Using a Tale of Terror you can start an object-based storyline: at every step, you trade one object for the next one, risking a failure and go back to start, or yield and get a reward.
The chances of success at every step seem to be ~60-70%, so since the steps are many, there aren't really many chances to complete all the storyline – I'm not sure how many steps there are, I'm currently at Deal with a Devil.
So, my question is: am I missing something and there is some way to increase the odds, or the only way to do that is to try again and again until you are lucky enough to get all successes till the end?
Best Answer
The chances of success decrease the further you get into the storyline; the further you go, the more failures you'll get. Each individual action is purely luck-based, and there is nothing you can do to improve it.
On a side note, if you're only in the Fidgeting Writer for profit (i.e., you have an unholy number of Tales of Terror, Brilliant Souls, etc., and you want Echoes), the best Echoes-per-action rate comes when you go all the way to the end of the chain. Several people have spent an inordinate amount of time and sanity on this storyline. Here's the data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AlbwjlynOB13dDQtelhZdm9LQlpJQ1JXa0FnMlFPamc&single=true&gid=6&output=html