It’s rare to find a game that lets the players make up their own story. Even in a tabletop role-playing situation, where a group could make up anything, players find themselves arguing about the rules and sticking close to the simulations they’re handed. Corvus Elrod lost interest in that years ago. As he puts it, “The point is not to spend the afternoon massaging the vector radiuses of exploding arrows.”

Elrod is a narrative designer, storyteller, blogger, and self-described “semionaut”. His distinctive handlebar moustache, round glasses and goatee make him easy to spot at conferences, where he’s been demoing his Honeycomb Engine – the role-playing system he’s been designing and refining for almost twenty years. This week he publishes the rough draft of the manual online, under a Creative Commons license, and he plans to print PDF and hard copy versions by November. He’s also encouraging designers to make their own variants, and exploring ways to license pieces of it to videogame designers.

“It got started the very first time I ran an RPG session, back in ’89 or ’90,” he recalls. “I had a whole bunch of different source books I read for different campaigns, and I didn’t like any of the systems. They all felt cumbersome and a pain in the ass to keep track of – too many numbers, not enough focus on the storytelling part of it.”

Elrod raises a classic problem of how to make an interactive narrative in games. Those of us who look for a good story with our gameplay will keep pushing for more subtlety and freedom in the choices we make. But if you take away the rules, you don't have a game - you have something closer to improvised theater, or campfire storytelling, or at worst, a student drama club exercise. Creativity's great, but how do you judge it? And what about the players who don’t want to tap their imaginations? I can only guess what would've happened when I played D&D as a kid, if we didn't have rules to keep us in line. We would've spent the whole night just punching each other in the face.

As Elrod designed his system, he tried taking out all the rules – and discovered it didn't work. “People became very flippant and went out of character because there was no structure there. They would be called before the emperor and they’d be snotty and rude. It would break immersion. Because there was no enforced consequence.”

The latest system finds a balance, creating rules that create the outcomes but don’t necessarily describe them. While the gamemaster, or storyteller prime, runs the session, she or he can pass the duty off to the other players – dubbed storytellers – at the table. Storytellers are expected to bring their own ideas to the session, to guide whether it’ll be funny, violent or tragic. And any genre should work: Elrod has led sessions in space, Dickens’ London, and the Buffy season eight storyline. At last month’s Penny Arcade Expo, he led a session with Dierdra Kiai and Travis Megill about four siblings who reunite at their father’s funeral.

Storytellers define their characters by a set of attributes and influences, but they don’t roll for their stats: instead, they get a point of “Source” for every year of the character’s age, and assign the points for the story they want to tell. The attributes break out of the traditional “constitution” or “wisdom”: they take their names from psychology, the elements, and folkore, and many of them conflate physical and mental abilities. “We’re not highly stratified beings. Our bodies are not that separate from our brains and our spirits. We can’t just leave our spirit on the coat rack and our brain in a jar and send our body out to do the work. Everything’s got to cooperate.”

In combat, dice rolls determine the outcome of your actions. But how they went down depends on the storyteller. “[You could say], ‘I do a jump kick off the wall, I hit the guy square in the face, he staggers back, blood gushing from his nose. And I do two hits of damage and I slow him down three spaces on the timing track.’”

The wrong set of players could drive each other nuts with this. The system has a few countermeasures; for example, if you come up with an idea or spin a yarn that the other storytellers like, they can award you points for “reknown.” But it depends on cooperation – and to listen to Elrod, that’s not a bad thing.

“A lot of systems, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, are designed around, ‘How can we keep everybody from doing crazy things.’ My system is more designed to say, ‘How can we enable you to have a really awesome story experience.’ There are certain gaming styles that no system in the world is ever going to be able to correct. You’re going to have people who are just incompatible storytellers, and no amount of math, no amount of balance, no amount of built-in punishments is ever going to keep those people from playing the game in a way that doesn’t agree with you. So the point is, get together like-minded people and use the system to support you all having a lot of fun together.”

Chris Dahlen writes about games, music, pop, and tech. You can find him online at @savetherobot, or drop him a line at chris [at] savetherobot.com.