Yeah, designing a game around hand management seems like it would require a certain amount of careful design. And I can see how you would do that.
But where does a hand of storylets make narrative sense? That’s the thing I’m struggling with. You’re giving the player a random subset of the stories that make sense here, but you want to keep that particular set of choices around for a while? Oh. How long is a while? I see. So you might draw a hand that is the set of vendors and interesting people that are at the bazaar on a given day, and that won’t change until you go to sleep and come back the next day.
Or a hand of the people who live in your neighborhood, and some stories might result in them moving out and then you draw a new person to move in. Things like that. OK, now I’m getting the idea. Cool.
As for the <<addcard>> trick, you can certainly do progress qualities instead. I was just thinking it might be easier for linear or simply-branching storylines with time separated content.
Greyelf pointed out recently that you can create dummy arrows by putting links inside comment markers:
/*
[[Study]]
[[Billiard Room]]
[[Parlor]]
*/
SugarCube will ignore everything between /* and */, but the Twine editor doesn’t know about that syntax so it will create arrows (and new passages, if they don’t exist). Clever.
And you can change the color of a passage tag at any time, and Twine will mark all passages with that color. So that would help with finding and re-numbering parallel content. Start at the end, change req-progress-eq-5 to red, fix all the red-marked passages, change it back to grey, and repeat. Or if you’re working in Twee you should be able to just search-and-replace each tag across your whole story.
Edit: Ooh. Or you could name each stage of the progress quality instead of numbering them, and keep a global list of the order. Then you’d just have to type the new name into the list and everything would just work. It would be a small piece of code, and I bet I could wrap that in a simple macro. Sweet.