The tabletop roleplaying game I play the most, GM or no, is Archipelago III.
What's your favorite GM-less game and why?
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High on my list would be
Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne
Microscope
Ribbon Drive
I talk more about the first 2 here
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One that’s not been mentioned so far is A Taste for Murder by Graham Walmsley. It’s a game of collaboratively creating a classic English whodunnit.
At the start of the game, we develop the twisted relationships between people in a country house. Then we secretly vote on who gets murdered. That PC’s player then becomes The Inspector, there to investigate the murder. As they do so, more dark secrets are revealed.
Great fun!
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My favorite games (that weren’t already mentioned) include The Skeletons, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, A Penny For My Thoughts, and some weird little games I wrote myself.
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I love Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple! Only got to play it once at Origins years ago.
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The one I’ve played the most is Capes, but my current favorite would have to be Archipelago.
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What is it that you love about those games?
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Fall of Magic is my overall favorite, and one of only a handful of RPGs I rate 10/10.
Also high on my list:
- Fiasco
- Microscope
- Love in the Time of Seið
- The Quiet Year
- Archives of the Sky
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Archipelago provides the sort of framework that perfectly aligns with my local culture of play - it pushes the right sorts of system to support what we want to do, it is easy to hack for specific needs, and it gets out of the way when necessary.
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About Remember Tomorrow I love that to play my own character, I have to either wait for another player to throw a faction at them or make them go after another player character. I explicitly don’t get to just go up against a faction myself. I find that very fitting for a Cyberpunk rpg, but also a great and pretty unique structure in terms of buying into what other people make. I also think RT has the best use of a Conditions mechanic I know.
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“Follow” and “The King is Dead”
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I’ve never had a bad game of Fiasco or The Final Girl. I haven’t got to play Lovecraftesque as much as I’d like, but it’s a lovely system.
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Really want to try For The Queen as well, I hear it’s amazing
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Archipelago is a perfect “do anything” game without dice or a lot of overhead and it lets everyone play characters and explore the setting. It’s my go-to when I want to play in a certain kind of setting that nobody’s designed a game specifically for, or when I just don’t feel like doing the dice rolling and number tracking of other games.
Capes is interesting because it’s one of the more “gamey” GMless games I’ve played. It has strategies and there’s ways to play it effectively, which I appreciate. It also does something interesting where conflicts are as significant as the people at the table make them. I’ve had people wave away punch out fights with supervillains in favor of getting super invested in whether a teen superhero can manage to sneak back into her house without her parents finding out.
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Ooh, lots of new games in this thread for me to check out!
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Before the Storm yet. It’s a one-shot storytelling RPG. You play the party on the night before the big battle, and you explore your previous adventures and relationships through flashbacks. There’s no GM and the primary game mechanic is drawing from a deck of ordinary playing cards.
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For the Queen’s basic structure feels exquisitely hackable to me. I predict a subgenre of “FtQ-powered” games will start popping up similar to PbtA and FitD.
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Um… over this past weekend I may have made a game with two other folks… https://twitter.com/GermanCity/status/1104267091949936640
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I just came here to see if anyone said Ironsworn because I’m going to say Ironsworn now:
~FANFARE~
Ironsworn!
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@shane I’ll try not to ramble, but I think I love most the way you can play it by yourself, anytime, add friends without needing a GM, and if you want a GM, some of the GM-like mechanics can just step aside without really needing to change how any of the game works.
The baked-in setting is great, too, but I’ve never used it, because it’s that easy to reskin.
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