When will the GM really become "a player, too?"
Games, Feelings, Mercer, Mulligan, Cordova, Devall, Actual Play, solo play, prep-less games, and a guess...
I’m thinking I might switch to audio as my format. Maybe I should be recording these as little audio logs or journals, put them on YouTube and such.
I was listening to an episode of Games & Feelings talking about the state of Actual Play media, and they got into the discussion of watching great GMs on camera. Specifically, they were discussing the spectacle of great GMs like Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan, likening them to famous magicians. Houdinis, David Copperfields, wonderous minds that keep their secrets behind a screen like Oz, begging us to ask how they did it.
The hosts agreed that this hiddenness, the very secret sauce, is one of the great pleasures of watching them work, getting to guess at their secrets.
I like these podcasters — they’re clearly hungry for New Things to happen in the TTRPG world, and they like talking about subjects like what it would mean to have a culturally distinct New York scene for TTRPGs.
But as much as I’m all-in with them on these topics, I’m not sure that the GM-as-illusionist is cultivating a good world for GMs to live in. Or at least, I’m not sure this is going to move us forward. And I’m not sure that it’s going to be a big part of the future, as much as I agree with them that it is a pleasure to watch.
You watch guys like Mercer and Mulligan behind the scenes, and you’ll hear them say that the GM “is a player, too,” but isn’t there a part of us all that finds this sentiment a bit quaint? A bit dismissive of the kind of hustle that GMing seems to require? That hears “the GM is a player, too” and rolls our eyes and thinks “Yeah, for one week, I’d love that.”
What if an Actual Play GM showed all of their GM work and prep in real time for the audience?
I’m thinking about two shows in particular:
The first is Ask the Oracle, a podcast where Shawn Tomkin, author of Ironsworn, joins his son through the start of an Ironsworn campaign, including worldbuilding, character creation, and the improvisational sessions.
The second is The Ninth Step, a Brindlewood Bay podcast GM’d by Jason Cordova and his fellow travelers in the Gauntlet Community. Cordova, who wrote Brindlewood Bay, uses his YouTube channel to stream tons of Gauntlet’s published adventures as Actual Plays.
Both of these shows share a lot in common:
The games are both GM’d by their designers — people whose intent is not to draw attention to themselves, but the game.
Both podcasts are at least partly intended as teaching tools. You can certainly listen to them as entertainment media, but they are also intended to serve as examples of how the game is meant to be played.
Both of these games are super-light on prep. Ironsworn is practically prep-less.
It’s worth noting that these games are profoundly different, but both are heavily inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse design school, a feature of which is decreasing prep load on the GM.
The GMing is intensely scrutable! Cordova and Tomkin are both working from their core rulebooks and little-to-nothing else as source material. If you’d like to read the mystery for an episode of The Ninth Step, it will take you about ten minutes. You can, essentially, read their prep notes.
They are incredibly refreshing Actual Plays to watch, though the part of me that wants to break down their secret tricks and decodes them — in other words, the part of me that is driving me fucking insane — goes a little un-fed.
That insanity is what led me to both of these games, Brindlewood Bay and Ironsworn. On the heels of a 2-year D&D 5th Edition campaign, I wanted to run stuff for my fiance and my friends that didn’t require a lot of planning. I started running a Ironsworn game with my partner and am setting up to run Brindlewood Bay at the end of the month.
Without rehashing old ground we’re all familiar with: I was tired. You see, I wanted to be a player, too.
Without belaboring the point, I think this age of Actual Plays and their Great Showmen are delighting us, and also perhaps cultivating a broader play culture that is running us ragged. It’s shaping player expectations, and it’s shaping the expectations GMs have of themselves.
Is it any wonder that the above episode of Games & Feelings pivots within minutes to a seemingly-unrelated conversation about their own GM burnout?
This is all just passé to say, because it is incredibly obvious, but not properly dealt with because I think we don’t see our way out of it. But I think it will change
A prediction:
In the future, there is going to be another Dimension 20 or another Critical Role, a sensational podcast that becomes a phenomenon among Actual Plays. Except, instead of a GM who cultivates the air of a sage or a mastermind, their GMing will be in plain sight. Their own prep — or as much prep as they even do — their improvisation, their own lostness and attempt to wrangle their own anxieties back into place will be as totally present as it is with the players.
I think when this next show arrives, we will be slapping ourselves in the head thinking “Gosh, they make it look so easy, thank god!” and “I wish I’d had this sooner.”
Lately, I’ve watched a few episodes of Me, Myself and Die! from Trevor Devall, a high-production show where a guy plays TTRPGs solo. I never thought I’d be into solo play, but I was hungry for anything new. Devall GMs for himself in real time, rolling random oracles and interpreting them into story moments as they happen. The camera shows the dice, no screen, and he reads the results from the table as he thinks aloud.
He drops a d100 and I watch his eyes dart back and forth like a magician searching for a dove to pull from thin air, a magician with absolutely no secrets, and all I can think is “Wow, look at this fucking guy cook!”