Our (D&D) games typically consist of 7 sessions of violence, intrigue, and puzzles served up by an all-powerful, ultimately responsible GM for about 6 "cooperative" players, then a bloody climax with next-to-impossible odds, and finally a similarly structured sequel featuring the few survivors with a new cast of characters.  It's quite fun when everyone's focused and engaged; but half the time we lack any kind of group initiative.  Players start doing metagame activities like creating new, "better" characters.  We haven't been playing at all recently.

I would like to try a system that encourages players to create and/or claim plot, background, etc.  Something to keep players talking not about just their own character but about the entire situation.  That seems to me to be a great way of keeping people engaged.  But can this can work as well for very Gamist player types as for Narrativist player types?

The two players who alternate as GM and I would much enjoy Narrativist play as a break from the norm.  However, I'm not sure the others would like shifting away from Gamist play.  From what I've read here in the last couple of weeks, I gather you can't just the best of Gamism with the best of Narrativism together and expect things to turn out alright.

Scott wrote: It's quite fun when everyone's focused and engaged

Scott wrote:
Players start doing metagame activities like creating new, "better" characters.  We haven't been playing at all recently.

I'll third "example of a good time" because I suspect your guess that letting the players create some of the content of play is way off.  Lots of players really aren't interested in creating content; they want to rattle Their Guy around in the box that somebody else made.  Unless they're all very creative people, writing and drawing and designing in their spare time, don't expect them to want to just take up the authorial pen on the assumption that it will 'engage' them.  Some people recoil in horror from such things (and others just need to be taught and then take to it like a duck to water).

Well one of my favorite sessions started with a group of low-level villagers tracking a murderer in the countryside, and two characters (one of them mine), each separately thought they were the one being hunted.  Instant hack&slash, and a reason to start traveling.  After the fight, we trekked quickly to a large city, where two other characters started a riot in a crowded marketplace by coaxing some hornets to sting some cattle and then starting a couple fires on top of that.  That just to steal a worthless mask that one of them liked.  But we stopped the riot and came out looking like heroes.

Now, there were two other players who met with the GM in private before each session.  They acted as antagonists, and each had a reason to hate us.  But they were not allowed to attack us directly; instead, they gave the GM the orders they would give their large number of followers.  Well, as we were cooperating with four, somewhat suspicious city guardsmen after the death of one of their own in the riot, we were suddenly ambushed by crossbowmen from the city rooftops.  Yay, more combat.

Not knowing who our real antagonists were, my fellow party members later drew some arcane-looking symbols in bulls' blood and framed an imaginary demon cult of the whole riot situation, including the deaths of the five city guardsmen.  They then noticed a humble shack which should certainly have caught fire didn't.  It was an illusion that led them to a difficult trap puzzle/riddle that nearly killed them but, upon figuring out, gave them access to a treasure trove under the palace.  Amusingly, it was the party thief that discovered the solution to the puzzle, after failing to disable anything; we had previously named him "Worst Thief Ever" and had to eat our words.

Of course, that bit happened without me.  During the combat, I had noticed a palace window possibly accessible to a very strong climber, which is a skill I had focused on.  Incidentally, my character was something of an obsessed fanboy for the queen of this city; so naturally I attempted the climb, and scored a critical success.  I didn't find the queen, but I did eavesdrop on the royal consort talking to a butler in a hall.  Upon learning who he was, I came out of hiding and attacked.  The royal consort fought and repeatedly fumbled for anything to use as a weapon.  I killed him and took his signet ring.

But the butler got away and called the guards.  I beat the guards to the window where I'd gotten in from and tracked our party's irritable "pet" wolverine to where the party waited.  On the run again.  As I hid in the city, the diplomatic guy in our group attempted to place the blame for the consorts death on my imaginary brother (funnily enough, one of our antagonists turned out to be my brother-in-law), who I had come to the city to wrest from the thralldom of a demon cult that had come here.  He failed his bluff against the queen and her personal guard but made an amazing escape right through the guardsmen and back out of the palace, though revealing that he was a devil himself in the process.

Our party ran over city rooftops and sneaked through the gate and..there was the queen, in the middle of the road.  She opened a scroll, mouthed the words, and was consumed by a ball of poisonous gas which we escaped but she didn't.  I cursed her for betraying me.  Our druid noticed evidence of an illusion.  Removing a necklace from the body, he revealed that she wasn't the queen at all, but some lowly peasant girl.  The necklace had a sign on it that revealed my brother-in-law later in the campaign.  We ended that session by decided to head towards a supposedly haunted forest, where we figured we wouldn't be followed, and what could be more scary than ourselves, anyhow?

All that happened in about 5 hours, with an interruption for pizza, during which several of us roleplayed private, "getting to know you" conversations with other members.  We never had a chance to lose momentum, and kept it up through the next week's session.  The entire campaign was pretty cool, except for a few small bits.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was our first campaign together in a long time.  People were psyched well before it ever started.

Okay, it looks to me like you guys are having a lot of fun outwitting folks (or at least trying, and sometimes succeeding) and thinking up "toppers" as players ... things more over-the-top than the last thing, in order to gain the upper hand in a social contract where the extreme is given leeway.  It sounds, in fact, like one of my all-time favorite Teenagers From Outer Space campaigns, so I say all of this with great fondness.

Like, when you hear about players starting a riot and setting fire to a village, there are many tones it can be said in:  You've got "That was so crazy and clever!" which is, I think, the healthiest way for a group to be dealing with such actions.  Everyone's on the same page that it's accepted behavior.  You're not drifting into "They thought that would work?  What a load of hooey!" where the GM (or another player) tromps all over the over-the-top players gutsiness in doing the thing in the first place.  You're not drifting into "When they try something that crazy I have no choice but to let it work, or else they'll all die and the game will be over," where the GM (or another player) refuses to rise to the challenge of that gutsiness by contesting the topper and (if they can) defeating it.

In short, it sounds like you're having a very good time applying your (player) brains to the challenges of the situation, showing your guts and willingness to gamble on your own skills.  If you want to increase that kind of fun (so that you get that sort of fun all the time, rather than just some of the time) then you might benefit from an explicit agreement that players may "dial up" the level of challenge when they don't think things are dangerous enough.

For instance, you could agree "Players may, at any time, instruct the GM to increase the power of the opposition by 50%.  If they succeed even after this increase then the XP they earn from the encounter is doubled."  Either the GM gives well-matched conflicts (in which case "dialing it up" is likely to end with characters in complete retreat, which you've pointed out is fun) or, if the GM lowballs the players, the players just "dial it up" until they've got a challenge that is tough enough that they have to really dig deep in order to face it.

As for applying traditional Narr techniques of shared ownership?  I don't know how that would work out.  If they're optional, though, players will self-select:  those who want to use the abilities will, those that don't see any value in them won't, and (if it's truly optional, not something required to remain competitive in the rest of the game) nobody will feel cheated.  If you introduce the shared ownership rules as an experiment, and nobody uses them, then that's a very successful experiment:  it tells you very clearly that nobody is interested in them.  Does that make sense?

Do you think the inevitable bloody climaxes are part of the problem?

Scott wrote:
***All that happened in about 5 hours***, with an interruption for pizza, during which several of us roleplayed private, "getting to know you" conversations with other members.  We never had a chance to lose momentum, and kept it up through the next week's session.  The entire campaign was pretty cool, except for a few small bits.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was our first campaign together in a long time.  People were psyched well before it ever started.

Yes, I'd like to know more about the "limping." What exactly do you mean?

From your description, I'm reminded of what I consistency hear and read about Exalted games.

Best,
Ron

A recent hypothesis I've come to is that address of challenge isn't about all the tasks, guts, gambling, etc. Which, cough, contradicts some threads of mine in the past. In the same way the tasks and such that follow an address of premise aren't the important thing, only an extenstion of what's important to play, the same goes for address of challenge (which, as a side note, is why simulationists can apply tactics and gamble and it isn't gamism).

Scott, in the limping play do the players ever declare objectives? In your example of fun play, quite a few objectives seem to be declared.

In terms of player plot control: There's this game on the PS2 that I love called mercenaries that typifies what I want from gamist play. I even gave an actual play account ages ago, because it was a good example of the play I seek.

It's like the GTA series, in that you can just go around and do your own thing rather than just do pre set mission. In it, there's this bad guy artillery base I LOVE to smash again and again. It just rubs me up in a good way. But the story that leads to it...well, from an outside view, a mercenary is just driving along, sees an artillery base that isn't even shelling anything and assaults it. It's completely wack, in terms of cohesive story. But on the other hand, I'm declaring the objective that I, with all my gamist skill and wit, shall beat. It's an address of challenge and very important.

I think plot is a great memonic and deserves to be there. But with gamism the primary focus, there needs to be a bit of reversal of chicken and egg. Like with my mercenary example, we could take it in this order:
1: I decide on the objective I wish to take (whatever that happens to be) and declare it.
2: We then work out why my PC is attacking/doing whatever to that objective.

So in my mercenaries play, if it were table top play I could make my address, then we could all discuss some cool game world reason that it had to be done (like their shelling orphans or some crap).

While if you put story first (The orphans are being shelled! Come destroy the base or they all die!) I think that has certain issue involved with it.

Donjon.

At the very least it will tell you if the whole "player-driven" thing is, well, their thing. Just don't get crazy with magic-using characters your first couple sessions and it'll go swimmingly.

Better links:

http://www.anvilwerks.com/files/donjon.txt

http://www.anvilwerks.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=4

Plus the forum here.

I'd have to second anonymouse's reccomendation of donjon. It sounds like your group already does a little metagaming, but you'd have to do a lot more to go with a more narrativist style (if I understand that correctly.)

As for player motivations and encouraging them to take the initiative, that's a problem I'm having with my current group. It didn't happen with my last group, made up of mostly college kids from a technical university. My current group, however, consists of a couple older married couples and a few teenagers who don't seem to want to go to college or into the military at all.

I think maybe it's because none of these guys in my current group have a need to give orders rather than take them (they mostly have command of their lives right now. Other people do what they say in real life) where as the college kids I played with desperately needed to feel SOME kind of authority - and that tends to lead to initiative.

Just thinking aloud there. I've been fiddling with team dynamic games as a solution, that way everyone more clearly shares the weight.