Oh, duh.
This will fall under the ‘totally incomprehensible except to three people’ category.
So in the car today, I was listening to Narrative Control when all of a sudden, a fix occurred to me for a problem I wasn’t until then aware I had. In Survival Stage, the players are trying on the lieutenant role and playing with lieutenants as you play your ideogogue. Also in Survival Stage, full-blown incident creation is introduced. My original thinking was that incident creation, with its attendant declaring of participants, was necessary for lieutenants. However, I was mistaken. What is necessary for lieutenants is lieutenants.
So the ‘fix’ — move the introduction of declaring participants to Synthesis Stage. In Survival Stage, you just pick an obstacle player (as you do in Descent, so nothing new there) and everybody else starts the incident as audience members. This nicely introduces audience members and what they do (turn into ideogogue, obstacle, or lieutenant players) before you have to actually decide on who to make an audience member. Basically, it allows players to understand their choices before they start making them — which is, in general, a good thing.
So there it is: a simple procedural shift that smooths both gameplay and the learning curve. One less hurdle to getting some fun play. Rockin!