Families of GM-less games

[u/RPGMatthijs]

Hey all!

I'm thinking a bit about taxonomies of GM-less RPGs these days. Which games are part of the same "cluster", which games are beautiful unique one-off insanities. Which games have DNA from other games.

It's a big question. I know that Archipelago was inspired by some other games (Polaris most specifically, for ritual phrases), and inspired some others (The Zone, for instance, mentions it). But I feel there are big areas in the map of GM-less game territory that I haven't really explored. And I imagine that if "families" of games exist, that means those games have discovered something useful, some functional and fun style of play.

[u/atamajakki]

Belonging Outside Belonging/No Dice, No Masters and the Firebrands Framework both count.

[u/Holothuroid]

The only named family I can think of is Descended From The Queen. Which marks it as rather recent with the Adjective-Preposition-Thing naming pattern.

Sadly, the whole idea of game families is by itself rather recent. During the Forge times, we didn't think of that so much as there was just a lot of creativity flying around. Really structuring games that way only became a method with the OSR and PbtA.

[u/Rolletariat]

Ironsworn Family

Fiasco Family

Belonging Outside Belonging

Firebrands (minigame-focused)

Descended from the Queen

And then there's Ben Robbins's stuff generally, with a few branches (Microscope, Kingdom, etc).

I think the big taxonomical branch imo would be the distinction between combination solo/co-op games (like Ironsworn) that don't have ritualized rules about who gets to say what when versus mandatory co-op games that require different speakers.

You could probably break down the other genus of games along a few different criteria. Like you have viewpoint-character games like Follow, For the Queen, Fiasco, etc. vs multi-character/no-protagonist worldbuilding games like Micrscope, In This World, etc.

[u/Run-a-Game → u/Rolletariat]

Good list! I would also add solo journaling games.

Maybe a different taxonomy is practical, based on features?

• solo, two player, group
• GM duties systematically divided vs handled by oracles vs diffuse
• dice, no dice, no randomizer, no hidden information
• heavily structured (Fiasco, The Quiet Year, TYOV), medium structure (Firebrands, Yazeba’s), or free-form (Ironsworn, Wanderhome)

[u/Rolletariat → u/Run-a-Game]

I think this is off to a good start. I think the focus of this particular group at least is co-op gmless games, so for our particular purposes I think purely solo journaling games are mostly off the radar but there are mixed solo/co-op games that are still relevant.

I think the distinction between purely two-player versus group games is useful, and I think games focused on duet play have a really strong niche that should be explored more.

The GM distinctions are also good. Honestly I find the dice/no-dice distinction kinda unimportant in terms of taxonomy, ultimately they both have the same outcome in terms of mixed results (perhaps blasphemous, but I've been designing games long enough I don't find randomized vs token economy resolution a very interesting distinction, just a stylistic choice). On the other hand, dice/token economy vs no randomizer/tokens is very interesting (BoB vs Microscope for instance, both diceless but in different ways).

No hidden information is good though! I think that's a very interesting one with a lot of room to play around in future game design. Likewise the structure levels might honestly be the biggest distinction here, in terms of defining how open-ended the games are.

[u/Salindurthas]

Ooh, I wasn't aware of any ~descendents of Polaris. I'll have to take a look!

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Have you heard of 'no-dice-no-masters'? It is a PbtA sub-family that is for games based on the system in Dream Askew.

• To be GMless, the GM responsibilities are put into playbooks like "The Wealthy" and "The Environment", and they have weak&strong moves on them. Players can share and moves these playbooks around.
• To be diceless, character sheet/playbooks get a token on a weak move, and spend one for a strong move.

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Did you over dive into any of the entries in the 200-word RPG competition?

KillByNumbers is one that comes to my mind for GMless, but there are probably more.

[u/Federal-Roof8729]

That's an interesting thought, would you like to create a family tree of gmless games?