strong player directorial power

[james_west]

To me, games with strong, continuous player directorial power seem to as different from traditional RPGs as RPGs are from boardgames.

I'm thinking Baron Munchhausen, Crayne's Storyboard or SOAP, Clinton's proposed demon-as-PC format in Sorceror, etc.

I've got two questions:

(1) How well does this work in practice with 'normal' players? (Who are, in my experience, pretty strictly actor stance by habit.)

(2) I'm wondering about possible middle ground: the games I mention above seem to have players-as-directors continuously, whereas in other games with some level of directorial power, it's very rare (usually ~once per session). Has anyone seen a game with more than that, but less than the ones I mention ?

[Ron Edwards]

Extreme Vengeance, Extreme Vengeance, Extreme Vengeance; James, you MUST get this game.

Others in this category include Ghost Light, Puppetland, and The Dying Earth, and I think you'll find Hero Wars in action is further along on the spectrum that it looks just from reading it.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

james--

i ran a session of "extreme vengeance" for my regular group & they LOVED it, particularly the directorial stance the game pretty much forces the players to use--previous to this, our narrativism pretty much consisted of ignoring & fudging dice rolls in mage...one of the guys in my group keep asking me to run it again (which i would if i were more into the action movie genre, but i'm not)...

my point being: if players want to use author & director stance, they'll take to it like mad--if they're not into it, they probably won't run w/ it...but you never know unless you try...