[Circle of Hands] Why rotating PCs and a fixed GM?

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

I was musing about the plight of the poor GM in this game: The GM creates two characters that he/she will never, ever play. As s/he will never play any other Circle member. And I thought "Well, it's necessary, because in this game..."

And I could not find the second part of the phrase. The setting has no "secret informations know only by the GM", there is not a megaplot (or any plot at all) to follow...  why the GM and a player could not switch roles, taking turns playing a circle member and generating an adventure?

What am I missing here?

[Ron Edwards]

Not wanting to rip off Prince Valiant worse than I already am.

Plus it's a game that I want to enjoy GMing, or at least that was part of the original vision. A lot of the unwritten "obvious" part of Gray Magick concerned how the GM would play a fantasy game without any of the older structural features. Of course, I was sure that I would be able to do that and it never occurred to me to try to write it down.

I still need to work on the longer-term elements of play, one or more of the following: recurring NPCs, a table-specific emergent course of the magic war, possible "falls" for knights (e.g. three tallies of the same color and none of the other), getting new knights into play from existing NPCs maybe ... or maybe none of these, and other things instead.

Whatever those longer-term elements turn out to be, that's why there'd be a lone GM.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Not wanting to rip off Prince Valiant worse than I already am.

Hah hah hah, that's been in the air lately.

[Ron Edwards]

Eero, I don't get it. Can you explain?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Sorry, that just hit home so much that I found it funny. What with me working on Eleanor's Dream (totally another retake on Prince Valiant on so many ways) for several years around here, I've found that other people in the Finnish scene have been slowly infected by second-hand influences from Prince Valiant, Trollbabe and such vanilla narrativist games. Fables of Camelot that I wrote with Sami Koponen is an example of the trend, too.

I guess what I really should do here would be to get my pawns on a few dozen copies of Prince Valiant, just so I could distribute the original game to my friends around here. I have my own copy, but few around here have actually seen it despite how influential it's proving to be in these latter days of the hobby.