“How is this possible? How can I enjoy role-playing games without a GM?!?” (ECCC 2012)

The GMless RPG workshop at last year’s PAX was so much fun that when Emerald City Comic Con was looking for gaming panels, I decided to pitch it again.

I expected a handful of people to show up, maybe five or six at most. After all, this was a comic convention with almost no previous RPG presence. Instead the house was packed.

“How many of you play tabletop role-playing games?” Forty-eight hands go up. “How many of you have played an RPG without a GM?” Two hands go up. Yep, that’s an entire room full of people who have never tried GMless RPGs but want to know more, so I took a fairly different angle from the PAX workshop which was loaded with veterans.

How’d it go? Listen for yourself:

(Fifty minutes long. You can also download the MP3 if you prefer.)

The attendance question at the beginning is about how we run Story Games Seattle. We were chatting, waiting for the clock to strike 5 so the talk could officially begin.

As you can probably tell, it was a great crowd and a really fun time. For a lot of the recording it sounds like I’m alone in a broom closet, then suddenly everyone erupts in laughter and you can hear how packed the place really was. But the real indicator is that mobs of people from the talk showed up downstairs to play GMless games. Which also meant I got to meet and game with a lot of the people from the talk, which made for an awesome weekend of gaming.