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strong player directorial power

Started by james_west, June 03, 2001, 06:13:00 PM

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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...
--josh

"You can't ignore a rain of toads!"--Mike Holmes