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 age, any liberatory politics is good-enough politics. It's really just me responding to a potentially implied idea in here, and certainly one I've seen one or two people tout since: that 'no dice, no masters' is comparable to the anarchist dictum of 'no gods, no masters', and therefore that dice and (game) masters fill a hierarchical role similar to godsorganized religion or (real) masters.

Speed-disclaimers: I'm broadly anarcho-communist in the politics I do, but not very sectarian or doctrinaire about it. This post is not an attack on anybody; mostly, it's an argument with myself/just idea-play. This post is not going to grapple with the debate around anarchism and spirituality, but for what it's worth I tend to see the 'ngnm'  statement as an attack on organized religion with inflammatory phrasing rather than on faith per se (I avoid it myself because too many people I organize with are spiritual in some way). As the original phrase treats the two components broadly interchangeably as elements of hierarchy which the attached tendency attacks mostly on the front of material mastery, this post will focus on game-mastery on the basis that dice are essentially game-mastery through the medium of random chance, a tool rather than a separate entity.

OK, NDNM time. Is this a more liberatory vision of gaming? 

Yes, one can argue it's prefigurative, a vision of a world where creativity is truly co-operative. What if nobody had to authorize your imagination? What if we (at least a small 'we') could agree on what we wanted to build?

Counterpoint: We live constantly constrained by certain laws that we don't get to decide on, that we don't have to understand to be affected by. Even the framing of these as laws is wrong, of course - they're more like boundaries of nature's sandbox, causal chains deriving from the very real agency of others, etc. The society we need to prefigure is not necessarily one where 2-8 anarchists sit down and mould the nature of reality to their whims,†  or even to what would make a good story for their value of 'a good story.' It's one where more than just commonsense constraints from everyone's invisible rulebooks like gravity apply: it's also full of mysterious agencies like literally any human who doesn't share your opinion, full of obscure natural (or supernatural?) principles, some kind of patterns in the basic 'economy' of resource use and distribution which sometimes do non-intuitive things, etc.

Now: 2-8 people likely have a better aggregate knowledge of these things than one person possibly can. However, 2-8 people, even with all social hierarchy thoroughly expunged, also likely have social dynamics that might influence what outcomes they will ultimately support.  And certainly Belonging Outside Belonging games explicitly cluster around a sort of separatist commune-building impulse, which... I don't blame anybody for wanting to play that out with the world as it is, but I'm not sure it's particularly a prefigurative vision insofar as these spaces are part of the old world and whether they're helping to build a new one in it's shell is pretty questionable 60 years on from the 60s.

I'd like to suggest that the proper role of GM, storyteller, whatever, is as scapegoat. For physics, social relations, whatever influences and constraints you've personally decided matter to your setting. The scapegoat's job is to be apolitical for the duration of their role, not insofar as they leave behind their model of why things happen but insofar as they leave behind any moral opinions on what should fall out the other end of their arbitration. This is the distinction between playing within, say, a historical materialist framework for your understanding of change and playing as an agent of Marxist teleology, bringing about the Glorious And Correct Revolution As Prophesied By My Favourite YouTuber. As a GM, I have done things which made nobody at the table feel good (within reasonable and pre-agreed boundaries) because they would preserve the tone and dynamic of the game's system.‡ I think of a recent character death, a beloved PC who had been taking a lot of spectacular risks diving into the sea to visit alien spirits, decided to do so in the midst of a clash between these beings and the 'natural' sea, was bitten by a water-monster, and bled to death after getting back to land. I was physically cringing as I had to announce it. Nobody, but nobody, was OK with it. If we had been storytelling as a group, I sincerely doubt it would have happened. Maybe, by conventional narrative standards, it even made the game worse. 

But - without it, the game's aspirations to a reasonably hard reality-model would have been weakened, and every future act of risk cheapened. It would have become a safe world, and that is a world inured against meaningful political choice, because meaningful political choices for those of us opposed to capitalism are - in this moment, at least, maybe for the rest of our lives - choices to sacrifice. The game of meaningful politics (liberatory or no; the opportunity for liberatory politics will inevitably allow the option to pursue power or be co-opted instead) must be a wargame, its protagonists sharply limited to give meaning to victory.§

Part of this is about definitional quibbling. The 'Games Master' term, much as I like it, is not really appropriate to such an arbiter-as-scapegoat. 'Master' implies human dynamics, and they need to aspire to be as inhuman as possible - yes, there will be biases, but they need to be confronted and avoided if they can. There's also a secondary role as facilitator, often folded in, which is one perfectly familiar to an anarchist organizer, and this role may step in internally and say to the A-a-S 'ok, people look uncomfortable in a bad way, let's step back from simulating and talk about boundaries'. Or: 'the house is on fire... we should probs go now'. (It probably doesn't even need to be the same person, which is an interesting thought, but of course it usually is.) But point is - a human 'Master', ruler, whatever, is never just acting to represent particular realities. Their actions by their nature maintain or enforce particular realities. One of them may be benevolent, but you're still dependent on the benevolence of the next to avoid a bad time, because changing them always has a relatively high investment in terms of instability, energy, and possibly life. TTRPG groups don't completely lack changeover costs, but assuming that two groups of approximately morally similar people are playing a 'GMed' and 'GM'less game, changing the model of the game or replacing the person running it should be about as difficult either way. 

(You could even do this in-game - 'having a revolution' of rules in the way Zedeck Siew writes about here. I've built this into my own Tales of Theon - there are a lot of ways that players can slowly usurp the authority of the Arbiter-as-Scapegoat that is the 'GM', gaining control of scenes or whatever as their character becomes more powerful than simulationist reality, and one class, the Resonant [my answer to the Bard] eventually gets the choice to fundamentally change the rules or even take over as GM; but if the social or natural rules of the world change enough that could also bring in a similar system rewrite, and has on one past occasion.)

 This isn't a political example, but I think you can see where the politics come in: to tell a story about building something better, you need somebody willing to say 'and now the uprising fails and the military executes you all' or 'and now the child's injury will dramatically worsen and shorten their life because your efforts at localizing the economy have broken medical supply chains,' or something less grisly that fits your preferred tone (you can tell my games get dark, I think; this is not exclusive to that predilection.) TTRPGs offer an opportunity to explore the social mechanics of reality, to ask 'how might some other set of people with particular abilities fare in my ideal world, or in the process of making that world,' or even just to explore the weaknesses and secrets of the world-that-is. This doesn't have to be serious, or aspire to simulation - your hexcrawl probably already deals with ingroup-outgroup conflict and the increasing centralization of authority in a relatively stateless world, your Traveller game is showing you the consequences of particular economic models on particular classes of people, your Royal Blood heist grapples with the morals of reclaiming rather than removing hierarchical authority.

Now. I specify NDNM here because... well, because it sells itself as an outgrowth of anarchist theory, but also because I'm not coming for all GMless play. (Nor, indeed, am I really coming for NDNM - play whatever you like forever.) Indeed, this was inspired by reading Kieron Gillen's review of 7-Part Pact as 'the first GM-full game'. Clearly, distributing responsibilities for different complex mechanics works to preserve some of the game's setting integrity. This has required a very specific capsule containing lots of setting and custom mechanics, but it's quite possible the principle can be generalized outside of this and I look forward to seeing experiments in doing so. It seems like a game that's going to change a lot. I'm going to run it and report back at some point in the next year or two, I hope.

That said, I think there will continue to be a role for the single maximally impartial Arbiter-as-Scapegoat, insofar as people want to play stories in worlds they understand very little, which move out of their sight and throw up strange and crushing results, without having to write several hundred pages of additional rules for it.

* The tyranny of That One Person With A Bad Take On The Forums is limitless, ofc

† Mage games aside...

‡ Taken here as the mechanic-dynamic interface, the totality of 'how we play'.

§ In theory. I don't necessarily think many wargames do this well; particularly, many undersell the importance of strategic losses as against tactical gains, where a narrow and relatively bloodless tactical win often ends up looking similar in terms of victory to a bloody one.