During a recent game something happened that bothered me and has since been occupying my mind. Here’s the situation: there were two players in the scene, one had narrative control of a character and another had narrative control of the area/NPCs (the game is Metrofinal). My understanding was that one player would make the character awesome and the other player would make the world awesome. At one moment, and it was just a moment (no hate!), the person playing the character narrated the world changing (not him changing the world), and it oddly ruined my fun (just for a moment!).

At first I was surprised. I have some pretty classic story-gamer GM ambivalence/borderline disdain. I can do without them. However, at the same time, I love it when people are given creative independence and have domain over a certain, well, domain within a game.

It was a game I’d never played, so after the scene I asked the facilitator whether this was an acceptable broach of narrative control. He said that it was pretty free-form, we could blur the boundaries between narrative control.

Usually that sounds cool to me, but then I thought, hey! We all have this awesome opportunity to play both characters and worlds, but at separate times. I don’t want anyone stepping on my creative little feet! I think the distinction between a classic GMed game and this made it such that every player was going to get an opportunity to play each role—thus making it more comfortable to adhere to strict narrative boundaries.

What do you all think? How do you strike the balance between, “We’re all here collaborating together” and “Hey, I want to do my cool thing!” when the rules aren’t totally explicit?

If the rules aren't explicit on the subject, then the only real option is to negotiate. The players will, either verbally or in an unspoken way, need to come to a conclusion about what is and is not allowed.

In this case, I think it was more of a "different pages" issue. I (being the unnamed individual above) didn't see myself as stealing anything from the player who was narrating the world. I saw it instead as collaboration: I'd toss in a detail here and there, and he'd have some leeway to move my character around in the world. It wasn't a matter of deliberate scene-stealing, but instead a matter of me wanting to add a touch or two to the scene. Perhaps this action stemmed from other games where dropping details into the setting is highly encouraged (such as Microscope, Shock, or Polaris).

In fact, Metrofinal seems to have a curious setup that places it in a different category from many of the "core" story games we play. Another game with a similar style is Silver & White, where each player has control of one aspect of the story (the machine, the photos, etc). But I digress.

How do we balance between collaborating (coming up with ideas together) and doing our own cool things (coming up with ideas alone)? I'm not sure I know of any hard-and-fast rule. It really depends on the players at the table, their moods, the current atmosphere during the game, and the game itself. I operate under a few general principles (which I am only just now actually trying to put into words). First, I try not to ever directly override or counter something another player creates in that collaborative space, and especially not when it's their solo thing. Second, I try to avoid holding the spotlight for too long (although I readily admit to sometimes failing at this task). And third, I try to support, encourage, or in some cases prompt other players to be awesome. I want the story and the scene to be cool just as much as the other players do. If I think I can help someone find that one idea they're just on the cusp of actualizing, I'll try to plant a seed or play along with the direction they're going. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it goes quite well.

That's all I can think of for now. I don't know if I really even answered the question...

Detaching this discussion from the specifics Metrofinal (or whether Marc is a big crude man-viking), what you're describing in general is a textbook illegal move:

A has guidance over X
B has guidance over Y
A jumps in and starts narrating Y
The buzzer should sound and A should be stopped

Even if B doesn't object someone should point out that this is improper so everyone else doesn't think that's okay and trample on other people's guidance for the rest of the game. Precedent sets play.

We've all done it, because yeah, sometimes you have an awesome idea or (more charitably) you think the other person really needs help.

The solution is respectfully asking permission. Ask politely if you can suggest something. The key is to ask before you say what your idea is: if you say "well what if X happens?" you've made it a referendum on your idea. Now they have to be a jerk and veto your concept instead of just saying no they'd rather come up with their own idea.

(Footnote: yeah, unless you're playing Microscope. Then the rules say absolutely don't, precisely because we want to see what cool and surprising ideas people have deep inside them. To hear those quiet, quiet ideas we need total silence.)

I think it can be hard to generalize about this behavior, though.

In Polaris, everyone has very specific roles to play, but I've often seen the lines between protagonist and antagonist control blur during conflict. For example: if the Knight wants to kill a particular demon, the antagonist is (I believe) within his rights to assert that the Knight also gravely wounds his good friend in the process, or is filled with sadness at seeing such a beautiful thing (the demon) be destroyed. The antagonist can dictate not only protagonist actions, but also emotions. Maybe this isn't the right way to play the game, but even if the antagonist restricts himself solely to the world and not the protagonist, he can still step on the other player's toes.

Also, in a D&D game I played, my character said something to the innkeeper like "We'll have two bowls of whatever they're having, (pointing). It smells divine." The GM responded with the innkeeper saying, "Oh, that's incense." Yes, I had taken a liberty with the world, but it was inconsequential and fit with the established flavor. In turn, the GM had implied that my character couldn't distinguish between food and incense. They strictly had only narrated about the world, but it caused quite an altered interpretation of my character.

This same GM gave me a lot of leeway in other regards, though. I was allowed to paint in large parts of my race's history and culture, despite the fact that the race was an invention of the GM's. Like this, in D&D it's traditional for players to invent NPCs, dangers and even landscapes when they're writing their backstories for a new game. These are all things that normally fall under the GM's purview, but are open to the players during character gen.


So, I think it can be very hard to tell what X and Y actually are in a game, and whether exceptions can be made to who has guidance over them. I think Ben's suggestion of asking for permission to add something makes sense if you already know what the limits of your authority are. I think in many situations you might have to instead extend the question into figuring out where exactly those limits lie. (Just like Caroline did with the Metrofinal game. Maybe we just needed to talk about it longer until this was fully worked out.)

In Polaris, everyone has very specific roles to play, but I've often seen the lines between protagonist and antagonist control blur during conflict.

Polaris is actually nicely clear on this front. During role-play, it's just like I described above: you stick to the characters you have guidance over, but you're allowed to suggest or request things of other players. Once you get into a conflict all that changes and you can say things about anybody because your ability to declare things is being moderated by the conflict rules (same with Shock). The other player has mechanical means to fight back.

Going back to collaboration or not collaboration, I would say that even if you have strict, strict, strict division of guidance (I control A, you control B) you are absolutely collaborating so long as you're paying attention to what the other players are introducing and building off of them. Someone has their character say something and you react and build off that. It's like ping-pong. If you start playing both sides of the net (speaking for yourself and the other player, like in the original Metrofinal example), or stop listening and using what the other person says, that's when you stop collaborating.

Traditional GMing is non-collaborative in this regard, because the GM has a pre-planned adventure and is not changing it based on what characters the players bring to the table or their apparent desires. Old school GMs do not retcon your long-lost brother being one of the bandits because you mention you had a long-lost brother.

The other view of collaboration is that we all brainstorm to resolve a single thing ("I think he should do X" "Well I think he should do Y") and then agree together which happens. But if you pick it apart that often means that many ideas are suggested but only one is chosen. Maybe they blend together, but usually one wins. Is that really collaboration? I don't think so. Because one idea often dominates I think it's a lot less "collaborative" than a dynamic back-and-forth where people are introducing snippets all by themselves (like the next line their character says) and then listening intently to see how the other player responds.

Amusingly enough, Caroline, this also happened in the Metrofinal game I ran last week, with players-as-PCs occasionally straying over to describe the setting or the effects of their actions. Apparently I need to be clearer about this!

I saw one thread where folks compared Metrofinal to an old-school adventure game, and that's pretty close to the vibe I'm imagining. Metrofinal grew out of another game where the stations were puzzles that the PCs (who were originally not bodhisattvas) had to unlock. So your instincts about the roles of the PC-controlling and station-controlling players are spot on, based on how I see the game.

The PCs are potentially very powerful and can make all sorts of things happen, but they can't really determine exactly how the station will respond to their actions. Sometimes the things they attempt have unexpected consequences! Really, all PC actions should be thought of as being: "I attempt to ______," with the person controlling the station saying how that plays out (it's a very grognard-esque GM-like role, really!). Often, with things fully under the PC's sway (such as their own traits and the things they carry), we can skip the step of the station-controller validating what happens, because it's silly and condescending to keep saying: "Okay, you can do that." But sometimes -- maybe there's a station where nobody can speak! -- even normal PC actions can be complicated or straight-up resisted by the station.

Getting that vibe right is not super easy, since it's a pretty sharp distinction in player roles for a game that seems very freeform and open. Also -- and I'm sure you cats have noticed this -- a lot of games that operate in this same ballpark have subtle or clear differences in how the players are supposed to collaborate in creating a play experience. So if players bring in some of their expectations from other games (not just D&D but Fiasco or Microscope or other hippie games too), it can makes for situations where people have different expectations and play feels weird or doesn't quite pop. But of course people want to use all the cool tricks and techniques that they've learned from other games, so it's hard to plan on excluding all that stuff entirely.

Instead, I think listening carefully to your fellow players and occasionally course-correcting is something we basically have to embrace. Ideally, it'd be nice if we never had to have conversations about play or the game -- at least, not in the middle of the game -- and could just play seamlessly, but I'm not sure that's a fair expectation, even when playing the same games with the same people all the time. One of the great things about games is engaging in the process of learning to collaborate with people on the fly, so speaking up when things are weird or using less obvious techniques to get things back on course... I think that's required, in many cases, and a good set of skills to practice!

Indeed, I thought the "I expect this to happen" terminology we arrived at midway through the game seems like the best possible solution for a game like Metrofinale where the narrative control is divided among certain jurisdictions for certain players, since it gives the bodhisattva player the opportunity to state what they'd like to see and the station player the chance to accept, reject, or modify it without having to actually "retcon" what happens. Maybe it would be useful for newer players if that was a terminology you specifically suggested to use at the outset, since it would help for curbing people who get a little overexuberant and end up "taking over" more of the narrative than they ought to--in either direction. Admittedly though I thought our recent Metrofinale game went pretty swimmingly for how new most of us were to it, I was worried that people might be too inhibited or reluctant, and at least having the opposite problem was more interesting! ;)

One thing I kept thinking while playing was that Metrofinale was a lot like having a lucid dream, in that you can exercise potentially infinite power over what happens, but it doesn't always turn out the way you expected, and that controlling your personal avatar is easier than controlling other areas of the world--at least, in my limited lucid dreaming experience. I really liked the tension created by having our bodhisattvas have a "guise" as looking normal-ish, which made it feel very in-character to react mostly "normally" at first and gradually reveal more and more of our bodhisattva natures, so there was a really fun level of shifting power dynamic the whole time. At least personally I was very satisfied in my last scene (in Los Leones) where I was able to really throw out a lot of the cool and symbolic powers I had been dreaming up the whole time, and do things like strongly set my expectations for what would happen--or at least that *something* cool should happen--rather than the sort of "try something and be content if it comes to nothing, go with the flow" attitude I had earlier in the game. I feel like as long as the players are on the same page and are each operating in their own bailiwick Metrofinale's system allows for a lot of interesting and differing interactions because both players can have huge narrative power simultaneously, and modulate that power as they go based on the situation and the other players.