Spammers Hate This One Trick

Greetings, Multiverse Curators!

Have your players been clicking the same Choice over and over again, hoarding a suspiciously large pile of identical Things? Maybe they’ve stacked up 100 Phase Pistols and tanked their Law-Abiding Citizen Role level down to -100 in the process. Sure, they’re technically failing at society, but how’s your carefully crafted narrative supposed to survive a player armed like a small militia?

We feel your pain. Fortunately, there’s a simple trick that (mostly) puts a stop to this kind of spammy behavior:

Make the requirement Role for a Choice the same as the penalty Role of the Thing it rewards.

Let’s walk through an example:

Say you’ve got a Choice that lets a player hire a guard robot. On success, they gain a Guard Bot Thing—but the bot has a penalty Role of Person of Means (because robots don’t work cheap, obviously). If you also make Person of Means a requirement for the Choice, then with each successful click, the player’s Role in Person of Means gets worse, and soon enough… they start failing the Choice entirely. Voilà: natural rate-limiting, built right into the narrative system.

It’s not bulletproof. Someone will always find a loophole (bless them). But this trick is lightweight, thematic, and weirdly satisfying to implement.

Happy world-weaving!

—The Scribarchy Team (still just me)