this is a test.

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.

Trying to gamify the GM role, like you describe, is probably one of the worst options in my experience. Firstly, it already exists in a lot of systems. There are the ones you mentioned but FATE and FAE have been using metacurrencies to some degree for decades now (though they're more for making faustian bargains with players than limiting GMs outside of the number of times they can do it per session), I've played games with clocks that limit the GMs options based on them, and I'm sure I've played others but the outcome of these, in my experience, is not a great time as a GM because the role of a player and the role of a GM are often in conflict. Making a GM have to follow meta rules and have their hands tied often makes you feel MORE like just a computer adjudicating the game system's rules than when you have free reign because you're more constrained. I don't think that if don't enjoy GMing, creating a gamified GM role will make you enjoy it as often as it will just make the people who like GMing NOT enjoy it. Ruining the role for everyone. Often you're just effectively making the mtg judge perform a dice rolling minigame before making a rules call which still isn't letting them play MtG if that's their goal. it's just making judging more difficult.

I don't know how many GMless games you have actually played. It doesn't sound like, from this post, that it is a large number. If I'm wrong then disregard this section, but I really think you should go seek some out. The Job is my personal favourite (though admittedly that's partly because I love heists and short one shot type games) but Fiasco is probably the most famous and well tested/loved by the RPG community, followed by The Quiet Year among the more artsy/high concept types.

Fundamentally though I would say that the experience of a GMless game is different from that of a GMed game in a way that renders them different beasts. I don't think people who enjoy the experience of D&D/Pathfinder/World Of Darkness will be able to get the same outcome from a GMless game so the GM role still doesn't work as a thing to "solve".

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.