But part of the point here is that today's games are addressing the drawbacks of being a GM, and in the process, blurring the GM/PC line.
It's no secret that I'm not a fan of the "no myth" fad or the games created on the idea that an RPG profits from having "no myth" or having what myth it does have created during play. I've never seen any "no myth" play in a webcast where I feel I would have wanted to be a part of that. Most of them have been actually repellent to me, because being a GM with long experience, I have 15 ranks in GMing illusionism and can see through the curtains to what is really going on. This means when I play, I know the game that lies underneath the transcript, and if the transcript generator is busted I know it. One of the downsides I've found in being a DM is that it makes emersion harder, in the same since that being a writer you are all the time analyzing the techniques that other writers use to create the magic. When a technique is employed well, you appreciate it in the way that for example, only a person who plays a sport can really appreciate how skillful the most skilled persons in a sport are, or only the way a craftsman can truly appreciate the skills of another craftsman. But when something is made cheaply, you are aware of that as well and know how hollow it really is. Or it's like being a magician who knows the secrets of the art of prestidigitation. Sometimes you know just how impressive a trick is, and other times you know just how cheap, unimaginative and low the deception really was.
The problem fundamentally with "no myth" is that nothing can replace the craftsmanship of preparation. Yes, it is true that a GM ought to be good at extemporaneous creation for the same reason that they need to be good at on the fly rulesmithing - no myth and no rules set are ever complete. But there is a reason that almost all forms of literature and all forms of entertainment require practice, editing, planning, research, and so forth and that the extemporaneous forms of story-telling exist, but attract only a small audience as a novelty. Nothing can replace the depth you get from preparation, and nothing is more obvious to a player than when the substance of something is deep compared to when it is shallow (and often incoherent). Consider even the problem of this latest season of Game of Thrones. Nothing is more obvious than the difference in the quality of the story between when the episodes sprang from deep myth, and when the creators of the show were forced to become more or less extemporaneous. As long as the show was loosely based on the books, they seemed geniuses. And now the same creators seem idiots.
So in the long run, I don't think anything can replace the blood and sweat of the GM, except the blood and sweat of another more experience GM sharing his craft.
Which is to say that yes, there are some GM-less games out there, but there are significantly more blurry GM/PC games. How are we feeling about some of those attempts (intentional or otherwise) at blurring the line?
I really shouldn't condemn any of them until I've played them myself - which in some cases I really want to do. Maybe I'll take some time off this year and go to Origins or GenCon. But my sense is that while the better designed ones could be fun, they still might be more fun with a GM, and the pleasure that they offer is suited more to one offs and short collaborations than long running games. They also suffer from a problem which GMed games have found ways to avoid, which is the problem of discipleship or mentoring. In traditional RPGs, experienced players eventually mature to GMs and form tables of their own, using their experience to teach to new players the arts and skills of playing an RPG well. Learning this without example is difficult. My own attempts to play RPGs were fun, but I didn't really start understanding them until the summer a player's older cousin offered to run games for us munchkins, and his GMing art was a revelation that inspires me to this day.
My sense is that a GMed game only requires the GM to be high skill, but a GMless game requires the whole table to be high skill - essentially a table of players that each could be in a different situation a quality GM. Not only is that going to be a rarer situation, but its not clear how a new group would reach that point. Equally, there are likely to be skills of play that are unique to GM-less games, but I suspect that without an example of good play, those skills will be hard to acquire. So where as in a GMed game, one skilled participant can mentor all the others successfully, I suspect in a GM-less game at least the majority of participants need to already be skilled in order to mentor the few or the one that are not.
This is one of the reasons I really want to play these games at a Con, but it is also the reason I have a great fear that if I did, the games still wouldn't receive a fair shake. Because I'm more likely than not to be playing at a group were the rest of the players, and perhaps even the coordinator of the game who is supposed to serve as mentor (and yet is not the GM!), no more really understand how to play it than I do.
