This is a thing now (click me).

Storium is the online game that lets you and your friends tell stories together and play in imaginary worlds of your own creation.

I stumbled across their kickstarter at the very end, and backed it right away. They managed to raise over 1000% of what they wanted initially, opening up a shit-load of extra content, as well as the promise to a version of the platform designed to be used in schools and for education.

Check out their kickstarter page here–it’ll give you a great insight in what it’s all about and the things that got added as the campaign went on.

Apparently, one can still get access to the beta cycle through their website, even now that the kickstarter is over.

My first impressions of the platform are pretty positive. But it’s very apparent that they’re still in a very early stage of what could potentially be an amazing thing. The concept itself is very neat–play by post with a twist. People tell a story together, each person writing from the perspective of their own character. While doing this, they play cards to guide their narrative. All the while, the narrator (creator of each game) lays out challenges to overcome with said player-cards, further guiding the narrative through those challenges.

It’s like playing an RPG, but with more freedom, no nasty rules, and loose guidance as to tell the story.

The narrator picks from a pre-build set of worlds, or builds their own. Worlds come (and are fully customizable) with a set of natures (character concepts), strength and weakness (character traits), and assets and subplots. All of which are cards to be played during the narrative to count against a challenge. Strength and Weakness Cards are the most important cards, since they allow to move the outcome of a challenge in a weak or strong direction.Whoever plays the last card on a challenge gets full control over the outcome, guided by the description left by the narrator, and can write up whatever the hell he likes at this point. The only guidelines are, as mentioned, the narrative suggestion from the narrator, and whether it’s a strong or weak outcome.

It’s a conflict-resolution-reward system.

I’m excited to see where this is headed. So far, a bunch of features are teased (and funded), but not yet implemented. Here’s hoping the beta moves forward soon to unleash the full potential of this idea.

So far, it’s missing any kind of social features. You can talk to other players in the games you’re in together through a comment-function. That’s it. I’m sure in the future there will be more ways to interact, like chat and forum and yadda yadda, but right now it can get frustrating. Also, finding games is a bit tedious. Just one big list to scroll down. No search option, tags or categories. All things that will surely be added in the future, I guess.

If you love storytelling, and love doing it with others together, this might be a thing for you to check out.