I would suggest a short series of Primetime Adventures, or even a Dirty Secrets novella or three (disclaimer: I edited the Dirty Secrets, and also, it’s structure is closer to one Player and many GMs than straight ahead player authourship). Both of these games do a good job of allowing all players to have input into the story’s direction but offering a structure for that input.

As has been mentioned, player authourship isn’t for everyone, but I do think it’s worth giving it an honest shot before dismissing it. It may not fit with your current fun, but it may open your eyes to another, different type of fun.

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It turns out that my friends really wanted to spend the evening killing monsters and managed to have good rolls most of the night. No token were used…

My friend PM, in an offline discussion hit the issue on the head for me:

Many players don’t like to be asked ‘So what happens now?” They don’t expect to be part of shaping the story, that’s the DM’s job.

If I really want to share narrative controlled, I need to introduce this in my DMing style and not crunchify into some mechanic.

Like PM says, if players flub a skill challenge and end up being surrounded by hostile guards… I should ask a question like “So does anyone of you know one of the guards here?” if I want to give players a way out.

If one answers positively, then with more questions, you draw the players into setting up the next scene where the sympathetic guard does something to help the PCs get out of this predicament.

So the whole token thing is not so much what I was looking for, but a way to draw out players into the story more.

I think it needs to come from my willingness to share and the player’s trust that I won’t screw them over if they go out on a limb to shape the story.

As for frustration management and magic item swapping, I’ll keep exploring. Many of the suggestions brought up in the comments are giving me plenty of food for thought.

Thanks!

Example: In one game, the DM introduced an ominous looking vial (plot point for the storyline) and a player made the decision to break open the mysterious and very very very dangerous and ominous looking vial before first getting it checked out by someone knowledgeable in such items. (this was after the DM kept asking “Are you really sure you want to do that?” aka “Listen to the DM’s warning and don’t do it!”) Inside the vial contained a very virulent plague that upon breaking would kill every living thing within a 5 mile radius…if they were lucky. Once the DM announced that the players basically killed themselves and the kingdom they were traipsing through, Divine Intervention was invoked, time reversed back a few seconds, and a powerful being showed up at the last second to prevent the character from breaking open the vial of death, thus saving the party, the kingdom, and the plot line.

Divine intervention is a very useful tool, and only having it available once per session and only with the total agreement of the entire party keeps the players from abusing it.

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When failure isn’t a real threat, the game loses all interest for me. Might as well put the dice away and have everybody describe how their characters do awesome things. It becomes a game of “I once caught a fish this big.”

I find the narrative control aspect to be more intriguing, though. When I run games, I’m always looking for ways to let the players help me with the work of describing the world and the results of actions without giving up all of my referee’s control over the final result. Points or tokens that allow players to say “but what really happened was…” seem like a great idea for this to me. Instead of associating them with the random aspect of system mechanics, I would probably choose to associate them with the “GM’s discretion” areas. Your example of “the orb nobody wants is really a bastard sword” is one good example of this. Another would be a critical success or failure on some check. Let’s go with a critical failure. I say the player swings, misses, and lodges his magic greatsword in the wall so it will be difficult to retrieve. The player spends his token and says, “actually, I tripped and fell prone, but I retained my grip on my weapon.” He still has to suffer the fumble, but he got to choose his own penalty instead of me choosing it.

It becomes even more interesting in other situations. I say the room is empty, but player says, “but that’s not how it went!”

“How did it go,” I ask?

“Well,” says he, “there is a fair maiden awaiting our arrival. She is friendly, and bears news from our patron!”

This hands me an interesting situation. A little tough to roll with? Yes, definitely. However, it definitely adds more imagination than my own to the task of shaping the growth of the adventure, and that can only have awesome results.

My house rules are a little tighter than your proposal, though. Basically, they have to work with the scene in plausible ways, and they can’t directly harm/kill an NPC.

I’d stick to making them an individual thing, I think. My concern is that the “only one to a group” would lead to arguments over how to use it, and derail the story you’re trying to enhance. That’s not a problem if everyone has their own personal “do something awesome” chit.

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I’m still unsure if its worth trying but i will offer it to my players.

I find sympathy in the arguments to leave affecting dice rolls out and leave the token only to affect how an aspect of the story goes. However the idea of the token is to allow things to turn around for the best for a key player in the evening.

Then again, as others pointed out, its a matter of trust and maybe I should just allow changes in story course without an extraneous mechanic. I could pick on player.

I think I may try to put too many things in just one idea:

1) I want something that would prevent story tellers to be disappointed by my clumsy skills (no Phil, the Fearie Queen is the one that sent the Trent Airship and its not an insane soul sucker!)

2) I want something to mitigate player frustrations with bad Dice rolls.

3) I want to allow players to get to choose loot they want instead of me making the effort of adjusting treasures in advance.

So yeah… that might be a tad too much for one little mechanic.

I’ll put it to the test tonight and report on it later.

Thanks for the feedback all!

For example, you couldn’t turn a botched or regular attack into a critical hit, but you could convince an enraged duke to throw the party into a den of angry lions rather than feed them to his pet dragon.

Alternately, you could have a percentage chance that every time a player uses this ability, there’s a risk that something bad will happen instead, with the bigger requests entailing a greater chance of bad repercussions (or entailing worse repercussions).

A wish for a critical hit could result in a slightly-worse-than-usual critical failure, and the aforementioned appeal to the duke could result in being thrown to the lions and then the dragon. And then another dragon.

As far as using them in 4E, I’m not sure I’d worry about players saving up that single point for the big bad guy at the end: They already can do that with their APs and those are far more of a major perk. Of course coupling the idea of max damage with APs probably is a recipe for anti-climactic battles. One solution would be to allow players to use APs for various effects: Perhaps it costs 1 to gain a reroll, and 2 to gain a 2nd action. You then give out more APs a bit more liberally in the game: Perhaps follow the standard rules but then throw one out to players on occasion for a really cool description or bit of roleplaying. If you’re really worried about players hoarding the points put a cap on the # of points that can be carried over between sessions or wipe the slate clean each time they take an extended rest. If you don’t want them to slaughter the bad guys, keep the rule that they can only use them once (so one reroll or one action) per encounter.

In the 4E game I run for a group of teens I use hero points as a separate system that grant rerolls and other perks (various prices): I reward players for good roleplaying with a hero point which is a good way for offering a reinforcement for desired behavior at the table.

I use rules much like this a lot. The first thing you ought to do is trust your fellow players. Much of your concern about these rules seems based on the concept, that players abuse the game unless they are kept in check by the GM. These people are (hopefully) your friends, they don’t abuse the rules – and if anything such as that occurs it is actually not some thing, that you should control by GM-administrated rules, it is something you should talk with your fellow players about.

Now that is said, I’d also say, that giving your fellow players influence on the narrative elements has for my game only been a positive thing. The players have become better to express their interests in the game, and they have become a lot more invested, as they too have become creators of the fiction.

If you’d like it, I’ll gladly write post about my use of “plot points” (as we call ‘em) in my D&D-game.

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Phil, what you described in the first post seems to be more of a failure cancellation device than a device for story influence. If that is what you are going for, yeah, they seem functional, if a bit boring, unless you seriously and consistently enforce the need to narrate whatever happens.

If you want to give some actual story influence to people, retain a right to veto their suggestions, as precocious apprentice said. Use the veto power to save your story, if you don’t feel like tossing it out. Or keep a few elements out of reach of the players, perhaps explicitly.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_007_(role-playing_game)

(from above)

Hero Points

Hero Points allow characters to perform the unlikely or cinematic stunts from the genre. Characters earn a Hero Point every time they get a Quality 1 result on a skill other than combat, also when the GM chooses to award one for a clever or dramatic action. A Hero Point may be spent to change the Quality Rating of any result by one level, whether for or against the character, also to change the environment, such as having something just show up by coincidence – the more fantastic, the more expensive in terms of Hero Points.

I’ve been using a variation on drama points in my 4e campaign, and it’s gone great. Players all earn them differently – the cleric and pally get them from their gods, the dragonborn fighter who plans to become a god gets them from being extra dragonborn-y, etc. There’s nothing quite like most of the party almost out of HP while the fighter is failing death saving throws, only to have him spend one to make a throw, immediately get to his feet, and (due to a fortuitous roll) take down one of the baddies in one swing.

I can’t see the harm in giving players narrative control. Let me rephrase that – I can’t see the harm in giving players who are invested in a narrative, narrative control. Players who are going to min/max every aspect of a game for everything it’s worth will turn this into an “I win” card, but you already know if your players are like that. If they aren’t, this will just lead to more good story stuff. Ask yourself: Is my group going to spend this token on a critical because the math works best.. or because at that particular moment, it would be really cool to have that character make that critical? If the answer is the latter, go wild.

And I do have to agree with most previous comments.

My first take on your idea (before I actually read you post) was not about dice rolling at all. It was about narration – about the story.

I feel this would work awesome with players that like to be involved in the story – I think you have some of those…

I’m reminded of the anecdote you told us when your players summoned flying ships to help them fight some pirate queen. I don’t remember the details, but I remember one of your players being kind of disapointed about how easy it all was. This is where I’d use one of these tokens as a player.

You got a better idea for the story? All players agree? Then the group uses its “that’s not how it went” token and rewrites this bit of the story.

Sounds three parts awesome and one part nightmarish

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