18 thoughts on “For GMless play, does anyone have experience or suggestions?”

  1. I could see it being run fairly easily with a rotating GM in the same manner as Crush the Rebellion. You change with each heist. You could use the random cards as well.

  2. I’d also be interested to hear any suggestions for this. It seems like a system where the GM could fairly easily also be a player if they’re able to maintain the two ‘hats’ separately, or if your group is good enough at improv, potentially everyone could contribute to the task. Not sure if that’s what you were talking about or not as I know it isn’t completely GMless, but that’s the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head.

  3. You could create some narrative guideline cards that a player could draw if they need a prompt. They’d have things like “escalate”, “complication”, “twist”, “betrayal”, “character moment”, “lull”, “interrupted” etc

  4. No experience doing that with Blades. Just suggestions: start by redistributing GM duties (probably to players not involved in a roll, a la Polaris). Then, figure out what to do when everyone is involved in a roll (this is a crew-based game that incentivizes teamwork, so it will happen). Playtest it until you find holes in doing things this way.

  8. Yes, obviously the random tables help a lot. Of course, you can rotate the GM per heist. Maybe that is probably the best approach. I’m also aware of a variety of general GMless techniques. I wonder if there are specific approaches to Blades for GMless play.

  11. Oliver Granger  That gave me some ideas immediately. What if the duties were divided like this.. one player handled the criminal world and Prowess (combat and obstacles) fiction, another handles the Bluecoats and Insight (mystery) fiction, and another handled the spooky ghost stuff and Resolve (social) fiction. And anyone else can suggest too, but the person in charge of that thing has the final say about those things.

  12. Mark Cleveland Massengale that reminds of Great Ork Gods, where players get assigned one or more gods: of war, stealth, or death, etc. Each player was the GM for their god’s or gods’ domain. It also had a neat system of spite if players there was protesting at the difficulty level set or felt there was favouritism.

  13. Mark Cleveland Massengale that pretty much how I’m trying to run blades anyway – if there is a question about ghost, I turn to the whisper to see what he have to say and almost always accept his answer. The same with the cutter and criminal element, the se with the leech when there is a science/drugs question.

    As a GM, I’m still the one who make the final call thogh

  14. Thanks for the comments. I really like the ideas presented here and in the linked post. I was basically curious what works best with Blades and what structures and mechanics of Blades lend themselves to GMless play. I like the autority distribution based on character (Whisper on ghosts etc.), I find linked plans (suggested in the linked post) interesting.

    Maybe, similar to Monsterheartless, we will one day put together a manual for Bladeless in the Dark !

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