Do NOT allow playing multiple place cards per scene
I just want to put my support out there for the existing system of linking a single PLACE to a single SCENE.
I know there are a few posts with about 20 or so up-votes between them (that I have seen) asking for this feature.
By most dictionary definitions, a scene in literature IS constrained to a single place
scene
noun
- a subdivision of an act of a play in which the time is continuous and the setting fixed and which does not usually involve a change of characters.
- the place where an incident in real life or fiction occurs or occurred
But this aside, I believe it is better for the gamification in Storium to impose this limit. Adding multiple places to a scene introduces tracking nightmares. Specifically you need to know
- which players are where. are they together at the same time? at different times?
- which characters, assets, and obstacles are where
- if something changes in the scene, are all places still available? If the players were in different places and a narrative element removes travel between those places, how do you resolve a split party (no mechanism for that in Storium today)
- travel time between places, and "out of commission" periods during travel.
All of the above questions are solved very well through today's implementation of 1:1 relationship between place and scene. The scene IS the Storium mechanism for managing players, characters, assets, and obstacles in space and time.
I've read public stories where they try and narrate multiple places, and it always seems to come out a mess. At least when I read them, it seems very clear to me that these things should be extra scenes, which would make them much more simple for everyone.
Anyhoo, I just wanted to give my support for the current implementation to the devs...
Chris
shared this idea
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Bluegeek
commented
I see where you're coming from with this.
My concern is that Storium follows the three Act model of a play or a screenplay rather than a more flexible book format where the story is divided by chapters which might contain one or more locations.
While the way Storium is structured makes a lot of sense for encouraging a collaborative story in a structured way, I immediately found the restriction on Place cards to be limiting as a Narrator.
It didn't stop me from dividing my scene into multiple locations. All it did was make it harder to illustrate a transition from one location to another. Sometimes a writer needs an extra location for a short scene which sets up the situation for a longer scene. Sometimes there are 'scenes within a scene'.
I agree there should be a limit on how many Place cards can be used in a Storium scene, if only to help maintain the story structure and eliminate a lot of confusing back-and-forth. But the one-per-scene limitation is too limiting and doesn't really force anyone to abide by it in the narrative. The Place cards are meant to be descriptive, not proscriptive, and taking away the function of description doesn't serve a lot of purpose.