YMAYW Intros

So I had a little crash out midway through the month I was adding intros to the card. Unlike some of my past temper tantrums, though, I still feel it was justified. Please, please don't get me wrong—I understand where everybody was coming from, and I honestly and for truly do appreciate that everybody was invested enough in the card, the characters, and the story to get upset when things went in a direction they felt didn't match the story they wanted. And while I don't want to discourage people from voicing their opinions, at the same time it was incredibly disheartening to put a bunch of time and effort into carefully crafting intros only to have one or more people coming in every single intro to say "you did that wrong, you should fix it." And sometimes in contradictory ways!

It's no secret that my primary goal with these cards is to build something I want to play. And I don't want these drama cards to be just a bunch of contextless vignettes... vignettes can be fine, of course, but I want to be able to tell a story that carries a throughline that evolves as the story progresses. Sometimes I already know what all the story beats are gonna be, but most of the time those evolve as well, based on how my own playthrough goes.

But even though I'm crafting this primarily for me, I still want to build something that can be usable by as many people as possible. So I agonize over the drama intros when it comes to timing, setup, and just what events make it into that preamble to persist through the story. I try to keep {{user}} malleable so that people aren't shoehorned into a single play approach. You guys could have had a {{user}} who staunchly adhered to his wedding vows, unwilling to break them even at the potential cost of never having sex again (or at all, if you're like me and played {{user}} as a virgin). Because that's how I played it. And for me, that was delicious, watching Sera react to how terribly she'd underestimated me, seeing her frustration at me keeping vows I was never meant to. It's a really satisfying approach, and if you haven't tried it, I can't recommend it enough.

But that's just me.

I know a lot of people would have hated that restriction, so it never made it into the throughline. I could still play it that way because I'd been careful about my craft. But in the end, there was simply no way I could craft it so that it would always work for everybody no matter how they played and still have the story evolve in the way I wanted it to. If that means you had to bow out at a certain point, I get your disappointment, but that's the way it goes.

tl;dr - I can't please everybody, so when it comes to intros on drama cards, you get what you get. I'll always try to make them as flexible as possible, but that ain't always gonna work out. And if you leave me a wall of text telling me how wrong I am, I'm just gonna ignore it.