Forum:Social Action templates

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Social Action templates

I have been working on merging the different social actions templates. I think they have big overlaps, and I have already managed to optimize away three of them. I am mainly writing this down to get verification on some of my thoughts. - -- RagCall (talk) 17:51, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Process modeling

Actions in Fallen London can function in the following ways:

• an action for which no other user is required. This is the simplest type of action we have. Covered by {{Action}}.
• an action which the receiver cannot prevent/accept. Example: . Currently covered by {{Social Actions Auto}}.
• an action which the receiver cannot prevent/accept and has a winner/loser based on a challenge. Covered by {{Social Actions - Attack}}. Example: these 10 pages which seem to be Knife-and-Candle? Is my understanding that these did not require confirmation by the receiver correct?
• an action which requires another user to do a one-click-confirmation (click a button in the messages tab). Example: , . Covered by {{Social Actions}}.
• an action which requires another user to do a one-click-confirmation and has a winner/loser based on a challenge. Example: plant fights like . Covered by {{Social Actions - Contest}}.
• an action which needs to be confirmed and redirects the receiver to a page with further actions. E.g. chess games and sparring bouts. . Now, my memory is a bit hazy on the details of those. Did those really have an "accept" button in the messages tab as well?
• replies to games of chess, e.g. . Covered by {{Social Actions Auto - Competitive}}. It seems to me they could be covered by {{Social Actions - Attack}} instead?!

Are there any combinations or mechanics I have forgotten? Is my understanding so far correct? - -- RagCall (talk) 17:51, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Your understanding regarding {{Social Actions - Attack}} is correct. Aximillio (talk) 18:43, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Social actions are admittedly a part of the game that I don't dabble in so much, so my expertise is shallow. There certainly seems to be an amount of complexity and variation which is disproportionate to the amount of content. I like tables, so let me attempt to categorize your categorization, in case it's illuminating:

	Fixed Result	Challenge
Instant Result	{{Social Actions Auto}} e.g.	{{Social Actions - Attack}} K&C
One-click accept	{{Social Actions}} e.g.	{{Social Actions - Contest}} e.g. Challenge a friend to a Contest of Blood
Response Storylet	Invite someone to a Game of Chess	{{Social Actions Auto - Competitive}} e.g. accept, and open the game with an intellectual gambit

In the "Challenge" column, do the top and bottom cell consist entirely of retired content? Is all non-retired "challenge" content now click-to-accept?

The only other major category of social actions I could think of was the Election Debates, which maybe only existed for one year. But I don't think that was a different interaction model. Several rounds of accept-and-choose-response storylets with a whole bunch of tracking qualities, followed by a single challenge interaction at the end.

A significant variation worth considering is FATE social actions. Sending Fate, sending FEAST OF THE ROSE gifts, Arrange for the Regiment to visit an acquaintance (12 FATE). We probably want to be able to denote the mechanics of these actions, especially since the FotR-Fate-cancellation thingy is important to some people.

- PSGarak (talk) 18:59, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Re retired content: they seem to be, but I am not sure if all of the actions are currently modeled properly in the wiki. For example, the chess invite is currently modeled as a {{Social Actions Auto}} with a {{Redirect}} added manually. For all I know, there may be some social actions that are mis-templated, so to speak. Which is related to the decline/withdraw mechanics you mention.

How exactly do the Fate-giving actions work? (I have never used them and genuinely don't know.)

And yeah, what is currently sorely missing is recording the "X declined your invite" or "You have withdrawn your invite" text and mechanics. I think none of the 5 templates provide the parameters for that. -- RagCall (talk) 09:19, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I just saw a question pop up on the official forums about location restrictions for various social actions, and it occurred to me to ask if that could be incorporated into any template updates? In particular, do the location restrictions correlate with the categorization you've already assembled?

As before, my own depth of knowledge on this matter is limited. And some specifics were changed as recently as two weeks ago (FotR gifts were made more accessible).

- PSGarak (talk) 01:49, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I am not too sure myself, but I think this is orthogonal. I *think* you can do social actions if both of you are in the same setting, and I know there was an extension of that last year - for example, you can now also receive social actions in your lab, despite it being a different setting.
...someone should write an article on settings. -- RagCall (talk) 11:25, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I opened the Template code to see what these things look like under the hood, and there's a lot of structural overlap I wonder if perhaps things can be simplified by having a different template structure.

All of the Social Action templates attempt to have all of the page contents into a single top-level Template, like we do for {{Item}} and {{Quality}}. But Social Actions are comparable to Actions, where we already have the standard that there's a "top" template {{Action}} and then sub-heading templates like {{Rare Success}} or {{Failure}}.

Related to that, the Social Templates are the only ones where a bullet-list of effects actually goes inside a template, instead of outside. In Actions, all of the calls to {{Gain}} or whatever happen underneath headings. It's quite common for Cards and Storylets to have calls to {{Options}} listed underneath the "top" template, and even the options that are template args are each passed as their own arg rather than a bulleted list passed as (part of) a Description parameter.

I think the Templates could get consolidated down to perhaps two or three templates, if we broke the mold of a single top-level template and instead had subsection templates for things like "When Sent" and "In Your Message Tab." On the other hand, Social Actions have a lot more lists-of-results than regular actions. It's rare (literally) for an action to have more than 2, but it seems the floor for Social Actions is at least three.

From looking at the different options, I think all of the pages could be built by combining the following completely-theoretical templates. The downside being that most of them require like 5 such templates, plus lists-of-results in-between them.

• One "top" template. Like {{Action}}, this includes everything up through the first set of results, i.e. includes the "When Sent" header and first description. There might be a few params specific to Auto-type actions.
• One "result" template, for things that happen.
• One "message" template for notifications that must be responded to.

The last two might be combinable, I'm not sure. They would probably need an optional "when" parameter that adds a title heading (e.g. "When Sent," "Once Accepted"), and definitely a "who" parameter to identify which player (You, Your Friend, Winner, Loser).

- PSGarak (talk) 18:46, 15 March 2022 (UTC)