Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy: Roles

Perhaps the core element structuring The Conversation are the Roles that participants take on. While the roles of GM and Player are reasonably well known, they are only the very basics of Roles available. What is more, the responsibilities and permissions of each role can vary greatly from baseline expectations. Let us explore more together in this week’s Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy.

The Basics

The main purpose of Roles is to delineate the responsibilities and permissions of different participants in the playing of the game. Dividing the labor required in order to manage the effects of a game is necessary to keep it flowing smoothly. Having clear delineations helps to assure that participants do not interfere with each other’s domains and to help them to achieve a greater degree of mastery within their own domain. Strong Roles can also help to strengthen the Conversation, by making it clear who is supposed to respond to what information.

In most games, Roles are assigned before even session zero, as part of the determination of what game to play and how it is to be played. Certain roles, like the typical GM, have extra responsibilities for the organization of play sessions, and thus must be distributed ahead of time. This is especially true when those with leadership Roles are being financially incentivized, as is the case for most larger scale games and for games with professional GMs.

There also tends to be greater authority attached to those roles with leadership positions or those with organizing functions. This is not inherently required for these roles to function, though, they simply tend to be so in more traditional structures. Assigning a greater authority to these roles can lead to dangerous power dynamics, and will tend to lead towards situations that do not allow all participants to function at their highest capability. Games work best when they empower everyone to play to their strengths, and this means giving everyone the freedom to rise or lower as needed.

The Complications

Instead of discussing complicating factors for roles, this week I’m going to use this space to break down the different roles in analog games.

Participants: While in theory everyone involved in playing a game is a player, in common usage, the term player has come to mean a specific role. For the purpose of clarity, I therefore have begun using the term “participant” to refer to those who are taking on any role in the playing of a game. Every game has participants, even 0-player games.

GMs: The GM is one of the most common roles in TTRPGs and has the widest variety of names, including but not limited to: Game Master, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Master of Ceremonies, Guide, and Hollyhock God. Traditionally, the GM has absolute authority over everything within the setting except for the player characters and also serves as the adjudicator of the rules. The amount of power that a GM is typically given far exceeds any other role, and leads to the GM being seen as the person in charge of the game and indeed in charge of the participants. This high concentration of power also typically comes with an excessively large number of responsibilities, leading to a dynamic that can easily grow toxic.

Players: The Player is the other most common role in TTRPGs, but typically is just referred to as the player, with instead different names being saved for the characters that are played by a player, which are generally referred to as a PC. The responsibility and permissions of a Player are typically bound entirely within their PC, using them as an avatar to explore the fictional space. The freedom of action of a PC is typically restricted only by the rules of the game, while it is up to the GM and the rules to work together in order to adjudicate the response of the world to the PC’s actions. Being bound specifically into the PC prevents the Player from making statements about the wider world of the narrative, but games like Apocalypse World and Fellowship, which preserve the basic nature of the Player role, work to expand the Player’s abilities to speak outside of the PC.

Host: The Host is a role that every game has, but few games actually do anything specific with, or even make explicit in their design. The Host is the participant who arranges for the space that the game is played in, be it physical or digital, and generally has responsibilities for assuring that the other participants are comfortable within that space. This role is typically seen as existing outside of the game itself, but in their role of mediating between the space and the play, they do have additional permissions when it comes to managing the players, and additional responsibilities when it comes to organizing play. If a given participant is being disruptive, the Hose has the permission to remove that participant, even if that participant has other forms of authority in play, like being a GM. Another important responsibility for the Host is arranging for breaks and making sure that people do not over-invest in the play to the point that they ignore their out of game responsibilities, like eating.

Designers: The Designer of a game is rarely considered a part of the active play of that game, but in truth the design of a game, its aesthetics, its mechanics, do have an active effect on how that game is played. Therefore, it can be useful to think of the Designer as yet another participant in play, albeit one who can only be interrogated via the text. Viewing the Designer this way makes it clear that their contributions to the act of play are only one amongst many, but in a way distinct from the other participants.

Facilitators: Facilitators are typically only found in larger games, like larps or megagames, and have the responsibility of adjudicating disputes. They rarely are associated with one side or another in conflicts, unlike GMs who are inherently going to be on the side opposing the PCs, and instead are more neutral when it comes to their adjudication. This can be especially critical in games where adjudication is also design, creating ad hoc answers to freeform actions posed by the Players. Since their only stake is fairness and cohesion, they are more freely able to make interesting choices in interpreting the results of actions.

NPCs: Also typically only found in larger games, participants with a NPC role are assigned to act as characters within the world, but not the characters played by the Players, thus why they are called Non-Playable Characters. Their responsibilities vary from playing enemies in boffer larps where their primary responsibility is to give a good fight to playing Face NPCs, characters meant to engage in role-play and provide information about the scenario and the world of the play via social interactions. In smaller scale games, NPCs are typically played entirely by the GM but this is not a requirement.

Logistics: A final role typical of larger games, the Logistics role are participants who handle the back-end of play, processing complex mechanical inputs in a place that is not directly involved in play. This can be scheduling events or handling in-game crafting or as a space for discussing concerns with the state of play. While this can be handled much smoothly between all participants in a small group, as the scope of play grows beyond six or seven people, the more important it is to have people whose sole role is handling logistical affairs.

The Variants

Rotating Roles: Some games rotate the roles that the participants have. The most common version of this variant can be found in games with rotating GMs, where different participants take on the role of GM for the rest of the table on a session-by-session basis, which is common especially in Japanese games like Double Cross. West Marches style games also use drop-in/drop-out style of play to allow for different participants to be Players in different sessions.

Troupe Play: Troupe style play is a specific kind of rotating role variant, where different Players take on a protagonist role at different points, with other Players taking on roles closer to the NPC role. This is especially true in games like Polaris, where the non-Player participants have specific sets of responsibilities and permissions depending on which Player is currently taking on the lead role.

GMless/ful: The most common role variant is to simply not have a GM participant, but instead to split the responsibilities and permissions of the GM amongst the other participants. This is typically referred to as GMless games, though since the GM responsibilities in fact do remain in the game, but are simply distributed, they are also sometimes called GMfull games to reflect that each participant is, in some way, a GM. This division of labor does work to reduce the sometimes unhealthy power dynamics that can develop in the traditional model, but also can put some participants on the spot to a degree that they are not comfortable with.

Formal Divisions: Some GMless games, however, do not divide the responsibilities of the GM evenly, but instead provide specific ways for a given participant to tap into those responsibilities. This can be seen in Belonging Outside Belonging or No Dice, No Masters games that use setting elements as a way of providing opt-in tools to help manage the typical GM effects. This allows for participants to be able to participate closer to their maximum capacity, by being able to focus on just their PC if desired or to pick up setting elements and use them to take on a more GM-like role temporarily.

Outro

As you can see, the topic of roles in TTRPGs is an expansive one. I’ve probably forgotten some crucial elements and variants on the subject. Feel free to let me know what I missed, but please share this post widely! Thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you again next week as I dig into Clocks!

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