I’ve started up a little group for exploring GMless games, because I’m pretty obsessed with them. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m utterly exhausted with trad gaming, both as a GM and especially as a player, and I want to swing the pendulum radically in the other direction right now. No dice, no masters!
The no dice part of the slogan came up in discussion after we played Molotov College last night. It’s an X-Men style superheroes game, and I was really intrigued by the premise because I don’t associate BOB with action genres. Probably for good reason: it didn’t work super well, though I think that there are ways for the game design to support that better than this particular game managed to (and it does want you to get in superhero fights, so we weren’t fighting against the intent there).
However, the question of fights led to one of the players pointing out that these games don’t play with the unexpected in the way that one expects (ha) a TTRPG to do. I’ve been meaning to write about this, but a phrase I have coined for myself when thinking about game design or choosing the right game for a given story is the game’s ‘engine of uncertainty.’ What do you control, and what do you leave to the (usually) dice? This is sort of at the heart of TTRPGs for me, the space where you surrender control and thus get forced to make narrative choices that defy your instincts and demand that you think quickly and creatively about how to portray them in the story.
Pretty much all of my favourite gaming memories are about big, weird rolls. The time the story totally derailed because of an unexpected success or failure, a roll that ended up defining a character in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I already write fiction; I don’t need another space where I’m in total control of what happens. I love TTRPGs because I love when the story is taken out of my hands, and then I have to react to whatever has happened.
But of course, that happens in two spaces in most TTRPGs, when you’re a player: the dice, and the DM. I can’t deny the appeal of trad games where the GM has a plan they’re skilfully unspooling, because it’s fun to be surprised and have to react to the GM throwing something at you that you didn’t plan for, or bringing up something from your backstory or character’s personality that you have to suddenly work out how to confront.
Belonging Outside Belonging games have neither of these engines of uncertainty. This is probably where our struggles with making a fight scene were on us rather than entirely on the game itself: we kept waiting for the unexpected thing, the shock failure by the dice, the escalation by the GM, but of course, that couldn’t happen. I pointed out that one solution would probably have been for one of us to have more directly taken on the role of the antagonist and just played out the fight in a slightly more conventional, adversarial way rather than trying to do it conversationally, but in a way that would just be eliding the problem by having someone become the stand-in GM for the duration of the fight.
So where do we locate uncertainty when there are no dice and everyone has the same amount of information? Or is the challenge to find the surprise and unexpectedness when the players are in control of everything? The latter starts drifting into story games in a way that doesn’t feel right. I do think BOB is distinct from that form; it wants there to be roleplayed scenes and dialogues, conflict, surprise, and I want to believe that that’s possible even once you’ve removed dice and torn down the GM screen.
I have a few thoughts about this, though in the spirit of BOB, I think the real answer is to play to find out.
In our game last night, one of the most exciting moments for me was when a character was looking through my character’s ransacked apartment and asked if perhaps he would find anything interesting, anything that would reveal something about my character we didn’t know before, which was a perfect BOB prompt. Of course I said yes, and suggested it was signs of my obsessive research into the career of our deceased Headmaster. One of the character sheet prompts is to define your feelings about them, and I said I wanted to prove that I was better than them. So, I suggested, maybe you found the signs of this obsession. Let’s make it more specific, the other player said: what if it was records of my my actual attempts to outdo him, my catalogue of his achievements and my plans to best them.
Alright, we said, so what did the Headmaster actually do? Well, we’d already set up a scene where someone had secretly accessed his files, and made passing allusion to there being plans and schematics in there. So maybe he was an inventor? I’m trying to improve upon his famous inventions. What if one of those inventions had something to do with the vision our classmate with precognition had about the sun exploding…?
“Wait,” I said. “Did I cause the apocalypse?”
It was the exact same thrill as when the DM reveals that actually, the mad mage in the dungeon is your long-lost father, but we’d come to it collectively. There’s a story there I wish we could have explored further, and it’s one that would have rested less on the big superhero fights we could have, but what those said about our cohesion as a team, our relationships to each other, and our respective commitments to not having the world end.
The unexpected element, in other words, is each other. If everyone fully commits to bringing strong ideas, asking questions, and building on what other people have brought, a different form of unexpectedness emerges through true collaborative play. This also happens in trad games when you get a table where the PCs are really committed to having scenes together, but that’s rare, because the culture and systems of those games is constantly trying to redirect you to the GM, remining you that they are the keeper of all the interesting stuff: the unexpected outcomes of the dice rolls, the unexpected NPC or lore drop. This is one of the things I’m so sick of. I want games where we’re all playing together.
It has to be said that achieving this in BOB or any GMless game doesn’t and can’t mean hiding things from each other and deliberately attempting to set up surprises. It depends on a totally open exchange of ideas, and a trust that the sort of particle collider of thoughts that results will lead to something interesting and unexpected if you are cooperative, patient, and open to the experience.