Can a referee be a verser? MJ was kind of playing The Architect, could you use yourself as a player character? Maybe two players refereeing each other? Has that ever been tried? I bet Adam and Pharaoh could referee each other. Just a thought.
I mean referee each other in the same world. Graeme could put his character into MJ's world, or vice versa, and MJ referees Graeme, and Graeme referees MJ. Has that ever been tried? Probably teach it a little faster.
I'd want to referee Osevens when he referees me. Two newbies working together could come up with a lot of ideas. Just a thought.
We'd blow the place up. >.<
Besides I don't know the rules well enough to even attempt to referee.
I was just in a mood for weird thoughts. My birthday is in March, and I asked my mom to get me a copy of the Referee's Rules.
Cool.
The problem with two players refereeing each other in the same world is that they'd have to have some way of deciding what actually was happening in that world. However, here are some ways:
- Use a world for which you already have detailed information with which both of you are intimately familiar. My first thought is someplace like Middle Earth, which has extensive maps and detailed populations, and then fill in the gaps with GE rolls; but my second thought is that Seth Ben-Ezra's most recent game, Dirty Little Secrets, says that the setting should be the players' home town, so that they know all the streets, businesses, and other details of the place.
- Verse into <i>Universalis</i>. Multiverser is set up so that player characters can become characters in the game worlds of other games. Universalis is set up with a mechanics system by which the players bid for control of the game, right down to creating the rules for play. Using an interface with a game like that, each player would drive the game world in the direction he wanted it to go. There are a number of other games in which players double as referees, although at the moment the only one that comes to mind is Clinton Nixon's game, I think the spelling is Dunjon or something like that, in which players set up challenges for each other.
- Shift the social contract rules such that both players can create anything consistent within the agreed parameters of the setting. This is a bit like the Universalis solution, but without the structure. Read Theory 101: System and the Shared Imagined Space for insight into what this means. Let the players create the scenario around themselves and each other; use the "Yes but, yes and" rule, in which once any player says anything that is true, and the other player must accept it as true but can add something to it that makes it different in some way from what was expected.
I've not tried any of these; most of my games are either for close friends/family or at demos. I have been in games in which two of the people at the table were running each other, but in different worlds.
--M. J. Young