7. The Game Master
I’m not sure if this intro section is going to give us enough to talk about in terms of the Game Master. The Game Master is, after all, defined by procedure in Blades in the Dark. So I intend to use this entry to make evident what I think is a core part of the Blades in the Dark experience - A procedure for everything.
Digression - The Rules of Being Everyone Else
(as a side note, that three word phrase “being everyone else” has been in my head for a while. I think it was the title of a book or blog post? But I can’t find it. The closest I can find is Peterson’s Playing at the World, which isn’t what I’m after)
There’s a distinct asymmetry between “traditional structures” of table setup - Players have one character, the GM has thousands. But this also translates to a rules asymmetry, where the rulebook is framed to the players as restrictions and to the GM as suggestions. Players have rules, GMs have advice.
Like a lot of shifts in the storygame space, the first time I saw rebellion to this was Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World which declared that the MC effectively required a structure:
“There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this.”
I really enjoy two shifts in presentation here.
One in moving GM’s toward a focused delivery model rather than a simulation model. In Trad play at the time, there was a distinct focus on the GM’s role to “simulate” rather than play with rules. To quote Michael Wheelan in his 2021 Dicebreaker Article : “It’s called the Dungeon Master’s Guide for a reason”. The difference in rules then led to a distinct difference in Genre. And I mean “genre” here in the sense that it is a different experience for the player. The tone and colour and sentiment of the game is different from GM to GM because the Guide doesn’t sharpen focus in a clear enough way. But adding this very specific instruction, Apocalypse World produces a very specific result. Playing through some 50 of the various *worlds through 2016-2017, I was very heavily impacted by how different so many of the games felt even with so much shared history (and, in contrast, how samey so many dungeon games felt even with wildly different rulesets).
The second is that the result is not better it is just for this game. I think that Apocalypse World is fantastic, but I don’t think its version of MCing would translate particularly well to a 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game. Instead, AW2e is AW2e, and other games are other games. And that’s okay. Desirable, even.
Apocalypse World achieved this by providing the MC very clear goals (to push the characters, to probe, to disrupt, to “make them pay” per AW MC sheets) and player rules that support the same experience (moves that destabilise, moves with cost), but not telling the MC, the whole table What to do, but How to do it.
To bring this back to Blades then, I think there’s a significant shift again. In the same way Baker and Baker (2016) formalised an established procedure for the failure state of a roll, Harper has formalised an established procedure for Baker and Baker’s “Conversation”. This has the effect of changing it from “not telling the Table What to do but How to do it” into “telling the Table both What and How”. No longer do we discuss the cloudy edges of Position and Effect is no longer a nebulous concept filtered through choosing which move to use, or a discussion on appropriate scale of consequences. No, now it is a named thing around which we discuss which has mechanical resonance.
Header image: "First-time dungeon master #starterkit" by Scott McLeod is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
