Several Minor Ideas, Thoughts Please? [somewhat lengthy]

[MacLeod]

Slap head, totally missed this the first time around!

Don't worry about it, this thread is a huge wall of text from most peoples' perspectives. It tends to glaze the eyes over!

This is actually exactly what I was talking about with aspects: One way of encouraging creativity is firstly to insure people have to do something different each time, then giving them a list of inspirations. So the starting descriptions of the characters could in a way be setting out your armoury; these details give you the space to get creativity bonuses from your narration. In the same way narrating the location could give information for players to use.

Indeed. =D The 'Narrative Color' section of the game is merely a loose outline... I have no hard coded bonus structure for the narration system though and I'm not 100% sure I'd like to include one either. I know one thing that I am going to do, and that is to include some creative description bonuses in the example battle to demonstrate how it might work in play. Lately I've been realizing more and more how inadequate the battle example that I typed up is. x_x

Also, I do include a mention regarding repetition and plainly stated narrations. Such things are subject to penalties based on the GM's whims. No one wants a guy to go, "I attack" during this game... and no one wants a guy reciting the same giant paragraph of description every round. I'm not saying that each and every narration be a massive thing either... simple narrations like, "I punch him while shards of ice spiral around my arm!" are fine.

[JoyWriter]

I tend to lean towards "not giving bonuses" vs giving negatives, just because it means that people can always rely on a baseline before it gets subject to other people's aesthetic judgements, but many games work differently. Hopefully the fact that the opponent is killing them much faster will encourage them to start being more creative, even without specific negatives.
The advantage with making a scheme like I mentioned is that you can just chuck it down on the table and have everyone look at it, allowing the GM to get bonuses too. It also means that you can play a game based on duels and have the other players act as a sort of judge/participating audience, still engaged in what is going on. It wouldn't be totally rigorous, but it would be open to discussion, allowing a group to find their own fairly consistent measure of creativity.

[MacLeod]

Okay, I think I see what you are getting at.
I think a table of examples paired with the bonus applied to it would suffice? It would be basically putting my loose and quick explanations into a tidy little table to reference... hm...