The Gaming Den

Super vague topic here but:

A majority of dialogue here focuses on systems with DMs restricted by rules that serve as a social contract. What alternatives are there to this (e.g. DM-less) and how do they succeed or fail?

Cervantes wrote:Super vague topic here but:

A majority of dialogue here focuses on systems with DMs restricted by rules that serve as a social contract. What alternatives are there to this (e.g. DM-less) and how do they succeed or fail?

Well the simplest I'm aware of is Munchausen. I tell a story until you decide you want to jump in, then you say "That's not how I remember it..." and then you propose an alternate story, and if people agree your bit is better you keep talking until someone else wants to jump in. If you can't agree whose story bit is better, you play rock paper scissors. There's a thing with bidding tokens in order to make challenges, but if you have people mature enough to not just challenge over and over until they beat rock with paper you don't even need it.

Then you got games like Eldritch Horror, where the villains are purely scripted and there are cards, die rolls, and charts that determine what the bad guys do. The players are all on equal narrative footing because none of them are the MC.

-Username17

Cooperative board games like Pandemic, or Arkham Horror, might also fit the bill of referee-free narrative building games.

There's a ticking countdown whose speed isn't quite predictable; which keeps tension building fairly consistent throughout the game. Additionally, the game's challenge becomes harder to more difficult overcome as turns pass.

However, players who have sense, and are cooperative, are more likely to succeed than fail. I suspect that if players act efficiently in either game, they're unlikely to lose; but if they start thinking they're in competition with each other, they're sure to lose.

I'd be tempted to mention Betrayal at House on the Hill, but it's a clusterfuck in terms of balance among the 50 haunts between Survivors &or the Traitor (almost all haunts have a traitor, but I'm certain that a couple have none, and it's just the players vs the game).

The Quiet Year fits the bill. It's a map-making game where players reconstruct a post-apocalyptic society through improvisation and negotiation using poker chips, until the end of the quiet year comes with some unavoidable disaster and the game ends.

There is also The Deep Forest, a variant where players try to rebuild a "dungeon" and it's monster society that was ravaged by humanity pillaging adventurers.

Never played them but I want to try someday.

Guts wrote:The Quiet Year fits the bill. It's a map-making game where players reconstruct a post-apocalyptic society through improvisation and negotiation using poker chips, until the end of the quiet year comes with some unavoidable disaster and the game ends.

There is also The Deep Forest, a variant where players try to rebuild a "dungeon" and it's monster society that was ravaged by humanity pillaging adventurers.

Never played them but I want to try someday.

Go away, silva.