Narrative & choice
Structuring authored or emergent story: branching, consequence, reputation, and persistence of decisions across sessions.
14 entries. Tie-break question: Is it structuring story or consequence?
Boss Encounters
A climactic, individually authored enemy or wave sequence closes a segment of play with its own rules, scale, and phases, so progress is gated by defeating it rather than by attrition against ordinary opponents.
Branching Dialogue
Conversation is presented as a tree of authored lines in which the player selects from a set of responses, and each selection decides which lines, information, or consequences follow.
Flashbacks
A player pays a cost to declare, after the fact, that their character took a preparatory action earlier, and the declared action is narrated as a brief scene and takes effect in the present situation.
GM Moves
The facilitator's interventions are codified as a named list of moves, triggered when a player misses a roll, when the table looks to the facilitator, or when a golden opportunity arises, and governed by a stated agenda and principles.
Legacy Campaign
A series of linked sessions in which the outcomes of each game permanently alter the rules, components, or world for every later game, through irreversible changes such as stickers, destroyed cards, and sealed unlocks.
Level Editors
Players build playable levels inside the game from its own palette of pieces and rules, test them, and save or publish them so that they or others can play them as ordinary play spaces
Morality Systems
The game tracks a character's ethical standing on one or more scales, moves it in response to the player's actions, and gates abilities, content, or endings on where the character stands.
Multiple Endings
A bounded story has several authored conclusions, and which one a player reaches is decided by accumulated choices, tracked flags, or a final decision, so the ending is a readable record of the path taken.
Player-Authored Goals
Each player writes their own character's goals, beliefs, or drives on the sheet, and the rules pay experience or metacurrency for pursuing or testing them, so the players rather than the designer set what a session is about.
Quest Structures
Play is organised into discrete assigned tasks, each with a framing, an explicit objective, tracked progress, and a reward on completion, so authored content is delivered and consumed one task at a time.
Relationship Systems
A tracked measure of the bond between the player character and a specific other character rises and falls with choices, gifts, and time spent, and gates scenes, bonuses, and endings as it crosses thresholds.
Reputation & Factions
Persistent numeric standings track how each of several in-game groups regards the player, rising and falling with the player's actions and gating access, prices, hostility, and story branches.
Scene Framing
Play is organised into scenes that a designated participant opens by stating where and when the scene is, who is present, and what is at stake, and closes by cutting away once the stake is resolved.
Shared Narration
Authority to narrate what happens in the fiction is distributed among all players by rule, passing by turn, by interruption, or by spent currency, so no single facilitator owns the story.