I’ve been thinking a lot about GMless games, and a little bit about how they can really expose the central functions that make a TTRPG work by having to find mechanics to replace the work usually done by the GM. I found a great example of this in the game INCOMING!, which I recently played with some friends.
INCOMING! is inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion, but is a commentary on the whole “powerful teen saves the world” genre. You are the adults in the life of a powerful young person (you decide the nature of this—superpowers or mechs or the high fantasy ‘chosen one’), and over the course of the game you get to know the never-seen kid and take steps to ensure they save the world— or protect them, and perhaps put the entire world at risk.
Every player plays one archetype-based character who has one special move, but otherwise every scene is guided entire by freeform RP. Each of the three Acts begins with a group scene to set our the stakes of the act, and then there is a list of optional prompts to guide the players as each PC initiates a scene with at least one other PC until everyone has had a turn. Then there’s an act-ending event, and the next act begins. After each scene, you either decide to increase the Hope counter, or the Doubt counter— Hope if you think you made progress towards achieving your mission, and Doubt if not. There’s also a Doomsday clock and a potential saboteur, but we didn’t play much with those because it was our first time. The relative values of all these clocks determine how events go at the end of each act and, ultimately, at the end of the story.
The first thing that might jump out—and certainly was a big Oh! moment for us while playing—is that you are not choosing Hope or Doubt based on your actions towards or for the Hero. It took us a few rounds to really clock this, as different characters were driven by different motivations: some mostly to advance the mission, some mostly to protect the Hero’s emotional or physical wellbeing. So we realized it was deliberate that some characters would end a scene feeling deflated, like they’d failed to protect the Hero… but in doing so, they’d advanced the mission, and this increased Hope. Once we noticed this thematic tension, it became even more interesting to explore it, and that gave us a tool for driving forward both the narrative (by setting up scenes to exploit this tension) and to even develop some themes, something that can seem impossible without the guiding narrative hand of a GM. In this case, it was the game designer, Cameron, who played this role, by setting up such a tightly focused premise and successfully creating a mechanic that forced us as players to reflect on the themes of warring responsibilities that were the point of the game.
Another great set of tools that we didn’t quite work out how to use in play were the characters’ Goals. The characters are all archetype-based, as I mentioned— the Mechanic, the Director, etc— but the players each decide the characters’ relationship to the Hero and also a Goal that they are mechanically incentivized to try to achieve. We all struggled a bit to come up with goals that weren’t just “advance the mission” or that seemed plausibly achievable within the scenes— or, given the character focus of this particular group, that weren’t designed to be undermined and abandoned as the events of the scenes changed the characters’ focus. We got through the game well enough without paying too much attention to our Goals, and with no one hitting the benchmark for achieving theirs.
It was after the fact that I realized the utility of the goals: to give the players something active to seek to achieve in every scene. Our group knows each other well enough and are good enough at character-focused dramas that we got by fine without that, but I realized that in concert with requiring the players to reflect after every scene on whether or not they advanced the mission, they were a pair of fantastic tools for constantly reminding the players to be taking action, to be pushing the narrative forward. And it gives two options for doing so: for players who are better at just focusing on their own character, they could just try to advance their goal in every scene, which would inevitably cause drama and have some kind of impact on the mission. And for players who are happier to take more of a top-down, holistic view of play, just knowing that at the end of the scene you’ll have to answer as to whether or not you advanced the mission could be enough to keep you aware of making sure you are producing a scene that will let you answer that question, one way or the other. Both of these are great tools for keeping players focused on action and on pushing things forward, rather than just having their characters chat and leaving it to the GM to introduce complications or momentum if needed.
And this, then, is the other fundamental gaming element that I think removing the GM allowed me to see more clearly in this instance: yes, the GM is the narrator and the rules arbiter and the person who plays the environment and the wider world—but at the very, very core, all that information they provide is in the interest of making sure the characters are doing something in every scene—that every scene, somehow, moves the story forward. It sounds obvious, but in the face of all the mechanics and plotting and trappings and complications that can come with GMing, I find it very interesting to just lay that objective out so totally simply.
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