Lump

WotC editions of D&D have much more granular and precise combat than TSR editions. While wandering monsters do not necessarily result in combat, especially in newer editions this is more likely than not, because combat is generally more rewarding. Anyway, the added granularity and more precise resolution of combat means that throwaway random encounters simply for the sake of taxing character resources are less rewarding from both a player and GM point of view.

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First off, these thoughts are not aimed at GMs, they are aimed at designers, but maybe GMs can still gather useful ideas from reading. I also subscribe to a separation of the roles of Adventure Designer and Game Master, the first one dealing with adventure prep, encounter design and homebrew, and the second one being in charge of running the game at the table, which is the thing im gonna talk about.

I've talked a lot about how I feel like the current ttrpg culture focuses a lot in gameplay being used to support a story, and how I think that forgetting about telling a story and letting the game create moments that can later be turned into a story in retrospective works better with the medium. When approaching game design like that, the GM goes from being a director to just a referee.

In the days of Gygax, rules where hidden information from the players, as well as dungeon layouts, adventure text and monster statblocks. I really hate this approach because it makes it so you HAVE to choose to be either a GM or a player, because knowing the rules or having read the adventure beforehand means you no longer get the intended experience of the game. Now, newer games dont usually ask players to be completely ignorant of the rules, but a lot of people still feel like knowing what happens in an adventure will ruin it for them. I take the approach of making all information public: rules, adventures, monster actions during combat, random events, etc; this approach demands that the adventure is able to be replayed and still offer a challenge, and that someone can read the adventure, get excited about it, and then run through it having the kind of fun they expected. Since I keep all information open in Sightseer, all players have the same degree of access to them, there's no need for a dedicated position for the rules keeper.

You can argue that running NPCs is still something you do as a GM. I have been able to ignore that problem in Sightseer since its a game about travelling, and interactions with NPCs are often short and rules-driven, with the vast amount of deep social interaction being inter-party dynamics. Even then, I think that players could be given out NPC sheets they are supposed to play out, maybe even gaining a benefit for nailing the character. Playing out multiple characters at once is nothing new to the hobby, troupe parties, dcc player 0 funnels, playing out a familiar, or even any situation where a GM plays out two NPCs at once.

At the end of the day, the GM becomes a figure with no agency on the table, but I still have a case against the use of the role. Even when you consider the GM a director, having someone willing to direct play at every table feels like a really hard to meet requirement and puts the GM in a position where the game depends on them being available to run every session. In most tables Ive been in, a player missing one session due to a conflict in schedule is not dire, maybe you choose to cancel or maybe you make up a reason for their character to be missing, but any time the GM is unable to attend, the session must be cancelled. That is a lot of pressure to put on someone that as a designer I dont feel comfortable with.

I think if nothing else the GM is useful for being able to hide some information from the adventurers. Exploring a space while not knowing what's ahead is important to me too, I don't think I would enjoy exploring a dungeon with the full map in front of me. I think part of the challenge of dungeoneering should be that you don't know what you don't know. If I was given a full monster list of the dungeon, I would be a little put out.

While I do think it's a problem that you essentially can never be a player for the same module twice because you've been spoiled, I don't think that just being GMless fixes that. I think the solution is to make modules that are more dynamic, customizable, and flexible; which would allow a GM to run the same module twice for the same group while it's still fresh, and for a GMless group to run that module while still feeling a sense of discovery despite being "spoiled."

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

And that's neat, but to me it also begs the question of: short of the game not allowing for loading back to a previous state and only having one save slot per run, what incentive is there for the player to pursue this? From a player's point of view "just reload the save and don't die this time" will always be preferable to this, especially since many dungeon crawler CRPGs assume an "everything is the dungeon" type of approach where you also kind of have to tackle the dungeon sequentially level by level. This is not like losing a single mission in XCOM where you can still probably recover and the campaign isn't entirely lost due to one loss: this is the equivalent of having to start with a fresh party who are probably squishy and will have to grind at least to some extent to be able to survive whatever it is that the previous party already had to survive to make it to level Fuck in the first place.

As you got deeper you filled up on loot (ores and fun little dungeon treasures; music discs, saddles, and really powerful golden apples) The game had, and still has, an autosave system that meant you literally couldn't ever reload without cheating, even if a troll-dm monster like a creeper blew up a chunk of your cool base and ruined it. So you had to do corpse runs, in a hurry, each time you died.

You were heavily incentivized to familiarize yourself with and modify the environment as you explored, so that it would be easier to fight monsters and clear out areas and also so that when you inevitably had to backtrack for a corpse run or just to leave the underworld to resupply and drop off your loot, you wouldn't get lost or die. Also Kenshi does interesting stuff with your characters getting captured sometimes instead of killed, and it's (kind of?) a CRPG. I guess I just wanted to talk about classic Minecraft...