So I’m a wack nut, in that I often play PTBA games with joint-GMing or semi-no GMing.

(So like, we have two or three players and in any given scene one of us is probably responsible for some GM style action, but not always, and we all do different stuff between games and toss out ideas as we play.)

And one of the reasons it works is that we’re all freeforming, and all calling moves when they trigger. No one person needs to be sole responsible for saying “That’s a move” because if it’s a move you all kind of know, sometimes someone just needs to say it. And when it’s a move, there’s no “do we roll or not” you just roll.

This is in contrast with Dogs in the Vineyard, where you as GM can totally be like “oh yes, just do that thing, I won’t resist it happening.”

Joint non-centralized GMing, in my experience, is pretty much a non-starter in Dogs. And I know it doesn’t work for many folks for PtbA, but I feel like (and this is not a hard assertion) that much of the time in Dogs the GM is making a lot of hard core decisions about the total course and pacing of the game that in PtbA’s “conversation” you don’t need to make.

Many GMs probably still do, but a lot of the time you don’t need to. You can steer the conversation in lots of ways, but you don’t have to the trigger man.

I have occasionally seen tables where that was explicit too. I’m trying to remember who it was, but I do know I saw a GM at Dreamation who asked one of the players to call when moves happened, so that they could focus on playing NPCs. The player would just chime up in a scene and be like “Is that Seize by Force?” or whatever.