Thread by @ThoughtPunks

On the computer! Let's talk Story Hour!

Here is one of each type. We should have POD decks available this summer. Hopefully will order a test print in a month or less.

Don't these look cool!?

Keep reading the thread for what the stuff means! 🧵
#tabletopgaming #IndieGameDev

Overview, basic game: Everyone draws 5. 1st player draws top card from deck as the random starting seed. Card types = obvious guidance. Pick a card from your hand + one trait from each category. Tell a paragraph or two fitting that. Vote on best storyteller at end, they end it.

You can also draw them for solo play or improv GMing as an inspiration oracle. The face colors make them easy to sort into separate piles if you wish. There's also a solo roleplaying add-on in testing, but we'll get that too! First, let's talk about the cards themselves a little.

There's 4 types: Actors, Events, Settings, Twists.
Actors have Behavior + Motives.
Events, Challenges + Outcomes.
Settings, Features + Moods.
Twists, Cause + Impact.
All really pretty self-explanatory. They are what they say they are.
Adds random elements + interesting choices.

The base game is "how do I play this hand into the story?" You have to follow what happened before as canon. You have to play the cards in your hand. 13 cards of each type. Over 2.5 million possible 5 card hands! [Do the math!] Plus 9 ways to play each [two 1/3 choices].

There are some basic gamification and oracle mods. Things like roll a d3 [1d6/2] to randomly pick the traits. Or a pool of points to give away to other players each round to crown the final Storyteller for the ending. But there's also a Game Hour expansion set being refined.

It adds a Director Card deck, 12 each of Cheats [like draw an extra card and discard an extra card on your play or retcon some canon], Montages [get to gloss over/soft reset], and Tricks [mess with other players' turns]. And 4 new cards of each the main 4 types.

As with the core game, the cards do most of the direct lifting for the rules. There's not a lot of extra rules text for Game Hour. The Director card hand [draw 3 each] adds its own layer of gamification and interaction, as far as it's working out in tests.

I did promise to talk a little about Solo Hour too. So that will come with two sets of 6 Splat Cards, a pulp set and fantasy set. Those are your characters. Couple skills and abilities. Health and Energy. Each is an archetype. Fairly straightforward.

There's a deck of 20 Action Cards. You each draw 3 each round. You can play one as your action that story round. Can spend 1 Energy for a freeform action instead of a card or to play a second card. Also a deck of prompt cards to set the main conflict before drawing story cards.

Core deck is a pure storytelling game. The game expansion leans more on cards for extra actions than extra rules, per se. The Solo Hour expansion adds the most new stuff but is itself still very card driven and intuitive. And that's my long little ramble about Story Hour! 🙏🥰

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