User:LionsPhil/QuestReasoningFlaws
- Dumping some observed repeated reasoning flaws as potential future material for quest advice---understanding how /quest/ plays badly, and how avoid it sinking your quest.
No attention span
What
/quest/ cannot plan beyond the short term. Longer term plans will be abandoned and changed.
Why
Quests run in relative super-slow motion, often with minutes of quest time taking days of real life. During that time, the players are reading a bunch of other quests and going through the daily routine, so they have plenty of opportunity to forget things. On top of that, a look at the IDs tends to show a certain degree of player "flow" as less-obsessive readers drop in and out, apparently not always reading as much as the whole thread, let alone the archive.
Coping
- Target the player decisions to the level they can deal with. Dive Quest is pretty good at leaving the grand strategy level to the characters, and just getting /quest/ to deal with the more immediate tactical concerns of reaching Muschio's current objective.
- If you can get away with it, break up the story into manageable, self-contained chunks. Dive again does this well. Conversely, quests like Tozol Quest or The Last Flight of the Sparrow which set up an environment, an overall vague goal ("escape"; "solve/stop murders"), and let the protagonist loose have been more susceptable to indecisive backtracking and other large-scale planning failures.
- Perhaps start threads with the same quick-recap mechanism that TV series use when running multi-part episodes?
Fallacy of Sunk Cost
What
A logical fallacy where a plan that is going wrong is stuck with because "we've gone this far already". A good example is continuing trying to dig into the safe room in Tozol Quest despite very obvious clues that the players were running out of time.
Why
Known bug in human reasoning. Still waiting for a patch.
Coping
Not sure. Test's clues in Tozol weren't sufficient.
Thinking with the wrong head
What
Any character that is vaguely flirtacious with the protagonist will be immediately completely trusted. This can combine with the sunk cost fallacy. Zira in The Last Flight of the Sparrow is a good example of a shady character being trusted more than would be usually justified becuase she is coy with Tiak.
Why
/quest/ are never happier than when playing Cupid.
Coping
If you're doing this, you're probably doing it on purpose. Have fun.
