Player Directorial Stance in Rules or Ad Hoc?

[furashgf]

I was enjoying Jared's new OCTANE rpg, and noticed (obvious to everyone else) that players get directorial power based on rules w/ in the system.

Elsewhere, people seem to say they just allow players to introduce directorial stance wherever they feel like it.  There are also some in-between stances (e.g., the pool's "monologue").

What's going on here?  What are the tradeoffs being made in using directorialism in rules v. other more informal mechanisms?

Gary

[Ron Edwards]

Gary,

If I understand your question correctly, you are asking about formal elements of game design that permit or even enforce Director stance.

The primary poster child is Extreme Vengeance, by Tony Lee, 1994 (Archangel Entertainment Studio). Characters have two attributes, Guts and Coincidence. Announcing a "Coincidence" literally means engineering aspects of the immediate environment as you see fit - finding a door, pulling  a concealed weapon, all the speeding cars lining up just for a moment so you can run across their tops, even entering a scene at a moment of your choosing.

The really neat part is that a successful roll may (if appropriate) be treated as a damage roll to one's opponent, whereas a failed roll (always) does that very same damage to you. Thus no matter what, someone (player or GM) has to work with the newly-invented elements of the environment.

Modestly, I also submit Elfs as an example of something similar, in that players' announcements and their rolls actually bring "magic items" into existence during the course of the li'l bastards' adventures.

Editing this part in: Extreme Vengeance contains a tradeoff of the sort you hint at, in that a starting character tends to have high Guts, high Coincidence, or middle range of both. Bur during the course of a "movie," Guts climbs rapidly and Coincidence drops rapidly.

The management of Director activity on the part of the players is a necessary aspect of game design. It can be presented as text, or system, or both, but without such a clarification, I think any RPG is flawed. Many, many games lack this clarity and rely on the gaming culture "just knowing" how it's done, and that leads to a lot of problems among people. I consider that this idea applies especially to those game designs in which player Director stance is not encouraged - I think their design would lead to less problems in play if they made it clear what is being discouraged, as such.

Best,
Ron

[furashgf]

Thanks Ron, but what about Sword and Sorcerer.  That encourages mass-directorial activity on the part of the player, but it isn't really defined in the rules (e.g., to come up with a coincidence, spend a humanity point).

[Ron Edwards]

Gary,

I did not say, in my previous post, that Director power needed to be formalized into game mechanics. I said that its limits and uses need to be set by text or system or both.

Sorcerer & Sword does it mainly with text. I don't see any contradiction between the supplement and my claim above.

Best,
Ron

[efindel]

I was enjoying Jared's new OCTANE rpg, and noticed (obvious to everyone else) that players get directorial power based on rules w/ in the system.

Another example of a system that gives directorial power through rules is Theatrix.  In it, there are two rules concerning directorial power:

First, players are explicitly allowed to improvise things in the setting of the current scene (the "stage"), provided they follow a few guidelines.  These are:  1.  Anything improvised must be something that logically would stand a good chance of being present.  2.  An improvisation cannot pertain directly to an object that is the focus of a plot or scene (e.g., if the group is trying to find something, you can't improvise that it's right here).  3.  The GM has veto power (but is encouraged not to use it except when an improvisation will cause consistency problems).

Second, a player can spend a plot point to make a statement that one of the PCs has made be true.  This is also subject to GM veto, and there are a couple of niche protection rules involved that I won't get into.

Elsewhere, people seem to say they just allow players to introduce directorial stance wherever they feel like it.  There are also some in-between stances (e.g., the pool's "monologue").

What's going on here?  What are the tradeoffs being made in using directorialism in rules v. other more informal mechanisms?

Gary

As Ron says, I think the issue of directorial power has to be addressed.  A game doesn't necessarily have to decide it for sure, but it should at least bring up the point and encourage the GM to discuss it with players.  Without there being at least an understanding, either player-GM conflict or player-player conflict can result.  The former will probably lead to a discussion, but the latter can be worse -- I've seen it happen that one player regularly does things in director stance, and the GM allows it, while another player thinks of director stance as being the sole province of the GM -- and therefore thinks that "the GM lets X get away with whatever he/she wants" and comes to resent this.

--Travis