Two narrative systems

[MikeF]

[AJ_Flowers]

I haven't played either of the games that are inspiring you, so maybe there's something fundamental I'm missing about the idea. But it feels like to me, what's missing from this is some sense of purpose for the various roles, narrator or player. Does each 'player' have a stake in a particular thing happening?  As in, they're designed to root for a particular character, or a particular outcome to the story?  Or are the players just sort of along for the ride? What the stakes are in the game and what the point of it is, other than telling some kind of story, might help you to better understand what associated costs there should be for a particular action.  It's not that the game has to have a win/loss condition, but it seems offhand like there's no real strong reason for a player to participate, token costs or no token costs.  In that case, Version B seems more appropriate, as long as you're dealing with a small amount of players... since it doesn't really matter where the story goes, anyway.

[Abkajud]

Hey, Mike! Sounds interesting!
Option B sounds like it more closely resembles the dynamic of a standard roleplaying game with regard to the narrator/PC relationship - sort of a "Yes, or spend a token" constraint for the narrator. I'm curious as to what it would look like, given that a more easily-trumped narrator would probably be narrating scenes that didn't focus on his own character or some such thing.
Vaguely, it reminds me of Polaris, as so many things do: in that game, you've got an active protagonist, his antagonist, and 1-2 players portraying neutral or friendly NPCs. Each scene swaps all the roles to other people. The equivalent of spending a token is "exhausting a theme", in which you tap into a specific trait, fact, or resource owned by your character, consider it "spent" for the time being, and thus have the right to say "no" to someone else's idea.
I imagine in Option B, though, you'd have a standard "The GM and the players" setup, only the GM role changes around from scene to scene, but the token economy could work similarly.
Maybe, to keep the flow of tokens going, players have to pay a token to say "No" to something the narrator wants to do. If everyone abides by "Yes, or spend a token", it's basically your standard rules of improv (almost - standard improv is a "Yes, and..." attitude, with any hard "No" actually derailing the process. Here, it's different). Thoughts?

[MikeF]

AJ, Abkajud,

Thanks for your comments. Abkajud, yes, switching it round and having a cost for the player's saying 'no' is interesting, but I think AJ is right that this is a mechanism in search of a game. I tried to flesh out a little what I want the game to do, and discovered that it doesn't quite fit with this mechanism, though perhaps a ghost of it survives. Just about to start another thread on that game, I'd be interested in your thoughts on that too.

Michael.

[dindenver]

Mike,
  One way to do it is to have a resource. The narrator gets a resource for saying Yes and gives a resource to say No.
  The point is, if there is a narrator that is always blocking, they will run out of tokens and have to say Yes. And if there is someone who always wants to add more to the story, they will run out of tokens and have to listen instead of interrupting.

  A good example of something like this is ...In Spaaace! I have played it and it was very rewarding for a diceless system.

  I hope this suggestion helps.

[Adam Dray]

You might also look at "The Princess Game" by Colin Fredericks. In it, players take turns narrating short statements limited to certain areas. For example, one player represents the bad stuff that can happen to the character, while another represents the character's good heart. Jumping in with your narrative costs you some tokens.

Polaris divides authority over different kinds of trouble in a similar way.