The more I poke at the system, the more it seems to me that the neutral cards - Goals, Subplots and Assets - really aren't that interesting in play. Because they can't drive a scene towards a strong or weak outcome, the only reason to play them is to avoid pushing a challenge away from where it is - e.g. if the balance is currently strong and you don't want to waste a Strength as the last card you play.

(Or if you want to avoid pushing a weak-but-player-written outcome into an uncertain-and-Narrator-written outcome. I kind of feel like weak outcomes are currently preferable to uncertain ones, but that's another discussion.)

On the one hand, that keeps the focus on the core character traits of Strengths and Weaknesses. On the other hand, there's drama in Goals and Subplots, and that drama doesn't really emerge if they count as zero-value cards. Similarly, if there's an action scene and a player has a sword/gun/special technique Asset, it's weird that that has no effect on swinging the outcome into player control; you can narrate a bitchin' sword stroke as your move, but you're probably better served not playing the Asset as part of it.

How to mitigate this without changing the system or taking the focus off internal traits? One possibility might be adding options to challenges that can modify play for that specific card. For instance:

• Only one Weakness can be played on this Challenge.
• Goal cards count as Strength cards for this Challenge.
• At least one Asset must be played on this Challenge for it to end.

And so forth.

I'm sure this would be fiddly and involve too much coding, but it's interesting to think about what could give those cards more ooomph.