Haystack
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323 votesHaystack
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31 votes
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369 votesHaystack
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commented
I like this idea. I would also be in favor of eliminating the "challenge budget" entirely, so that players can be made to choose which challenges deserve their limited resources. For example, a detective has five informants, but only enough cards to interrogate two.
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621 votes
We are going to try out something related to these suggestions, probably in the timeframe of Gamma. Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
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commented
It seems to me that relationships could be played out through challenge cards that players could issue to one another. For example, I'm Martha and I give you a challenge "Find out why Martha has been so quiet lately" or "Turn Martha against Roy." This has the advantage of being consensual, as you can simply ignore the challenge if the relationship doesn't interest you.
It may be better to think in terms of relationships as processes rather than assets.
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13 votes
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commented
Why *require* players to take narrative control of the outcome? What your observing may be a lack of clarity, but it's also possible that this feature simply isn't popular among a subset of players, and making it mandatory would only interfere with their style of play (I would also echo Mr. Cat's concerns about the flow of the text).
Taking too much narrative control of an NPC, for example, risks canceling subplots or back stories that the narrator may have been (invisibly) developing. Maybe the NPC's blood was supposed to come out green, but you described it as red, and so a would-be plot twist vanishes. A player may instead prefer to make the direction of his/her action obvious from the text, but allow the narrator to write the actual NPC response (e.g., "Deciding at last to finish him, she brought down the knife...")
The more that Storium *requires* you to do, the less freedom you have to tailor it to your group's preferences.
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56 votes
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commented
Also, in certain contexts, a weakness may play out as a strength, and vice versa. For example, poor health gets one out of an undesirable situation ("get him out of here...I don't want to catch that.")
It's important to remember that the outcome guidelines are just that--guidelines...Just because the system says "strong outcome" doesn't mean that you have to write it that way, if it makes better sense otherwise.
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202 votes
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commented
I would definitely like to see more interaction between players. With the mechanics geared so heavily toward responding to the narrator's challenges, there's little room for characters to build relationships with one another and drive the story that way.
The less the narrator needs to drive the story, the better.
Player-to-player feedback systems could lead to ugliness. It might be enough to have a link to public games that the person has participated in, so you could look through their posts and draw your own conclusions.