Rewarding narration in GMless competetive games.

[BigElvis]

For my game Flash i wanted to include a mechanic that could both reward narration and direct narration as well. My solution was word/picture cards. Each card would have a picture or word on them (ex. blood, cut, eye, hand, scream, child, blue, green, red, mud, water). Every scene the cards would be up for grabs by players including them(or close) in their narration.
My problem with this was that it seems to easy to me to just include everything in a narration, and if there was some reward then it would be stupid, from a competetive point of view, not to do so.

So does anybody have any ideas for or insights on rewarding narration in GMless competetive games, not just for my game, but in general?

[joepub]

You need to have some kind of feedback loop present.

For examples:

*It's your scene. You're allowed to pick up one card. From that point on, you can only gain additional cards if people pick them out of the pile and hand them to you. It's a way for them to say "What you're doing is really cool, and I want you to take it in this direction now!" I personally am a huge fan of this idea. So, I pick up Child and narrate it into the action. Then, maybe you think that's really cool and you give me Mud to work with. The more entertaining and awesome my narration, the more incentive other players will have to feed into my narration. It costs absolutely nothing for other players to hand me cards.

*Everyone has the cards dealt amongst them, in hands. When you play a card, you hand it to another player. That way, the person who consistently has the coolest narration will get fed more cards when its not his turn.

*When you take a card, you spend a Story Token to do so. After you narrate the card into the SIS, any other player can slide the Story Token back to you if they think it was awesome. They're even encouraged to toss you additional Story Tokens from their bank if it was super awesome.

Are these the kinds of solutions you're looking for?

It also really depends the group dynamic you want. Teamwork? Back-and-forth dialogue? Fast-paced competition? Giving us a better sense of this would help us give you more targeted suggestions.

[joepub]

Note: I posted this response before noting your other Flash thread.

[BigElvis]

Note: I posted this response before noting your other Flash thread.

That's cool this is not supposed to be another Flash thread.

As to your idea: I don't think it would work in a very competetive game. It is a nice way to both direct narration and reward it out-of-game(if the cards don't affect the mechanics). The thing is I wanted a way to give a reward in-game, but it has to be objective, people shouldn't be able to say: we'll you only won the game because we were more rewarding than you were.
Personally I am not sure it is possible, which is why I would like to see if you guys have an idea that will make it possible.

[Callan S.]

Quick idea: Some people your competing with, some your not. It's determined randomly (everyone draws a counter from a bag or some such).

Okay, you do your narration. You then turn to the crowd and choose who you think looked the most pumped, cause obviously they will give you the most points. Also you can try and guess if they are a competitor or not. Non competitors can give you a point, competitors can give a penalty...or also give a point!

First twist is, the player never says if they were competitor or 'audience', unless they give a negative point (they would then show their competitor token or whatever)

The twist is, I bet sometimes you choose a competitor and sometimes your narration will so overwhelm them that they would give you a point anyway. This gets around your stated 'we'll you only won the game because we were more rewarding than you were' problem because the competitor is totally empowered to penalise while at the same time if he tries to be chummy and nice with the rewards, he just looks like an audience member and its not a matter of 'I gave to you, that's why you won'.

Just a rough idea.