Greeked Text

Precipitation map of the US from GIS Geography

Map of the major rivers in the United States scaled by average water flow by Peter Gleick and Matthew Heberger

THAT SOLVES NOTHING, sure, it makes it better. Its not the same friend skipping playing every week, but someone still has to skip playing.

Most modern ttrpgs ive seen either treat the GM as a referee that is supposed to follow the rules, or as an auteur that turns the game the players are going through into a performance. One is a computer and one is an artist, neither of them are gamers.

Older ttrpgs may treat the GM as an oppositional force to the players, but still gives them total power over the game, leading to the classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" situation.

GMs dont have a game to play, they don't have a win condition or lose condition, and they don't have obstacles set by the system to make reaching those conditions a game.

Draw steel and Daggerheart do have metacurrencies that serve as obstacles, which could be a great starting point. Draw Steel's Malice feels more to me like a difficulty dial players can shift, with the GM being only able to choose which Malice abilities to use, but Im also of the opinion that GMs shouldnt be left alone during combat, I make flowcharts for the monsters I make so that the GM can at least have a baseline of what the monster wants to do in every situation, and ideally Malice would be included there (the GM could always ignore it, but the flowchart is meant to mimic the decission process of a monster, even at the detriment of their combat skill if needed). Daggerheart's Fear does have a bit more variety, but its also very similar in its limitations.

A lot of people actually WANT the experience of GMing games. Of running them. Of designing and facilitating, or even just refereeing them. It's fun for us. I may sometimes want to PC a one to three shot type thing but by and large the experience I want from TTRPGs is the one provided by the GM role. Not the PC role. And no, you're right, the role is not the traditional gamer role. It's usually either referee, writer, or level designer but it turns out actually those are all fun and enjoyable experiences and none of them are a "problem".

I would also argue you're also wrong to say we don't have obstacles or win/lose conditions. We have both in spades from the players. You think designing puzzles and scenarios that are difficult enough to be challenging but not SO difficult to be unfair isn't a challenge? You think accidentally creating a TPK or roadblock is not a lose condition? That having the pieces you set up all fall into place isn't a win? That players do not love throwing obstacles at you every chance they get?

Im not saying the GM should play like a PC, what Im saying is that a game system should be able to provide an engaging experience to everyone on the table. Another reason Id want to gamify the GM position is because it helps with the learning curve of how to GM the specific system. Its a good way to tell the GM what they are expected to do.

In another post Ive also talked about how the figure of Game Master and Game Designer can be two different roles. You can design a whole prewritten adventure without running it, and you can run a prewritten adventure by the book without having to create anything. I really value the power to take decisions, and the fact is that if the Game Designer took their time to come up with a good adventure path, the Game Master doesn't need to make a single decision during the game.

As for the roles of writer and referee, I find that having a writer GM tends to overwrite the type of emergent stories the system itself provides, which may be a fun way to spend your time with friends, but I dont think counts as playing the game. It's a bit of a controversial opinion but Im willing to expand on it further if needed. The role of referee is something I also take a bit of issue with as a designer. If you step out of the ttrpg scene you can find similar figures in MtG judges, football referees, boxing referees, etc. But the thing is that those only become necessary during high-stakes games. Playing a casual game with your friends doesnt demand a referee, you and your friends can probably reach a consensus on how to interpret a rule if needed.

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the GM, and I feel like as a designer, that figure isn't needed at all, and that having one person for every five that want to play the game, having to miss out on playing its not fair for them as an expectation. Some people will do it happily, but I dont think its something i can ask as a mandatory requisite for playing.

Im aware my position is very extremist, but after being mainly a Game Master and Game Designer for years Ive suffered burnout over and over again. I love prepping encounters, designing npcs, coming up with cool adventure premises. But the thing that burnt me out everytime was running the game. I noe realize it was because I was fighting against the nature of the game and tried to force stories to happen instead of trusting the game, and when I tried to fix that as a designer I found myself struggling to find a goal for the GM.

OP, what games do you know / would recommend for experiencing this design space you're interested in? There are several structures I know of for gm-less play or gamified gm-ing, but I'm always excited to hear about more.

And I'm especially excited about the idea of gamifying the GM role in a way that could seduce players into trying the GM role for the first time.

Girlframe, a very kinky game about the dynamics of mechsplo fiction, where one person acts as a Handler and the rest of players as Girls. The Handler is still tasked with running the enemies and the enviroment, but the game makes it clear that Girl players are also expected to look up rules, run npcs and move the action forward.

Sightseer where Ive thrown out the GM and the adventure tells you how things develop. Since its a gameplay-focused system with very little plot, most things can be run just by reading the adventure (i also take care to make adventures playable even if you know all the information in them). One of my main goals with making Sightseer gmless was erasing the conception that one specific person MUST be available for everyone else to play, so all of the usual GM's functions are divided amongst all players.



😌✌️🩷

(Link to the riddle video if anyone wants to watch it)

Art tip: gesso your fabric before painting on it

Art tip: if you dilute your gesso with water and paint an entire hat it will take a whole ass 24 hours to dry

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

THAT SOLVES NOTHING, sure, it makes it better. Its not the same friend skipping playing every week, but someone still has to skip playing.

Most modern ttrpgs ive seen either treat the GM as a referee that is supposed to follow the rules, or as an auteur that turns the game the players are going through into a performance. One is a computer and one is an artist, neither of them are gamers.

Older ttrpgs may treat the GM as an oppositional force to the players, but still gives them total power over the game, leading to the classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" situation.

GMs dont have a game to play, they don't have a win condition or lose condition, and they don't have obstacles set by the system to make reaching those conditions a game.

Draw steel and Daggerheart do have metacurrencies that serve as obstacles, which could be a great starting point. Draw Steel's Malice feels more to me like a difficulty dial players can shift, with the GM being only able to choose which Malice abilities to use, but Im also of the opinion that GMs shouldnt be left alone during combat, I make flowcharts for the monsters I make so that the GM can at least have a baseline of what the monster wants to do in every situation, and ideally Malice would be included there (the GM could always ignore it, but the flowchart is meant to mimic the decission process of a monster, even at the detriment of their combat skill if needed). Daggerheart's Fear does have a bit more variety, but its also very similar in its limitations.

A lot of people actually WANT the experience of GMing games. Of running them. Of designing and facilitating, or even just refereeing them. It's fun for us. I may sometimes want to PC a one to three shot type thing but by and large the experience I want from TTRPGs is the one provided by the GM role. Not the PC role. And no, you're right, the role is not the traditional gamer role. It's usually either referee, writer, or level designer but it turns out actually those are all fun and enjoyable experiences and none of them are a "problem".

I would also argue you're also wrong to say we don't have obstacles or win/lose conditions. We have both in spades from the players. You think designing puzzles and scenarios that are difficult enough to be challenging but not SO difficult to be unfair isn't a challenge? You think accidentally creating a TPK or roadblock is not a lose condition? That having the pieces you set up all fall into place isn't a win? That players do not love throwing obstacles at you every chance they get?

Im not saying the GM should play like a PC, what Im saying is that a game system should be able to provide an engaging experience to everyone on the table. Another reason Id want to gamify the GM position is because it helps with the learning curve of how to GM the specific system. Its a good way to tell the GM what they are expected to do.

In another post Ive also talked about how the figure of Game Master and Game Designer can be two different roles. You can design a whole prewritten adventure without running it, and you can run a prewritten adventure by the book without having to create anything. I really value the power to take decisions, and the fact is that if the Game Designer took their time to come up with a good adventure path, the Game Master doesn't need to make a single decision during the game.

As for the roles of writer and referee, I find that having a writer GM tends to overwrite the type of emergent stories the system itself provides, which may be a fun way to spend your time with friends, but I dont think counts as playing the game. It's a bit of a controversial opinion but Im willing to expand on it further if needed. The role of referee is something I also take a bit of issue with as a designer. If you step out of the ttrpg scene you can find similar figures in MtG judges, football referees, boxing referees, etc. But the thing is that those only become necessary during high-stakes games. Playing a casual game with your friends doesnt demand a referee, you and your friends can probably reach a consensus on how to interpret a rule if needed.

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the GM, and I feel like as a designer, that figure isn't needed at all, and that having one person for every five that want to play the game, having to miss out on playing its not fair for them as an expectation. Some people will do it happily, but I dont think its something i can ask as a mandatory requisite for playing.

Im aware my position is very extremist, but after being mainly a Game Master and Game Designer for years Ive suffered burnout over and over again. I love prepping encounters, designing npcs, coming up with cool adventure premises. But the thing that burnt me out everytime was running the game. I noe realize it was because I was fighting against the nature of the game and tried to force stories to happen instead of trusting the game, and when I tried to fix that as a designer I found myself struggling to find a goal for the GM.

OP, what games do you know / would recommend for experiencing this design space you're interested in? There are several structures I know of for gm-less play or gamified gm-ing, but I'm always excited to hear about more.

And I'm especially excited about the idea of gamifying the GM role in a way that could seduce players into trying the GM role for the first time.