Interesting! Yeah, GM-less games are a pretty different approach. I would have many unsuccessful play experiences if I used your benchmark though! I mean, there are certainly games where I know every scene I want to frame or what I’m going for at the beginning of them, but that requires me firing on all cylinders, which is rare. More often, I know some of this up front, and the rest I figure out while in the scene. Gosh, I almost hate to use this tired phrase, but usually I’m just playing to find out. Which is a goal in and of itself, but a very loose one.

What I mean by this is, I’m not always sure what’s going to stick or be interesting because I’m not sure what the other player is going to do. How they behave and what they say is intensely interesting to me. I fucking love to riff. If I’m exploring my character and how they’re coping or changing or wrestling with something or seeking something or someone, then I want to be open to the other character/player moving me. I want to be a little storm-tossed and affected by their words or efforts, or move in if I sense that they’re storm-tossed.

That said, I’m bringing a lot of GMing sensibilities with me always, so I don’t tend to do super-long, unfocused scenes. They might start out that way (by just plopping two characters together or something), but I’m always poking around to see what seems interesting and when I find it in the scene or conversation, I zero in and bring it home, so to speak. I love doing this because it keeps me open to truly allowing what happens in play with other people to matter, and I often get to be surprised by what happens.

Sometimes that results in ultimately uneventful scenes, but even those I use to feed into what’s next. For example, one of the Mars 244 characters is a caregiver & sex-worker and one of his questions is about finding someone who can fill his own need to be cared for. He might go for someone he’s attracted to first, but maybe that doesn’t pan out the way he hoped and he’s bummed, so in the next scene he finds himself chatting with the old drunk chaplain and they end up having a nice bonding moment that reveals both of their broken selves and they end up watching out for each other in the thing that happens next.

In a number of the GM-less games I’ve played, there isn’t a lot of control over the overall journey of play or a ton of options in the outcome, but the story arises from how you got there and what meaning you bring to it. I was just thinking of Laura Simpson’s clever game A Companion’s Tale where you play the support characters of a heroic-type character who, in the game, is basically a prop that you define together. Like, who the hero is is not in question, but our job is to define how kind or horrible they are and who has influenced them in becoming that way. The scenes we have flesh that out. I love this because it takes our romanticized, easy-to-swallow tales of heroes and explores what’s under the tip of the iceberg. Montsegur 1244 does this with a little-known historical event, and my Mars 244: The Liberation of Sisyphus game does this with a fictional future event. The exploration of what’s under the surface is sometimes something awful, but sometimes it’s something really beautiful, and often it’s a mix of both. Games like these almost always give more nuance and a broader understanding to the end point, which is so good if you like complicated stories and characters (I do!).

There are areas I’m less comfortable with in GMless games though. And those would be games like Dream Askew that have so much openness, I can freeze up a little. Which isn’t to say those games can’t be great, but I’m definitely more likely to flounder without some sense of what I’m supposed to (or want to) do.