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In Storium there are Subplot cards and Goal cards.
A Subplot is chosen by the player for his character at character creation.
And a Goal is a card that can be picked up or give to the player by the Narrator.
Both of them allow you to get an extra Wild Strength card once completed.
What is the difference between them? Why are they not simply the same card?
A Subplot is a personal choice, you can select one from the available Subplots in the story already, or create your own.
A Goal is one that is assigned by the Narrator, either directly to you, or available to be picked up.
All Subplots start with 5 cards, whereas a Goal can start with any number of cards as dictated by the Narrator.
In this way, the Narrator can give incentives for players to do certain things, whereas the Subplot is personal incentive for your own character to accomplish his own goals.
Also, here is a quick explanation of the cards from the creator of Storium found on the Kickstarter Comments:
The idea of Goals and Subplots is that they are rewards for playing your character in a certain way over an extended period of time. Goals are ways for the narrator to encourage certain long-term plot directions without forcing it on players, whereas Subplots are long-term plot directions that players can choose for themselves. In both cases, the player gets a reward for having committed to that long-term direction and thus helped to advance the story. These cards are limited to one play each per scene because otherwise a player could "spam" their cards, earning the reward too quickly and undermining the entire storytelling purpose of the feature.
The primary difference seems to be that the Subplot cards represent the character's current primary ambition, while the Goal cards represent potentially several things that the character would also like to achieve.
The mechanics are very similar, because the things the cards represent are so similar. The primary difference in mechanic, in order to model this difference in theme, is that you can only have one stack of subplot cards at any time (according to the wording on the cards and on the site, anyway, actual gameplay may prove this to be wrong), whereas you can have as many stacks of Goal cards as the narrator allows.
This limit on Subplot cards is the only justification I can see for them being separate card types.
