Replacing the GM

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 4, 2004 at 12:49 PM

I'm in a play-by-post bulletin board game, and I enjoy occasionally skimming the other games on the board to see what other people are doing. One of the games on the board lost its GM recently.

The GM had run the game as sort of a freeform experiment in Narrativist Amber, and felt it had lost its way. He threw up his hands and then washed them of the whole thing. But a number of the players weren't so ready to give up, and actively recruited for another GM. They found one, and she's going to let the remaining players wind down or summarize their existing game threads before launching them into a plot based on her own ideas and incorporating the existing characters and setting.

I'm fascinated by this process in terms of the player community's feelings of ownership of the game and the negotiations with the prospective new GM. Even though the new GM has a plot, and the game will therefore work out to be more GM-directed than it was before, it seems to me that the players will (visibly) have a lot of power in ways they don't (visibly) have it in many other groups.

I will be watching this experiment with interest as the game reboots and goes on.