I had brief plans for a complicated token economy for my NaGaDeMon game. (The game which still needs a title. Titles are hard.) You’d earn tokens when you proposed how things would turn out but someone chose a different path, then you’d spend those tokens on all sorts of things. Getting more votes, bribing other players, controlling NPCs.

The system had one or two fixable flaws. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the token economy was the wrong fit for this game. Gaining tokens would overpower the core storytelling aspects of the system, I fear, and mechanize too much of the game.

So I scrapped it. Paring the game back to the minimum it takes to get it to work. Build a bit onto the core mechanic, look at it, whittle some or all of it off. Repeat until you have a game.

(So I’ve only managed to write down some purely optional setting material, which is very nice but probably needs trimmed down in size. Eventually actual rules text should hit the word processor.)