Narrative authority

Ran two games last week where the idea of sharing narrative authority with players came up. In other words - where should the GM encourage / “allow” players to help build the world. And even in cases where players feel like they wanted to contribute, did they really know enough about the world to feel confident — did they understand the fictional positioning, or what elements in a location and time the characters could access and leverage to move the story ahead?

One challenge was that I combined two games — VoidHeist (which is a short rulebook and has very little in the way of lore, arguably intentionally so) and Scum & Villainy (which has a good amount of detail of factions that operate in that world) — which means that by definition, there could be some questions about what lore, if any, is still defined and relevant.

Another challenge was that in running Coyote & Crow, players had asserted some NPCs into the world during character creation, and then seemed to want one of those to figure centrally in the session. This begged the question as to whether the original story was still relevant and going to be satisfying, and whether it was boring, or why this was happening at all, which was both interesting and distracting. Ultimately, it was coupled with a session where I realized there were rules I was still learning, and we had to look up in a book that hadn’t centralized the rules. In this context, trying to learn a game, from a cognitive load perspective, it seems easier for a GM to try to stick with the plot hooks and underlying story elements that were prepared.

And on top of this comes whether one should bend rules, more in the style of adhering to the “rule of cool” in a traditional game with complex mechanics, or should one try to adhere to the rules and reinforce them.

I’d deliver the punchline here if I had it. But right now mostly seeing how all this fits together and what options are available and expectations I should have as a GM when running and learning new games, and just helping players engage.