Accord playtest and game structure

[Andrew Martin]

I've managed to playtest my Accord rules with four players on Sunday evening. There was myself, my brother (a killer GM), and two friends, one who's a story oriented GM and the other is mainly a player. The venue was at the friends house. Accord is intended to GM-less (or GM-full...), and players cooperate to roleplay their characters and tell a story. Accord was the first experience any of us had with a GM-less, story oriented RPG.

Setup was great. I showed the 3x5" cards, and said that each card held information on one concept in the game, and that players briefly described the cool concept they wanted in the game, and then could write up a full description on the card, after getting full accord from the group. This went very well. I was totally surprised by my brother producing around a dozen descriptor cards in short order, all in full accord with the chosen setting and genre (force users in a galaxy, far, far away...). The other players got into well, and the story GM was highly impressed by the cards and the building of the accord, of characters, location, tools, species and so on.

Play used a version of Zac's Shadows rules, where the players named two or more interesting outcomes and rolled a D6 for each outcome; the highest D6 selected the appropriate outcome. Game play very quickly stopped after we "used up" the mysterious starship; the player complaining that there was no surprise in the outcomes, and not liking the way the game sort of fell over. This player insisted that there should be a GM to keep things going. The story GM sort of felt the same way. There was no feedback from my brother.

I was stuck at the time for an answer in how to have the functions of a GM without having a GM. Ron's analogy of the GM as bass player in a band came to mind, and I wondered about the analogy of replacing the bass player with a drum machine in a GM-less RPG. :)

After some thought that evening and the next day (today), I've come to the conclusion that I was wrong in starting play too quickly, having only the one card "to do" (as compared to several dozen set up cards). It was after the one card was used that play "fell over". We should have had a structure of things to do along with places to go to and evil villains to defeat, and monsters to beat up for the characters. In other words, like a first adventure for a conventional RPG or Inspectres' Jobs, or the trailer for an action movie or TV show.

At the moment, my thoughts are that the Accord rules along with player created cards should cover things to do, places to visit, villains to beat up, princesses to rescue, and other common things that the players would like to see their characters do. Then players could draw a card randomly as play lags, and get more action happening.