Here’s a way you can get more use out of an existing bit of content. You have a story that’s ten branches long. But you want it to take a while, be a bit of a big thing. So, you create a pacing mechanic. You scatter a few branches around your Sometimes deck that give a point in a quality. Let’s say this is all spy fiction, and the quality is ‘Word from your Contacts’.
So, to play your big story, each step takes 10 points of Word from your Contacts. So the character has to run around accumulating that before they can advance the big story. Great.
But it gets better. You write another big spy story. You want a slow pace again – but you don’t need another pacing wheel. You can re-use the stuff that gives Word from your Contacts, and make the new big story also need that.
You can de-couple the pacing content from the story content, and reuse one with a new set of the other. It means that players will be seeing a lot of the pacing content – so you need to make sure it’s good – but it’s an efficient way of structuring things.