Elfwreck
My feedback
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99 votesElfwreck
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25 votesElfwreck
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10 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I'd like to know at a glance whether adding a strong or weak card would change the likely outcome--there's a difference between "1 str and 4 neutral cards" vs "3 str, 1 wk, 1 neutral," and knowing that at a glance would help me decide which cards I want to play.
Elfwreck
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
There are tabs in the game info that currently aren't active, but the only one that seems relevant for this is the "Player Reference" tab, and I don't think a single textbox is enough for this. (There'll also eventually be a "premises" tab with a sample opening scene, and a set of premade characters. Those will help, but aren't likely to be too useful for anyone creating a game from scratch.)
Right now, game info for anything complicated is usually shared on googledocs, and that's a big weakness in the game design. I really wish they'd open up the Player Resources tab for narrators to fill in; that'd overcome a lot of the "go here and read this 3000 word background doc" problems.
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90 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I don't think strength cards need to be "powers" or "beneficial traits"--they are traits that help you take control of the scene and write the strong outcome you want.
So a strength card for a goal completed by sacrificing the rest of the team could be "Survive At Any Cost--When you're running away from a bear, you don't need to be the fastest... just not the slowest."
You can have "unmitigated bastard" strength cards. Or "whiny brat" strength cards--by wheedling and moaning at the NPC, they eventually give you the information you need just to shut you up.
(That said, I agree that rewarding players with STR cards does imply that weak outcomes are "losing," and something should be done to address that.)
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13 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I love this - we definitely need more nonlinear story options. This would also work for dream sequences and certain AU/virtual reality stories.
I suppose the current workaround would be "create a new character, identical to your current one except for str/weak cards, and play that one for the flashback/dream/VR scene."
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5 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I don't have a problem with narrators who are biased toward their friends. I don't like them, but I don't think they're doing anything against the rules. If I noticed what I thought was overt bias, I'd just retire if it really bugged me, and avoid that narrator in the future.
There's no "winning the game" that a narrator is preventing by being biased. Players who find themselves stuck as the odd one out while the narrator and close friends play aren't being cheated out of any victory, and there is no way to enforce "be equally fair to all characters and only judge them by their posts." (Even if there were... does that mean judging them on their grammar as well as plot actions?) There is no objective way to measure "character play quality."
I don't think it's a good idea to remove narrators' ability to avoid players they've met and disliked in other games. I suspect that hiding usernames would just result in more "my friends only" games, where narrators are unwilling to take a chance on strangers who might not fit.
Or there'd be a lot more "check out this g'doc and SEND EMAIL to get into the game."
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6 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Right now, it's behind a paywall, which complicates the feed idea.
I agree that I'd love to have a way to integrate it with my other web-viewing; I forget Storium exists sometimes because it's so sealed off.
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20 votes
Thanks for the suggestion! We are planning to do this! It will probably happen around the time of our Kickstarter campaign, sooner if we can manage. There will be wiki-like pages for both narrators and for players. Pre-built Storium worlds will come with “canon” content for both pages, and then participants will be able to add to them. Sound good?
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Whether or not each game gets a wiki--that's a lot of placeholders for what's going to be thousands of games, most of which don't want one--a forum would be a helpful addition to the current very limited chatbox.
Players and narrators should be able to share worldbuilding and background info that's too complex to put in the opening description; the current structure isn't happy with 10k words of worldbuilding or a whole chapter's worth of character history. And it's even worse if you have ongoing development of something in the world. If the Ubiquitous Diner Where Everyone Meets eventually becomes a hub of criminal activity, players might want to keep records of who's been there--and right now, those records will be hosted away from Storium.
We really need a way to put all our game info on-site.
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131 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
This is a terrific idea; right now, a lot of narrators wind up using the chat function to say "Only X character should deal with Y challenge," or there are awkward workarounds like the one in https://storium.com/game/halfway-home/chapter-1/scene-1 where the narrator (team?) made challenge cards with people's names on them--but anyone has the ability to actually respond to them.
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694 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Very much agree. If nothing else, filtering by starting gameworld would help a lot of people find the games they'd like.
Rating players can be very problematic, but having a listing of players who agree to be searchable/contactable would be terrific. It would be great if you had to submit your name to the list, and renew it every few months (three? six? a year?) so that there's an easily-identifiable list of active, willing-to-be-social players; narrators would be able to develop games based on players currently available.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Yes please! I want notification emails to say [[Character (Player) made a move in "Game Name"]], not start with the player name.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I'd like this too. I don't know if I'd want this specific format, but the email notifications should be at least consistent with the site, which lists character names and then player names in parentheses. Right now, the emails are exactly opposite of that.
I could also see the value with all notifications from a single game having the same subject line so they stack in email programs-- "[Storium] Moose Habitat: Something happened!"
Listing the game first would be good, and following it with *what* rather than *who* would be great. I need to know what game has new content, and whether that was a move or a comment or something else, before I need to know who said something.
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Characters who aren't challenges are, presumably, just part of the narrator's scene description. Potentially, they could be asset cards: a "Talked with Bob" card could be played to share whatever secrets Bob may have mentioned, or to convince someone else of something.
"I'm here to get that car you've been working on. Bob asked me to pick it up for him." [Plays "talked with Bob" asset]
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I think there are a few posts with this basic idea. I expect that, for now, the solution is for the narrator to post an "epilogue" scene with a number of challenges to match the remaining cards that need to be eliminated (or more than one epilogue scen, if some characters need to drop more than 3 cards), in which they can reminisce over the adventure and drop cards as they go.
So: Epilogue; everyone meets in the tavern and has a drink to celebrate that they're all still alive. (6 challenge points: Strong result - you all get roaring drunk had have a fantastic time. Weak result - same as strong, but you're going to have hangovers in the morning.) For more challenges, add the bartender -- and spend cards telling him about your terrific exploits.
Adjust as appropriate to venue. Murder mysteries recap the story in a drawing room; medical dramas explain to a review board what happened; deep-space adventures on a single ship discuss how they'd cope with similar problems differently in the future. The epilogue could even be "each person records recent events in their journals."
This is not an optimal solution, but it would allow dropping cards without creating an entirely fake scene that just says "generic challenge: 5 points" and having players throw their cards onto it.
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8 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Agreed. I expect that some people will post after being poked, not realizing that's an auto-feature of Storium and not something the narrator set up.
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9 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I would definitely like narrators to be able to import data instead of typing (or copy/pasting) manually for ~90 cards for a custom game. Allowing it to import from Excel would be great; requiring a CSV with specific headers would also work fine. Not sure if it'd work to bring in pictures; I can imagine a way to put in the links to a hard drive, but it wouldn't allow custom cropping.
Allowing a custom card bank would remove the pressing need for it, but it'd still be nice to create the cards in something other than a popup menu and then import them.
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318 votes
We will soon be adding the ability for the narrator to explicitly specify which characters are in a given scene. Would that help a bit?
Meanwhile, you can visually segment the action in a scene by using a horizontal rule (“
-” in our layout syntax). Note also that the system does not require that players make a move in every scene. So you can ask someone to “sit this one out” and the scene will be able to progress just fine. Hopefully these techniques can get you un-stuck for the time being?Regarding simultaneous scenes, we’ve received this suggestion from a couple of other users, too, and so we are thinking hard about how we could add it to Storium without making things difficult to use and understand. It’s high on our list so please stay tuned.
Thanks for the feedback!
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
Definitely want this. Today I got the email notification reminding me to post--but my character's not active in the current scene. The narrator should at least be able to turn off notifications for players who aren't part of the current scene, so they don't think, "hey! I better post something--even though I was told I'm sitting this one out."
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323 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
I'd love to see a shared pool of cards, whether those are the custom-created ones or borrowed from other games. If I'm running a "Space-Time Adventurer" game, whether that's similar to Dr. Who or Bill & Ted, it could easily have cybersamurai, cowboys, and convenience store workers all active at once. Having to create every card from scratch is a nuisance--in the long run, it's going to result in a lot of cards with a single keyword and no description because the people in the game, or who've played with that narrator before, know what they mean and don't need to type it out.
Creating a library of cards that can be drawn into any game will make setup faster and the games more interesting to new potential players. Requiring all customized cards to be created anew for each game will encourage cliques.
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950 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Elfwreck
commented
While it's nice to see a card for each individual NPC, I can also see cards only being for things that need players to assign cards to them. In a case where a player needs to talk to the three explorers, the narrator can create an "Explorer Team" card, mentioning that there are three of them and the player(s) will need to negotiate with each of them. The details of the negotiation are left to be played out in the story.
A broader range of markup options would also be fine. The current features force a very limited range of storytelling styles on the players.