Storium

[clyde]

I think Storium is supposed to be a role-playing game that combines player-writing and playing-cards that represent abilities and items. 

 

https://storium.com/how-to-play/basics

 

I just signed up at the $20 tier because it looks like the type of thing I've wanted for a while. I haven't played a game yet, I'm just reading the instructions. Since these instruction pages are giving me a better idea of what this game actually is (compared to the kickstarter-video and the intro-video), I figured that you all might be interested in looking over it. I will report my findings once I go through a game.

[Merus]

I am in a game.

 

It is a forum roleplaying system, basically, with some light mechanics that enforce players being unable to just invent an entirely new backstory for their character for each challenge. The card metaphor is pretty light.

[clyde]

I got into my first game (a murder-mystery). For my first move, I had my character speak to an NPC. The narrator informed me that it wasn't allowed to speak directly to them. Is that typically the case?

[Merus]

It's up to the narrator, but often what you can do is just fill in both sides of the conversation. Obviously in a murder-mystery you need to be able to interview witnesses and subjects.

[clyde]

Something that would help me a lot would just be some sort of etiquette guide that mentions basic expectations for this collaborative form. Right now, I'm considering writing other people's characters and that seems like it would be rude (though I would have no problem with someone doing it to mine). I have these strength cards that say something to the idea that my character can easily extract information about someone else, but in practice that would mean that I'm telling another player that their character is oddly skeptical of complexity and has a fondness for tropocal fruits (or whatever).

I'm sure I'll get a feel for it, but I would imagine that these initial confusions may be something that other new players would experience. Something that addresses these concerns and establishes a default (that can then be modified) would be useful.

[clyde]

I just submitted a character for approval for a generic cyberpunk story. I'm excited about it, so I wanted to share:

STYLES CANDY

Not so much a “rockstar” as much as a “rocker”, the society infrastructure molded to empower the Mega corps has left Styles with a philosophical void. As a child, he was curious enough to try Better-Than-Life chips and cunning enough to access an addiction. He collected designed memories of luxury and empowerment, but they stopped getting him high by the age of 15. Meanwhile, he had become dependent to the side-effects and glitches of out-dated and over-used chips, the only one’s he had been able to get his hands on. As the technology got better, the BTLs were cleaner and Styles had to figure out how to make his own. A mixture between a functional (but not entirely reliable) understanding of hardware, and meat-space stunts seems to do the job be the only way he can continue to feel alive.

/// make as many assumptions about my character as you like, I’ll work with them. You can write entire dialogues that include my character, even a heart-to-heart where he tells what he came from. If there is something you want me to make up for him, feel free to ask in the comments but permission to turn him into anything (such as a trans-gendered android) is not required.///

Styles Candy’s Cards

Nature

ROCKSTARRockstar

A cutting-edge style hacker and culture punk, reshaping the world through your art.

x3

Strength +

STREETWISEStreetwise

You know the politics and the landscape of the streets and how to get around alive.

Strength +

WILDWild

Fill this in during play to introduce a new Strength.

x3

Weakness -

BROKEN MEMORIESBroken Memories

Your head’s not right, riddled with blank spots and holes where memories should be.

Weakness -

WILDWild

Fill this in during play to introduce a new Weakness.

x5

Subplot

ART IS LIFEArt Is Life

A childhood obsession with BTL-chips has turned into a spiritual quest to discover or create an existence in the creases of the real and the fake.

Edit:

Moments later:

Approved!

[clyde]

I probably should have assumed this from the beginning, but I get the impression that Storium's flexibilty and dependence on player-investment means that whether or not you have a good time is largely going to be based on the party and narrator you end up with. My first story (the murder mystery) was a disaster. There was no sense of who was in charge of what. The narrator wanted the party to talk amongst themselves and (I think) create clues that they woould eventually write into the actual solution, but we were all paralyzed with not understanding how much we were supposed to write into a mystery that the narrator may have already created. It was weird. It was fun though. The setting was that we were all a bunch of strangers who won vacations to a resort. For the first two days of playing, I got a real sensation that I was stuck in a public place making small-talk with strangers; it was thematically accurate. Our card-challenges were things like "Get to know each other" which was very awkward because the asynchronous format does not allow for a dialogue to be written by two. This means that you would have to make drastic assumptions about other player-characters in order to reveal anything interesting in the segment that you write. Once everyone lost faith that this was going to work out, there was a day of inactivity and I can now no longer access the story. I think the narrator deleted it, but it's possible that there might be some sort of "kick player" functionality that I'm unaware of. To be clear, I did get a cool experience out of it. I genuinely felt some aspect of being in that fictional setting.

I'm now in my second story and the narrator seems much more comfortable in their role. It's a cyberpunk story and the narrator appears to be using a mixture of provided cards in their original form, provided cards with edits, and original cards that are written exclusively for our adventure. In this game, I'm seeing what the cards accomplish and what they do not. Think of cards like achievements or badges; they are digital reifications that have an psuedo-scarcity to them. Cards can be put into two main categories. Some are granted to players as awards, and some represent challenges for the player. The awarded cards represent abilities, weaknesses, motivations, and assets. Each one has a description to it that creates an expectation of the subject matter and influential details that you should include in the paragraph or two that you write to describe a action your character takes (including lesser consequences). The challenge cards are provided by the narrator to focus the collaborative writing on a few common non-player characters and obstacles. These challenge-cards have point values and two generally worded possible outcomes. Players use their awarded cards to match the point values of the challenge cards, taking note of what the cards they are using are supposed to represent and including those motivations, abilities, weaknesses, and assets in the segment they write. When a challenge-card's point value is satisfied with player-cards, a strong or weak outcome is determined (which has written guidelines) and the player that was the last to put points on that card includes the outcome in the segment they write.

Now I know this sounds really flighty and loose (and it is), but it can totally work if you end up with a complementary group. Without the cards, there would be less common ground from which to work. The presentation of the cards adds an officiality to these nodes of communal fiction. As an example, in the story I'm currently in we had a challenge card that was to get away from the cops. There is an unstated expectation that all the party members need to stay together, use their awarded cards on the challenge-cards and write their segments in consideration of all that. So one player had a card that said they have a medical profession, they used it to procure an ambulance. One player had a card that said they have corporate connections, they used it to make a call to slow down the cops with an insider who had access to stop-lights. I used a teamwork card and a weakness card (one that explains I have confuse memories) to describe the scene of how my character responds to the flashing lights, explains their motivation for throwing another player into the ambulance and how the driver (another player) takes off. Because I completed the challenge with a strong outcome (determined by the cards used to satisfy the point value) I'm instructed to make sure I include the outcome that we successfully get away from the police.

Styles just stood there for a moment, unsure of what was going on. The sirens, the fires, the blood, the sense of urgency; all this assured him that it wasn’t real. The sirens though, they always evoked a reaction real or not. The sense of cinematicism increased dramatically as an ambulance raced towards Styles and the cripple, its doors flying open and inviting them in. There was no way this was real. Styles took the narrative cues and helped hoist the injured man into the vehicle. The calvary of cop cars came into view and Styles jumped into the ambulance instinctively. The driver hit the accelerator as soon as the two medics closed the door. Styles looked around him. A company-man was examining the moaning form on the floor. Style’s couldn’t see the driver, but he assumed someone was there. Two confused medical personnel stared back and

“Ahgg!!” , Styles screamed and flattened against the inside wall of the vehicle.

“Yes?” The samurai who had decapitated Kanon answered Style’s surprised scream from a corner he was poised carefully within.

“Null sweat” Styles tried to be non-chalant about being stuck in a small area with a second, and uninjured weaponized human. “I just didn’t see you there.”

Styles Candy will earn a bonus wild card in the next scene for playing out their Goal: Teamwork

The narrator then creates a new scene and dispenses award cards. In this case, the narrator included character-specific flavor text to acknowledge how we had defined our characters in the previous scene (this is a very nice touch by the way).

It can be rather enjoyable. In the two games I've been in, players submit moves every 3 hours or so. We end up with each player taking about two turns a day. The asynchronous drip-feed is a nice little flourish to my day. If I couldn't play this from my smart-phone, it wouldn't work for me.

[Merus]

So I pulled out of the test game I was playing. I don't think Storium's a particularly good system; you start off with only three mechanic-relevant responses to anything, which means that you're constrained to fairly cliched responses to any challenges. There were several moments where I wanted to play a card, and had to work out what the card represented for my character, how that applied in this situation, how that could possibly help, and how in god's name that was supposed to lead to the desired result. It took me a long time. There were several instances where 'what I wanted to do' would just bog down the storyline because it had nothing to do with playing cards. The more I played, the less enthused I became at the prospect of making a post, because either I could waste the other players' time or I could put in a ton of work to force my cards to work in a situation, with what felt like little middle ground. I'd far prefer to either do forum roleplaying, where I can make more nuanced responses, or in-person, with a character that has more than two personality traits.

[clyde]

So I pulled out of the test game I was playing. I don't think Storium's a particularly good system; you start off with only three mechanic-relevant responses to anything, which means that you're constrained to fairly cliched responses to any challenges. There were several moments where I wanted to play a card, and had to work out what the card represented for my character, how that applied in this situation, how that could possibly help, and how in god's name that was supposed to lead to the desired result. It took me a long time. There were several instances where 'what I wanted to do' would just bog down the storyline because it had nothing to do with playing cards. The more I played, the less enthused I became at the prospect of making a post, because either I could waste the other players' time or I could put in a ton of work to force my cards to work in a situation, with what felt like little middle ground. I'd far prefer to either do forum roleplaying, where I can make more nuanced responses, or in-person, with a character that has more than two personality traits.

I took the opposite route. Unafraid of wasting other player's time, I've been trying to put more weight on the role-play than the cards; I feel sorry for my poor narrator. I'm not sure if I have been an annoyance or not, but I will say that forcing other players to solve the problems that my character exacerbates has been the most interesting part of the story. I'm not trolling them, I'm just role-playing. I've still been finishing obstacles, often with weak outcomes. My personal goals are rarely fulfilled. The narrative of this ends up being this broken and damaged cyberpunk character who is dragging the team down with all his personal baggage. It may be selfish, but I think it's fascinating.

Unfortunately, it's also a lot of work. I'm still in the same game from May and i must admit that I don't look forward to typing out my contributions. I haven't felt this need to procrastinate since turning in creative-writing pieces in college. It's actually similar in many ways. As the team/social pressure is forcing me to continue to write in this world, my narrative-skill is improving much faster than if I was to do something on my own with no one watching. I don't think that the resulting Storium-prose is more than a first draft, but it does have some interesting plot-depths.

I'm supposed to write my character's epilogue for our first run and I needed to get this out of my system before putting my big-boy britches on and typing this shit out. This is good for me, but it's like pulling teeth.

[clyde]

I'm still playing The Cyberpunk Story That Never Ends. Now that I'm learning a little bit about programming, I'm able to use concepts loosely. I'm playing as a deck-jockey. The post I made today is so bad that I love it. I enjoy how when I'm reading Neuromancer or Count Zero the partial understanding of scripting and hardware just becomes these strange magical items with a tiny bit of unreliable logic. Since my understanding of scripting doesn't rememer which one is the delegate and which one is the event, I end up rounding down and it mixes with loose campiness that I find myself proud of.

By the time Mari had given them the bad news, Styles had managed to lay out his deck, connect through Mari's terminal and jack-in. The matrix flowed around him and Styles saw a ping flush away from him.

"Nail me to the signal when it comes back." Kanon had taken the form of a luminecent green burr with a fractal of tendrils, one of the constructs Styles had collected in the past month. A short time after they had watched the pulse disappear over the horizon, the world shuddered with its return. Kanon had somehow shared the senstitivity of the chip's signatures with Styles. Kanon knew what a Ceduceus signal looked like; she couldn't forget the pain they caused. Her trauma amped this particular ping to make it the only signal that he was able to pay attention to. In the instant of its reverberation, Styles speared it with Kanon and found himself bound to her, flying through the Matrix surfing the signal.

Near instantly they found themselves in a class of mind-numbing delegates attached to mega-corp grade methods that were whirring away so ceaselessly fast that the clock-drain was lagging the meat-signals of the host. This was crazy. And they were inside of it. At the moment of recognition, the ping shot them back. Styles jacked out to share his findings.

///

"It's a wireless, read-only ping, so I couldn't manipulate anything, but I got an image." The sudden changes in realities removed his ability to focus on anyone, he just talked as if he was in a lucid sleep assuming someone else in the room could hear him if he spoke; the images around him were still hypnagogic. "There was massive overclocking from the chip borrowing a lot more meat-cycles than I've ever seen. The host won't be hard to identify, they are probably crawling if not paralyzed."