Controlling another student

[sambrookjm]

My most recent character just got an 11 Mastery, and all of the fun *cough* Total Control *cough* that comes with it. I've got a couple of questions about if these are bugs, or intentional design choices.

 

When I controlled another student and set them to Bully, I was unable to choose which character my "puppet" would bully. Multiple instances of bullying on the same day all picked on the same character.

 

When I chose to send my puppet on an "Adventure," the resulting adventure seemed to use my character's skill set rather than the student I was controlling. When I went back to my character the following day, the progress in the adventure was also under my character. It also looks like there was only one adventure that each of the controlled characters could take part in. Is this a sneaky way to get an adventure that you normally couldn't because of really bad relationships with certain characters?

[Legate of Mineta]

sambrookjm;

 

Correct on both counts- at your current level, you cannot truly control another person, but you can influence them to the degree that they will choose to do something they otherwise might not- bully, for instance. However, you cannot specifically tell them who to bully.

 

Adventure is available to all Students, but they cannot embark on them themselves, so it defaults to you. That's a known issue with Mastery, but no ETA yet on closing it.

[Reianor]

All the MUA-HA-HA aside the control is rather disappointing. "Do you really need to cast that?" Spring into mind...

 

95+% of action you can order will be of no help to you. You can have a student work on a particular skill (might be worth having them work on compete, though not particularly, since the courses overall activeness depends on their collective merit, all you'll achieve is save THEIR time), build friendship with rare designated students, build friendship with random students, attack random students.

It's really hard to find an action that'll forward your cause.

 

Here are the most useful things I've found.

 

-Have a student in a competing college use "unprovoked attack". That'll give him demerits and hold back the competing college's effort at the expense of some other student's health.

-Have a student in your college use compete. Preferably control someone with compete at 3. A downside, is that the most potent controlling options are hostile, and you'll be spoiling relationships with your college. Still, even non-hostile options would be more time-effective than using compete yourself.

-Control your clique, and see if they have any actions that benefit the entire clique. Also, see if you can get them to train skills which they cover in your adventures. Like above, though, all the most potent controlling action are considered being hostile.

 

So, most of the time control is pointless, it's definitely better than wasting a period on compete though. (At a later months I mean, you can't have control early on)

 

I also have a theory that repeatedly controlling the same character and getting 'em to skip classes for a long contiguous periods of time may get 'em in "trouble with authority" and maybe eventually expelled, though I've never bothered to do so, and I doubt this method's efficiency. Still, might be worth a try if you're getting bullied over and over again by the same character.

 

Also, you could try to find a designated rival of your rival, and have him help you with your feud.

Or, which should be more useful, find the designated friends of your friends and have an easier time getting them to join your clique. It's still going to take quite some time on your behalf, unless you're using hostile control on your friends. (which might be more time-effective if you need to control your friends for extensive time periods).

 

 

On a side note, the description of "Formal Invitation" reminds me a lot of the concept of "presence" (a power of nobility to emanate an aura of authority, potent enough to elevate their asking and telling up to the potency of ordering or controlling). Any chance of seeing a similar thing in game? Should be a combination of etiquette/manners, grace/appearance, and discipline/self-control aspects of a character with high requirements in each of them.

[Reianor]

sambrookjm;

 

Correct on both counts- at your current level, you cannot truly control another person, but you can influence them to the degree that they will choose to do something they otherwise might not- bully, for instance. However, you cannot specifically tell them who to bully.

 

Adventure is available to all Students, but they cannot embark on them themselves, so it defaults to you. That's a known issue with Mastery, but no ETA yet on closing it.

Would it be possible to chose targets at later dates? I've been browsing some student unique skills, and some of them sound to fun to remain out of reach (while no fun to fling at RANDOM targets).

 

Also, I've been thinking, would it be possible to add a unique skill to a player that allows us to mimic some aspects of other characters? Say, like a costly background that allows us to "study" a character once per week and then mimic their special action a defined number (varies based on the action itself) of times during the week following that study. Will need some extensive balancing, but should be fun to play around with. Maybe throw in and extra action to that background to let us annoy people by mimicking them

[Legate of Mineta]

Red;

 

Yes, as you advance, you'll be able to take greater control- I'm not sure you'll get to specific targets in Y2, though.

 

That's an interesting suggestion about studying a Student- it's not likely you'd see that in Y2, but I'll add it to the list!

[Reianor]

Red;

 

Yes, as you advance, you'll be able to take greater control- I'm not sure you'll get to specific targets in Y2, though.

 

That's an interesting suggestion about studying a Student- it's not likely you'd see that in Y2, but I'll add it to the list!

 

As a matter of fact, I've been thinking if it would be possible to mod-in such a thing into Y1.

 

However there's a heavy dependency here, and I'm not sure if Y1 is suited for such complex schemes.

 

Primary problem is a highly configurable action.

It should be possible to implement a boatload of actions each representing specific result of interaction on "per student" basis (as in Mimic John Smith), but that'd make one heck of a mess, and Y1 is already giving us trouble navigating our lists.

It would be better to create one ability (or rather a small set of them, representing different aspects of mimicry) which then runs behind the scene check on a list which determines the result based on target, but I'm not sure if that would be possible.

I've been also wondering if that could be implemented as an ability that triggers a repeatable event (event\adventure interface) which in turn serves a a menu for choosing target and other specifics). However I don't know if Y1 can handle this either.

 

And another problem is making it scale. I imagine it would be possible to introduce a new skill into the game. But would it be possible to keep it out of the normal skill inform routine? There's a number of occurrences in the game where one can learn a random skill that has not been "informed" yet. It's all good and well for general things, but it would seem rather bizarre to suddenly learn a supernatural ability which description makes a reference of you having it since birth. (And the way students are set, some of their abilities can not be "mimicked" "naturally", seeing how they may depend on physical build or even reputation). On the other hand, it IS a mod, with only one purpose in it, so a situation where a person installs it, skips the background, and then finds oneself in a middle of the forth wall mess-up shouldn't be a huge concern.

 

The idea of mimicking other student's "tricks" and "specials" rooted itself into my mind when I was browsing their wiki pages. A lot of them have quirks that don't have similarly working "general" substitutes. They keep being described as outstanding in one way or another, or even outright "best" and "unmatchable". Which, I should note, is a mistake. Players should retain a feeling of being able to compete with any one of them as long as they set their mind to it. It doesn't have to be easy (and preferably shouldn't be easy), reasonable, or maybe not even in fact possible, but telling them that "Jon Smith is the best smith this generation will ever know", while being perfectly fine in a railed game with defined protagonist, is an obvious mistake for a game with such an unrestricted environment as we get in Academagia.

 

Players on the other hand don't have a description attached to them, and their feeling of uniqueness comes from background, where it's few in numbers and far in between. Sure, you've been born during an astronomic event, and maybe you're kid of sky pirates who double up as famous heroes or something, but out-there in the school, best you can hope for to keep your self esteem up is that, while you'll never be "the best smith of the generation", you're one hell of a jack of all traits.

 

Well, that added up into an idea of making a background, and following it up with in-game elements, tied to that background, and bringing the player up to par with all these oh-so-great students.

 

Basically I'd like to add a background, describing the player's student's in-born ability to copy those around him/her within natural boundaries of a parodist, a skill set, uncovering his/her supernatural side as an ability to take that mimicry far beyond parody levels, an effective gameplay mechanic, which affects him/her based on which aspect of which character he/she is attempting to mimic, and maybe, once the rest is more or less done, a set of adventures, developing a story, building on the dynamics of student's unique perspective on his/her own personality.

 

Buuuut that's one heck of an endeavour, aaaand I'm not exactly the kind of person to stick with the same interest long enough to accomplish such a feat. Still, the idea keeps returning to my head rather persistently, and the whole task isn't as gargantuan as the ones that usually tickle my fancy, so who knows...

[Legate of Mineta]

Red;

 

I suppose it might be possible, but...as you note, it would be a big mod.

[Reianor]

Red;

 

I suppose it might be possible, but...as you note, it would be a big mod.

 

Not exactly...

Would a mod that adds 3 abilities per student be considered a big mod? Well this one would not be much bigger.

Now, the amount of sorting inconvenience it would add if it was added in a series of actions... well that'd be something to behold...