The "story level" part of the ST system hasn't really been developed, and I'm not sure what all was originally planned for that, but some of these suggestions should probably be limited to folks who have earned some trust and/or proven themselves.
Ideas and Suggestions
1) Starting with the low-hanging fruit, here. The ability to toggle a story as "open to all" vs. "private." It's kind of a headache, when your story is open to anyone who wants to join, to have to manually accept everyone who applies. Really, I think the apply command should only be required for "private" stories. For "open to all" (or "first come, first served") STs, the system should just auto-accept players. That way, the storyteller can just focus on the story.
2) The ability to do a global event to let everyone OOCly or ICly know a story has started and how to join. Global echoes only echo to people already joined for the story, which is fine for other uses, but I'd love to be able to send out a message like:
(In moderation, obviously.)Word is going around that a crowd of angry farmers in magebane masks is gathering in Church Square, complaining about rotted crops. They're calling for townfolk to grab their noisemakers and come help investigate. (OOC: Rotten! is about to begin in Church Square. All are welcome! Type STORY REVIEW 123 for the full hook or STORY JOIN 123 to join!)
Messengers to all aren't ideal, because they cost the storyteller money to send, can't be written while a story is open, and now all come with a town crier blurb that assumes anything written in the "message" portion is a verbal message. Visnet is free, but it's fully OOC, not everyone has it on all the time, and it doesn't have that oomph that says, "Hey, this special thing is happening!"
3) The ability to build small, temporary areas (1-5 rooms) for story purposes. Right now, I have to ask staff for help with this, and since I can't justify adding to their burden for something temporary, I typically don't. Most of my STs have been limited to places on grid I've discovered in the past, which is fine for a lot of things (I can DnD style in a single room, if needed, and I have the benefit of having discovered many interesting locations and secrets on past characters), but I often wish I could do something special. Something unique that might grab even oldbie players.
For example, a story that takes place on a boat that arrives at the docks for a day, in a temporary tent or structure, in a secret cellar, or in a series of cave rooms (added to an existing cave) that collapse once the adventurers escape with the treasure, etc. etc. If I have to pester staff to build me a boat just for my story, I'm probably going to put that story on the backburner. If I could build the boat in an hour myself, I'd say ahooooy matey!
I kind of imagine this would be fun for other players as well and might be more of an incentive to run an ST if the storyteller knows they have a little more freedom to create a space for their story. For players who don't have years of experience under the belt, even just figuring out WHERE to have a story is probably intimidating. Staff can help with this, but there are still limits to what the grid has to offer.
4) I would love to have my own backstage room and the ability to visit there to prep for a story without having to pester staff for a transfer or having to create a temporary mob to use as a "transfer beacon." I could see this as not only being useful for someone who runs a lot of stories, but maybe also an incentive or just a nice reward. After X stories/story level, staff reward you with your own story room for your account!
5) I've been trying to think of ways to make it easier to coach other players to run their own stories. A storyteller help channel, maybe? Open to other ideas, too. There's just a ton to the system already, and if it were me, I wouldn't want to spam visnet asking for command help on a system most people don't know how to use.
6) The ability to set a co-Storyteller might be useful. This would make it possible to co-run events and make it easier to lead 2 groups at once. Some people might also be incentivized by running a story with a friend, rather than having to wade into the system alone.
7) I think it'd be great if the 'end' command that closes a story could return the same prompt as reroll, e.g. require 'end yes' or some other keyword to confirm. I'm constantly terrified that I'm going to use the command by accident when I mean to pause. I know others have accidentally used 'end' when they meant 'pause' in the past -- to hilarious but unfortunate effect -- and this would help ease my mind. A lot of prepwork goes into setting up a story, and it would really suck to lose everything because my fingers get ahead of me sometimes.
8) Ability to discern whether something is a "story object" by looking at or appraising it. All story objects disappear when the story ends, so it'd be nice to be able to easily tell them apart.