.

 

Please forgive me, this is going to be a long post, I'm sure.

 

Perhaps to make things slightly clearer, there are generally two different kinds of adventure: one where you take things step by step, and one where everything happens in one day (all-in-one's). This can be a bit confusing, as a lot of the step by step adventures have a bunch of steps all at once (with the occasional break), especially as we report them to Legate as 'Wait, this seems to happen all in one day!' material. Still, it's different.

 

For example, all the familiar adventures and all the student adventures are step-by-step. You start it, do a step (occasionally, more then one step), pause, then trigger the next step. Even though in the Dog bond there's a few steps that trigger right in a row that have you tracking a certain man and the cat bond has a few steps in a row that have you investigating a certain group, if you fail a step, what simply happens is the adventure stops at that step and you can re-trigger that step as necessary. Oan's adventure (after you finish the tutorial adventures and tell her that you want to help her find the trees) is like this, too. You look around the warehouse in a clump of steps, you get through the reserve in a clump of steps, you deal with mantisis and spells and everything in between in a clump of steps. But the key is that if you fail a step (fail-fail, rather then doing a 'I don't want to do this anymore!'), you can restart at that point.

 

With one note: 95% of the time, that doesn't apply to the final step of an adventure! You mess that step up, it's gone. There are a few exceptions, but they're mostly very few. However, with last steps of adventure, all that usually means is a slightly diminished reward. You still get the relationship an item, but not the stat raise, or you still get the stat and skill raise, but don't get the glory, or you get basically everything, but get two points of stress or vitality damage to go with it. Sometimes, though, it's really bad- as with Oan's adventure, where you disappoint your mentor and don't get any stat raise, while a success would boost both Intelligence and Insight. The problem is that you can't always tell what's going to be the final step of an adventure (some adventures are nice enough to give you hints or to have titles that sound very climatic!!, but some it's just guessing). Which is why I strongly recommend saving before trying any adventure.

 

(There are a few times when messing up a step on a step-by-step adventure just has you start the next one, as some of the all-in-one adventures do. These are really rare.)

 

Then there's the all-in-one adventures. The best example is one I'm sure you've seen: the Day of Fools adventure. The adventure triggers all at once, and if you fail a step, well, you failed a step. Adventure over. The Day of Fools and the Balloon Day adventures are the best examples of that- there's also the Bassan Adventure (A Sign For Talented Plotters), though I hope that gets changed in DLC 12/13. >.> Those adventures are a bit tricky and frustrating. Thankfully, Day of Fools has incredibly low rolls, but Baloon Day needing a certain amount of Incantation made me very sad my first two run-throughs.

 

However, there's another type of All-in-One adventures... the best example is 'Some Such Adventure'/'If Hearing is Believing...'. If you fail a step in that one, you just continue on to the next step (similar for the 'Botany Extra Credit', where you can rack up crazy stress/vit damage by constantly failing- or the part in the City Hall adventure where you can try and fail and try and fail and try and fail until you finally succeed or, more likely, throw your character out a window). These adventures generally don't have as good rewards as other ones, as no matter what, you're going to reach the ending... but at the same time, they can be useful for playing through early, to unlock some skills. Admittedly, if Hearing is Believing probably shouldn't be done till you have a moderate amount of Negation or Revision, but that's not too hard.

 

Summing it up: if you start an adventure and fail a step, one of three things can happen. The adventure can be frozen (often with you picking up a point of stress or vit damage or losing a step in confidence), and you simply need to start the adventure again and re-select it, hopefully with a higher skill. The second option is you can be moved to the next step of the adventure: more often right there and right now, but on very rare occasions, also needed by triggering it. The most rare option is that well, that's it- adventure over, no adventure for you. Again, that's very rare (the Bassan adventure is the only selected adventure that comes to mind that does that), unless it's the last step- in which you'll be getting a reward anyway.

 

As for unlocking required skills... it depends. It doesn't happen nearly as often in adventures as it does if you select a skill in an event and fail it, I don't think, but I usually select skills I don't have anyway in adventures in hopes of getting an unlock, so it definitely does happen. There are very few adventures that only allow a single chosen skill, though, so you're likely to find something useful eventually even if you can't unlock one of the requirements.

 

And if you do find yourself needing a skill that you can't figure out how to get, just post it and everyone'll help you in finding it.

[Panpiper]

Wow! Thank you Mikka, thank you very much. You should perhaps be recruited to write a strategy guide or something. ;-)

 

I have hitherto pretty much ignored adventures, but I am starting to realize that adventures are the biggest part of the game, certainly the part that has gotten the most love from the developers and the community. I had previously spent as many actions as I could with the Sphinx and such just boosting skills. But it looks to me now that one would likely be better off spending as many actions as possible on adventures, using the Sphinx only to boost critical skills that one finds lacking. That said, even then one might be better off just backburnering the harder adventure in favor of doing some easier ones, and let those easier ones boost the required skills so the harder one can be tackled later.

[cymrean]

With Mikka spilling the beans above about Oan's adventure, i can say it's the one where i failed at the end and got nothing. And that option was blue hehe so it was bad luck. Still haven't managed to get to the end of any other adventure.

[Mikka]

That is an annoying one for a Charm-lacking character.

 

 

As an aside, I just realized all my ranting above about the Tale of Two Plotters is the Vilocian adventure. The Bassan adventure is fine for 'if you fail, try again' (save for at the last step). Vilocian/Plotters is just mean.