Can players sometimes contribute too much fiction?

\n In my experience it is likely that you're doing the group a disservice by emphasizing the shared narrative thing as the key magic ingredient in your current explorations in gaming. There are games and creative priorities where that genuinely is what people want, but for the majority of roleplayers (story games, traditional, whatever) the shared narrative powers aren't the true point of the exercise. This can then result in a sort of "false consciousness" similar to when freeformers convince themselves that their play is great now because they don't have dice and rules spoiling it. The reality might not be so simple.

That is obviously just a guess. If it seems like it might fit, you might consider toning down the methodological emphasis on shared narratives in favour of other things that the group actually wants and likes.

On the other hand, if you're convinced that you want shared storytelling, then a good rules-system that actually does that is a must. Going with a Story Games darling is a foolish thing in this context; just because it's called "story games" doesn't mean that it is technically about shared narratives - most story games are explicitly not. We've seen many cycles of people playing games like say Primetime Adventures with the expectation that they're more refined takes on Once Upon a Time, just because they're termed "story games". The choice of game has to be based on the factual properties of the game, not on hyped up assumptions.

To give an example of the difference, consider Apocalypse World vs. Microscope. One of those games has a creative agenda of experiencing and exploring meaningful stories, while the other is all about celebrating shared creativity and riffing off the contributions of the other players. I'm not saying which is which (such a difficult riddle), but the point is that one of those games incorporates the kinds of creative bursts that you describe, while the other does not. If you decide that you'd like to explore the possibilities in unconstrained narrative control more deeply, choose a game that makes use of and assumes such behaviour.

\n The main thing is for the group to incorporate/reincorporate and accept. If people are all about making new stuff, it just goes crazy. If people are able to build on or play with stuff others have come up with, that's great.

Think of it this way: When a player comes up with an idea, it gets weight when others re-use it. If no ideas get weight, your shared fiction is light and flimsy and easy to rip apart or blow away. When you have enough weighted ideas, and relationships between ideas, the fiction holds together and is strong enough to really play with.

\n I sometimes feel like I am in danger of doing this as a player. Adding too much. Being a long time GM, a person who generally enjoys brainstorming and one of the players more comfortable with "non-traditional" RPGs in my group. But it is something I keep an eye out for.

\n If one person is adding too much in a game that's supposed to be shared, go back and emphasize what they're supposed to be doing in the system.

In PTA, you only state the casting, location and Agenda up front for the scene and the high card person only describes how the scene addresses the Agenda.

In Houses of the Blooded/Blood and Honor you only describe the outcome of the risk itself that's being taken. You don't "take over the story".

In Universalis you gotta pay to keep talking.

There aren't actually all that many games where the rules permit a huge amount of input by a player who has that power. Technically Fiasco does, I guess.

\n Collective creativity without serious and well-crafted constraints easily gets vague, boring and/or paralysing IMX. I suspect in many cases, the problem is more badly managed co-creativity than too much, as such.

This means that the game rather needs to support co-creativity, and piling co-creativity onto a game that is designed to do completely different stuff is unlikely to go well without serious hacking to make the game support it.

\n Think of it as a conversation and follow the general social rules. If you're a group of five people, you want to be inclusive when you talk. If you talk a lot, let other people in. If someone is left outside, change the subject.\n

I feel that when I ask a leading question it generates a deluge of content that is hard for everyone to incorporate or engage with.

\nI'm not really sure what kind of leading questions that you ask and how it steers off, but it's OK if this happens. What to avoid is to give this too much space if you can't continue. Let it instead go and find another subject to talk about. It's basic conversation principles. Why, for example, strangers-that-meet-on-social-events ask what they do for a living, it's to find a common topic to talk about. If it doesn't bear fruit, drop it and continue on with something else. Imagine how awkward it would be between two people if someone were persistent about the subject, for example work, if it didn't generate a common ground to talk about.

I would call this behavior in finding a common ground \xbbfishing\xab. Wish roleplaying games were better at pointing this out.

\n I think the problem isn't player contribution but that player contribution, but that player-contribution can sometimes results in what we Swedish game designers call "Hot Dog Cake." What the hell is a hot dog cake?

Chocolate cake is great right? And hot dogs are also delicious, right? Hence, wouldn't a adding hot dogs to a chocolate cake make the best food ever? (... Nope. It might just be the worst food ever.)

Just like in cooking you need ingredients that go well together in an roleplaying/story game. What you need to do is at the first stage of the discussion get an agreement in what sort of thing you want to be doing. If you all agree that you want to make a cake, you can build on each others ideas like:

"Let's make a cake!"
"Yeah. We all want to make a cake!"
"Perhaps we could make a chocolate cake. Is everyoen okay with that?"
"Yeah."
"Oh! It could have frosting!"
"And we could serve it with some with cream!"
"I think it delicious when you add a bit of chili or cinnamon to chocolate cakes. Are you willing to try that?"

And so on.

Then if someone suggests

"I love hotdogs! Can we add pieces of hot dogs into the batter? And perhaps some mustard? And ketchup?"

Then you can tell that player:

"Erm. Hotdogs are great and so is mustard and ketchup. But I'm not sure they would be right for a chocolate cake... Perhaps we could do something with hot dogs some other time. Is there something you like that you like in chocolate cake?"

\n I agree. I assumed that if the original poster was getting overwhelming setting detail, his questions may have been too broad. My examples were more narrow than, say, "tell me about psychics ..." Your versions are even more narrow, so that oughta work too.

\n In the absence of procedural rules like Rickard's for limiting any given player's input or for otherwise moderating a creative free-for-all, someone is still the GM. It's that person's job to make sure that each individual contribution makes sense in the context of the on-going fiction, sticks to the tone accepted or expected by the group as a whole, and is interesting in and of itself. If there's no GM, those functions still exist but are distributed to the group at large, but since you're the one asking the leading question, presumably you have the authority at the table both to ask it and to do something with the answer--the strong facilitation and judicious editing that Jason mentions. In terms of specific techniques, I often find it useful, having asked a question like, "Tell me why you're here," (in this relatively open-ended opening situation, for example) or "What's your relationship with him like?" to interrogate the player's response a little bit, to draw out its implications or potential consequences. So if the response is, "We're sworn enemies," to the second question, then I might ask, "So will you shoot him on sight, or are you trying to set up a more complicated revenge?" My goal is usually to get a sense of how to frame the situation so that the player can go into motion. "Get revenge," the player tells me, which leads to more questions. Send him to jail? Deprive him of his fortune? Steal his wife? Undermine his greatest intellectual achievement? Once I have an answer, I know more about the NPC, and the PC's adventure is practically laid out for me; all I have to do next is roll some dice. This is what Rickard means when he says "Listen and adapt."

\n I was waiting for Rob to come back and clarify, but this is moving fast, so I'll chime in now with my two cents:

Creative spitballing is its own thing, many groups love it, and it's not always the worst idea to rearrange expectations for an evening in order to accommodate it. I've had fun sessions that consisted of two hours of brainstorming and then one hour of play using about 20% of what we brainstormed. I was especially fond of this when I was new to "highly creative" RPGs. Eventually I got it out of my system and got back to wanting to play characters and create narratives.

\n

Archipelago does, but the other players can say STFU at any time.

\nSee, that's why I like the earlier edition better.

Players could say: "STFU, please."

Really, politeness counts.