What's the Motivation Not to Play All Your Cards?
Not only do you get your Strengths and Weaknesses back sooner by spending them faster, you'll also win reward cards by completing challenges. Both of those mechanics are incentives for players to hog the spotlight. What is to keep them from doing this, apart from not being a dick? (Obviously, no one wants to play with a jerk, so that's relatively self-correcting, but even the nice players feel a little bad doing the opposite of what the game rewards them for).
I'll think up specific possible solutions if you like, but for now, my suggestion is high-level: The game mechanics should reward players for doing what's fun for everyone, because many players will do what the mechanisms reward them for, no matter how unfun.
Jay
shared this idea
Narrators set a limit on how many cards can be played per player, per scene. The default is 3 cards but can be adjusted anywhere from 1-5.
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Jay
commented
It seems like your team has failed to understand the concern.
Regardless of what the per-scene limit is, I can always play my limit first. If the narrator doesn't craft every scene to have challenges equal to the number of players multiplied by that limit, then other players will get to play fewer cards. Those players are forced out of the game.
The onus shouldn't be on the narrator to prevent that behavior, and indeed, their only solution is a bad one, because it means scenes can't complete unless every single player is playing to the limit in every scene, which is rare. -
C David Dent commented
Well as a narrator you can reward players by giving them assets in-game.
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Jay
commented
Just found this rule:
**You can play a maximum of three cards per scene. Storium keeps track of this, as well.**
That does limit how much of a scene a player can steal, and reduces the impact of this concern. Though it's a bit of a hack and treats the symptom, not the disease.There's a bit of Nim going on, where the player that plays the game to win* wants to play so that he plays the last card and reaps the reward for completing the challenge.
*Obviously, in a story game, winning should be telling the best collaborative story the group can, but because the game has reward mechanisms, some players will play to maximize their rewards, even at the cost of the story.
What if there were a way to reward players for working together?