Playing and spending cards
Right now, cards don't act very much like cards - they're more like tokens that you advance and then get back. I'm finding that the players in my game are confused by that; they want cards to act more like, well, cards!
One way to do this would be to make card play more finite - you play a card once and then it's gone. You can still get new cards, but you have to be more deliberate in when you play what you have, and bear in mind the price of getting a higher-level success (or gaining Karma with a higher-level failure).
This might also help prevent äll-in"style approaches to cards, where players dump their whole hand into a scene in order to steal spotlight time and justify big wins/losses.
Artbroken
shared this idea
We did this as part of Alpha 2. Thanks for the great feedback!
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Artbroken
commented
I get where you're coming from, and I can see that you want to encourage players to use their resources. My view is possibly skewed - my players are all actors and comedians, and they're confident about getting into the story and doing things.
One thing that ties into this is that, other than strengths and weaknesses, cards don't actually *do* anything when played. Playing a Thing or Goal doesn't help you obtain a better (or worse) outcome; it's just a flag to say that you have an item or are pursuing a certain agenda. But you can do the same thing without playing the card - if you have the Elephant Gun card in your hand, there's no need to play it in order to say 'I shoot him with my elephant gun.' So the act of playing seems a bit unnecessary right now.
Limited card uses might be one answer to this; another might be more concrete effects for playing a card, such as 'virtual Karma' that can only be spent for an outcome in the current scene (which might also help reduce the problem of having no strong/positive outcomes happen in the first scene, when no-one has Karma).
There are certainly other answers too, and it's good that you folks are thinking about it.