60 minutes of thoughts: Why I, an anarchist, don't like No Dice No Masters (or: why Games Master is a bad term; or: what a[n anarchist] Games Master should do)
(Last month's book-blog is taking longer than usual, unsurprisingly as it's, er. A whole wargame. So I'm returning to my series where I write a blog post in an hour, do one edit, and post, to fill the gap. This time, I try to discuss politics and GMing theory! I beg your forgiveness for the inevitable incompleteness). There's a lot of leftiness in indie TTRPG design. Notably, Belonging Outside Belonging , the diceless game family born with Avery Alder/Benjamin Rosenbaum's Dream Askew/Dream Apart, is also known as 'No Dice, No Masters'. This is of course partly a joke, but a quick reading of Alder's description of the system also shows it being framed as an extension of the political side of things: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/belonging . Note how discussion of the mechanical elements, in explicitly political terms, directly follows a laying out of political aims. This is not a post saying that the system is bad politics . Frankly, in this day and ...