Storyteller: Mechanics
Disclaimer: all this might change before release! It has happened before…
Storyteller has a simple interface: you drag actors into panels to give form to a story, but you don’t directly control how each character behaves. Each actor reacts according to his nature, of which there are several: villain, lover, hero, amnesiac, etc. All living characters have a common behavior: they all suffer when someone they care about dies or dumps them, and other common-sense rules.
The challenge of each “story” (or level) is to figure out how to make actors do what you want, how to fit that in 3 or 4 panels AND somehow match what the story goals.
In example above, Tim is missing Lucy because he fell in love with her the first frame. Lucy, however, is playing a villain so she is not only uninterested in Tim but also annoyed at his crush on her. What happens between the first and second panel is that Lucy left for some reason and Tim is still in love with her, thus him missing her. This is called closure, the core of what makes Storyteller work. Another, simpler example:
Adam here dies because the game concludes that since there’s a tomb in the second panel and only Adam is missing, he must have died. That’s the nature of the tomb in Storyteller.
Each one of the stories check if its conditions are met, but often they are not very specific, so you can find multiple solutions to the same story:
 
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Some stories actually detect some interesting variants and hints you of their existence!
Right now, I am trying some new submechanics like flashbacks, that allow out-of-order story arranging:
This is super-cool looking. How hard is it to auto-solve for solutions (i.e. without a player)? Could you, say, give a start state and an end state and get the system to find a solution that fits?
By Mike on February 3
Fascinating! Is the nature of characters involved in a scene always known, or is it sometimes revealed through probing the situation?
By Paul McCann on February 4
@mike: it could be done without any hard technical problems. In fact, the current game engine could probably find *all* possible solutions for any story. I will be doing this sometime this year.
@paul: the natures are predefined independently of stories. Same disposition of actors always produce the same result.
By Daniel Benmergui on February 4
Hi. That looks promising.
Do you use any engine or code on your own?
By mark on February 10
If in the first panel there’s only adam, the second one there’s a tombstone and the third one has adam again … does that translate into adam dying and then rising from the grave as a zombie?
Would said zombie eat the brains of a previously loved one?
By Kimari on March 2
Oh, and you could also make use of backgrounds. For instance, a “thunder storm” background would change a good character into an evil one if he just experienced tragedy. Maybe even stab somebody in the same frame.
An already evil character would laugh maniacly with a thunder for background after having committed a murder.
A normal person under normal circumstances would get killed by a lightning.
A knight in shining armor would get struck by lightning, but not die in the process, instead channeling said lightning to attack something very powerful (a dragon perhaps?).
Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m getting kinda carried away here
By Kimari on March 2