CREATURE FEATURE: Powers of play in a shared-GM game

[Steve Dustin]

Creature Feature is a shared-GM monster movie RPG I talked about in this thread:  http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4138

Some conversations got me thinking about "defining" the metagame capabilities of players in terms of "levels of power" in Creature Feature. Right now, I've got three levels that are definite, but am waffling on adding two more.

Levels with their "powers" and who can weild them during a scene:
                 
Script-Writer: add plot complications, dummy actions, and invoking the monster [everyone at the table]
Cast: interacting with the game world with your character(s), handle your character's narration, make contest rolls for your character(s) [everyone with characters in the scene]
Cinematographer: set-up scene--choosing a location and introductory narration, choose participating characters, do scene narration that doesn't fall into the lap of the Cast [only 1 Cinematographer in scene]

And then I'm contemplating adding these two just to complete the "color" of the movie analogy --

Director: Establishes a scene conflict or motivation for the scene, starts a scene by saying, "Action!", ending a scene by saying, "Cut!" [1 Director per scene]
Producer: handling in-game book keeping, handing out bonuses during a scene, handing out script dice rewards at the end of a scene [1 Producer for the game]

The idea, theoretically, is that a player at the table could weild all 5 levels of power in a scene, but the ideal is to spread them out among everyone. At that players without characters in a scene still can participate in a meaningful way.

Some focused questions: are there too many levels? Like I said, its mostly that way to accommodate movie color. Are there certain "powers for play" I'm missing? I'm trying to consider play considerations for traditional RPGs and how a shared-GM tweaks that.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks, Steve Dustin

[RobMuadib]

Steve

Hey, looks pretty solid to me, with the 5 levels. I like the Producer "job" it mirrors some of the thinking I have with my Design for TMW:COTEC so far. My only point is that Cinematographer and Director have alot of overlap.

Perhaps you could reserve the scene framing and motivation stuff to the cinematographer and have the director conduct play and otherwise keep the action moving, making sure people get to take part (don't know if you have player turns, but seems to fit well with more collaborative models.)

You can see how I divied up the GM duties, which I recently expanded
upon in the PDF of my Game Concepts: Shared Play chapter, which I
posted on my website here

It is interesting, butchering the GM, as it were. Since of all the taken for granted concepts of RPG's is the GM + Players paradigm, is the most widespread.

HTH

[Mike Holmes]

IMO, combine the cinematographer and director. Any fuzziness between the two would be bad, and the jobs aren't really big enough as defined to split them up.

Mike