How we avoid spotlight hogging is that you can only have a max of 3 reward tokens awarded per game. So if a player is hamming it up for rewards, then they get a treat the first three times, and then they tend to step back. Over a few game sessions, everyone is chiming in semi-frequently, and you can tighten up the conditions on which you’ll reward.

At the end of three game sessions with this in place, we had it so that everyone was getting an average of one token per session.

Oh, and to make sure people didn’t worry about spending the tokens: they “expire” at the end of the session.

The best way to introduce narrative control to a new group is to just do it. The entire concept is only difficult for experienced players not used to having it. New players don’t have such limiting preconceptions about what roleplaying really is.

A good system that gently introduces player control is Spirit of the Century. By spending a fate point, you can introduce elements or coincidences to a scene. (Adventure has a similar technique, Dramatic Editing.) In both places players are encouraged to contribute to the narrative, but the scope is agreed to in advance and the cost of a player point helps clearly bound when it’s being used.

If your group gets more into player empowerment, systems like Primetime Adventures draw them in more consistently– even to the level of almost co-GMs. Figure out what level of contribution you want from the players and there’s probably a perfect system out there for you.

@ Deadlytoque: The rewards for player narrative are an awesome idea. I’ve shied away from doing it in my games when I had a player who definitely took advantage of the system. He would pull anything out of his ass and try to narrate it with gusto, to the point of spotlight stealing. Rewards are a good tool for most situations though.

@ Shaun: Thanks. I’ve noticed that too. The players become the focus and tend to weave the story themselves after getting just a taste of it. I usually start my games off with a beginning set piece and a BBEG motivation, then inject the players into the situation. Once they get into it and start finding their own ways about the sandbox the storyline kind of resolves itself.

@ Kameron: That is an incredible benefit of Player narrative in combat. Trying to describe the same sword thacking in different ways gets tiresome. I’m going to write a future article on a thing that is closely related to Player Narrative: Cinematics. The idea behind it being that once the players are describing things let them take full control and describe whatever they want. You roll, deal your damage, but the player can describe it in any way they want, they just can’t change the outcome of the roll. They still deal X # of damage, or they can’t knock the enemy out or kill him, but they can hit him first, block a punch, kick him and push him back. So long as that is all in the Cinematic realm, it happens because the player described it.

Disclaimer: I should put in a disclaimer that Player Narrative and Cinematics (as well as Thematics and Unlimited Character Creation) are 2 of the 4 pillars of a roleplaying game that I’m the head of the design team for. I hope to write more on Cinematics and Thematics as concepts in themselves, and a bit of the writing is actually a reworking of what is in the book.

If you want a lot of player narrative, Wushu is great. It’s all about player narrative – how you describe your actions is the mechanic that determines how many dice you get to roll.