Has anyone given any thought to playing DW GM-less? It seems to me it would work if you approached it with a Fiasco-style sensibility, with the players collaboratively creating situations. Whenever a GM move is called for, perhaps all players other than the one affected decides which move to make.
There’s plenty of material for generating towns, dungeons, and even deciding what types or themes of monsters should be present without a GM’s input.
Thoughts?
“whitebooks” is such an experiment. I believe it is beta and splits GM duties between different players.
There’s been some discussion of this. Stealing from GMless stuff like Dream Askew (an AW-based GMless game) and the recent D&D boardgame (GMless dungeon crawl) would be cool. It might work better with modules or otherwise pre-gen dungeon maps, yeah?
My group has been playing GMless on Sundays since our regular Sunday GM is working on his degree and doesn’t have time to prep anything. The D&D boardgames have been fun, but there’s a lack of continuity and character ownership that I think we’ve been missing.
We have successfully played Fiasco in the past, so I feel we could work without a module. I do have the D&D boardgame tile sets should we need to randomly generate dungeons, and DW gives plenty of guidelines for creating monsters, towns, and other things on the fly.
I’ll check out Dream Askew and see what I can steal from that. Once I get a chance to try this in play, I’ll come back and share my experiences.
White Books is here: http://quenouille.com/white-books-playtest/ and Eric Nieudan is the one to talk to for more info.
J. Walton I own 2 iterations of the DnD boardgame: Ashardalon and Drizzt. NOT an rpg, and not a fantasic boardgame either. Gears of War is a much better GMless coop boardgame. I had a look at White Books and at first blush it looks very good. Still haven’t have a chance to playtest it though.
Not sure White Books is what you’re looking for; Ed Wilson, since you’re mentioning continuity as a requirement (I’ll be working on that at some point though).
If you want to have a look for hacking purposes, shoot me an email and I’ll send you the playtest pack.
In any case, GMless dungeon crawls are an obsession of mine, so I’ll be interested to hear about what you come up with.
I mean, it’s possible? But you’re going to kill a lot of tension and the way the PCs interact with the world is going to become less personal, less in danger, and I feel less fun.
I was thinking Fiasco would be good but the thing with Fiasco is that action doesn’t really work in that game so to put something in like DWs rolls to get the action working would be cool
Noah Hinz you would think so, but then we played whitebooks and for some reason the tension is there and it works
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Wynand Louw The D&D boardgame is my favorite version of 4E, but to each their own. I’ve mostly played the Ravenloft version, though.