This actually ties into a few threads being currently dicsussed in the Publishing forum. My wife (who has roleplayed a few times) and I invited over my wife's cousin and his friend. Both are non-roleplayers and my wife and I decided that we would play Baron Munchausen. They had never seen the movie so we also decided to change the setting to the 80's. My thought was to get out my 80's CD's, have everyone pick one and then tell the story of how you (as an 80's rock star) did some amazing thing.

They didn't like the limits. They wanted to be anyone from the 80's and they wanted it to be random, in that you didn't get to pick who you were. So we got paper, wrote down a bunch of people from the 80's and put them in a box. Each round, we drew a name from the box and that's who we were for that game. We had rock stars, politicians, actors, and serial murderers.

At first, it was kind of lame as people were getting used to the game. (Although both my wife and I had read the game, we hadn't gotten a chance to actually play it.) We were telling stories of affairs and such and it wasn't producing great stories. So I said each story needs to be "easrth-shattering" and then we got some fun stories about Chinese popping out from the center of the earth, an interplanetary rock tour with an alien love child, and lots of fun. The craziness escalated and we got a little tired so the stories did descend into silliness after a few more rounds and we ended the night.

Both the non-roleplayers really enjoyed the Baron Munchausen game although we may need to institute more guidelines about what kind of interruptions are allowed and how they're resolved. I've got all sorts of ideas of different settings including Old West Tall Tales and James Bond superspy stories. I think we may have to try this again at Thanksgiving and see how well it goes over in other age groups. (We were all around 30 years of age.)