Shared Action Resolution

[MachMoth]

To be honest, I never put to much thought into shared narration.  I like the idea, but most of the people I play with don't.  The seperation of character and player is too great, and they feel they lose the sense of ownership/control.  

However, I was toying around with the idea of a group of players controlling a single character, when I worked out a system of shared action resolution/narration.  Each player rolls the same skill/resolution thingamawhatchit, and each narrates a segment of the scene based on his/her individual success or failure.  

For the time being, I've  decided to use this as my mechanic for Saeculum Adstructum, since there is already a level of character/player seperation involved there, and the players have a storyline goal for the session from the beginning.  But, I was wondering how this compared to current shared narration methods in existance, and if the general concept could stand on its own, without the rest of the system babying it.

[Ben Lehman]

This sounds remarkably similar to Donjon's "establishing Facts."  You could essentially have each character narrate a number of "points" equal to their margin of success or failure...

which suddenly strikes me as a very good idea...

yrs--
--Ben

[MachMoth]

Hm, I hadn't thought about it at that level.  I was thinking along the lines of if you succeed, narrate success, you fail, narrate failure.  However, you are most certainly right.  There is lots of room to turn this simple idea into a host of great mechanics.

In fact, you just helped me with a problem that's been halting Saeculum Adstructum for weeks.  Characters have traits listed throughout their history.  This is how their experience and development is quantified.  However, a trait has no numeric value.  If a character is a bad ass swordsman.  It just says "bad ass swordsman" somewhere in his history.  It has made it very hard to include into the resolution mechanic.  However, this works perfectly.  When a player narrates, he rolls against the difficulty of the event.  Each point in the MoS is a point of victory that the player must use in his/her narration to effect the outcome.  Each point in the MoF is a point of failure that the play must use in a similar fashion.  A player may also use one of the character's traits to float the result in one direction or the other, so long as it is included in the narration.

Say for example, Dran is locked in a heated battle with the last of a zombie hord.  All of the other players have had their chance to add to the event, and now narration is passed to Peter.  Peter has rolled a MoF of 1, not a good way to end a fight.  However, no one has mentioned what a "bad ass swordsman" that Dran is, and it is in his history.  Peter calls it in, choosing to shift his Margin up by one, to a MoS of 1 (Margins of 0 would lead to no effect, which is boring, and as such, are skipped).  Now Peter can end the fight with a decapitation blow to the zombie, so long as Dran sounds like a "bad ass swordsman" in the process.

I think this is definitely what I'm going with.  Any comments graciously welcome.

[LordSmerf]

Very interesting actually.  There are some really interesting possibilities here, which i'll detail in a moment.

First, a point of clarification: are you intending to present challenges to the party instead of indivitudals?  Meaning that you say: "there is a horde of zombies attacking you guys, what are you going to do?"  As opposed to "Peter, two zombies are attacking Dran; Bob, there's a zombie coming after you; Katie, you're being ignored at the moment."

Personally i like the first option since it present a challenge for the group to overcome, instead of breaking it down into individual challenges.  An example would be:

GM: You're being attacked by zombies.
Peter: Dran is going to whip out his sword and wail on them.
Bob: Zerubabel is going to pour lamp oil on the zombies and then light them up.
Katie: Arcturus is going to use his "distract zombies" skill to lead the zombies toward the huge pit in the middle of the room.[/list:u]
Then you all roll appropriate abilities and

narrate with the option of overall success/failure being calculated from the sum of successes failures rolled all around.

Anyway, on to what i think is really cool: use this with dice pools.  Instead of worrying about MoS and MoF, count the actual number of successes and failures rolled.  Perhaps using traits as automatic successes.  This allows/forces you to narrate setbacks, but then eventual victory; or initial advantage, but eventual failure.  That seems like a pretty cool idea to me.

So, yeah, i like the idea, i'll be taking it now.  Thanks.

Thomas

[MachMoth]

By all means, steal away.  I could not hope to capture all of the possible uses of this idea in one game.  In fact, it would make me feel all warm and fuzzy, if I were credited with the spawn of a small sub-genre.  ;D