For about a year I’ve been promising to share my ideas and methods for playing Panty Explosion without a GM. Filip and a few other guys over at Story Games finally called me out on it. So here you go.
Very shortly after releasing Panty Explosion I discovered that (for me) the game worked very well without a designated Superintendent. I was mostly doing store demos and convention games at the time, playing with people who didn’t know anything about the game. This was different from the play testing Matt and I had been doing earlier in the year. Different circumstances, plus I had developed different methods for playing, presenting and facilitating the game. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that because of this the game itself changed.
One of the things that I noticed fairly quickly was that when the game was working well and all the players had a good understanding of who their characters where and what their story was, the role of the Superintendent became almost superfluous. What I mean is that most of the time I would find myself sitting quietly at the table watching everyone else play, occasionally answering a question or providing some flavor for a scene. This became a reoccurring theme in the game I facilitated. As the Superintendent I would start off by explaining how to play the game and setting up the first scene. After that the players would mostly take over, and I usually wouldn’t get to give much input until the end of the game, where I would take the role of the Demon and roll some dice. And more and more often, I found the players were doing that part as well!
I should make it clear that I wasn’t sitting quietly because I was bored or didn’t know how to participate. Rather, these games became the kind of ideal situations that designers hope for, where the player immediately grasp how the game is supposed to work and be played, and the session itself gains a life of it’s own and no longer requires your input. That’s good. Shit, it’s great! But it occurred to me that it didn’t really leave much for the Superintendent to do. It was fine for me, as the games creator, to sit back and enjoy other people playing my game. But for another Superintendent? That experience might not be so much fun.
I think it might help for me to talk a little bit about the role of the Superintendent in Panty Explosion (and Classroom Deathmatch). It’s easy to call the Superintendent a GM, but that may set up a false expectation. The Superintendent has a few different duties:
The Superintendent creates the School.
The Superintendent is in charge of the Demon.
The Superintendent is in charge of framing scenes.
The Superintendent decides when Agendas have been resolved.
Creating the School and deciding when Agendas resolve are pretty minor duties. One is done before the game starts and very often involves the participation of the other players. The other is largely decided by the other players, and only requires the Superintendents agreement. Framing Scenes is an important part of the game, and is one of the two tools that the Superintendent has for shaping the games story. But players can also frame scenes. The Demon is the only real power that the Superintendent has. The Superintendent gets a pool of Demon dice to create monsters and other challenges for the other players to face. These dice are what gives the Superintendent power and authority in the game.
t became apparent very quickly that (as I said before) a game of Panty Explosion that was going well didn’t need a Superintendent. I don’t mean that the responsibilities of a Superintendent could be ignored, just that a single player didn’t have to dedicate them selves to the job. I discovered that it was very easy to spread the weight of the Superintendent role around the entire group.
The way I’ve been playing the game with both my friends and new players, the way I’ve been introducing it to new players, is to have all players share the responsibilities of framing scenes and controlling the demon. The common question I get from people who have played the game is how do you build a story without a central Superintendent to guide the game. What they forget (or missed in the first place maybe) is that the story in a game of Panty Explosion is made up of two parts, the Students Agendas and the confrontation with the Demon. So each scene in the game needs to address one of these two parts, with a preference for resolving Agendas. So what a game of Panty Explosion is going to look like is a series of scenes strung togetehr, each scene addressing one or more of the Students Agendas. Some of these scenes are going to be about the Demon, but really the Demon is just there to provide antagonism. To keep the Students from completing their Agendas.
So once you can see that, playing the game is pretty simple. Players frame scenes where they can address their Agendas, and other players provide antagonism either with the Demon or just by playing their own Students. Connecting these scenes togetehr creates a story and eventually leads to the confrontation with the Demon. Someone needs to be in charge of keeping track of the Demon dice. I usually put a big pool of dice in the middle of the table to represent the total Demon dice. Any player can act on the Demons turn and use dice from the pool. Once the pool is down to about a third of the dice, I tell the players that we need to head into the final encounter with the demon. At this point one or two of the players usually take charge of the Demon, describing the scene and dictating all the demons actions.
In a one off game this method will usually result in an entirely improvised game with just 2 or 3 really intense scenes. For multiple session games the players will often do some planning between sessions, and you’ll start to see elaborate plots and relationships unfold. The Demon will often develop a personality and a theme, even if it’s being controlled be several different players.
When I tell people about this style of play, they often complain that it won’t create a good story, or that it will be confusing. I’ve found the opposite to be true. What you need are a group of players that are willing to share and are open to improvisation. These are things that Panty Explosion forces on it’s players anyway, and I think that’s part of the reason this play style has been so successful for me over the last year or so. If anything, Panty Explosion is about compromise and the realization that not getting what you want can sometimes be better then getting exactly what you ask for.
That’s pretty much it. No rules and no real guidelines, just a rambling example. Sorry. At this point you may be scratching your head and wondering why the version of Panty Explosion that you know sounds completely different from the one I seem to be playing. As I said before, the game has changed for me. This is how I play it now, and I find it very rewarding.
Shit, I forgot the important part. Playing like this frees me up from being the Superintendent and allows me to lead the game by playing a Student instead. I find this is much more helpful for teaching new players how to play and how to use their agendas and the scene framing rules to create stories and drive the game in interesting directions.
Hope this helps.
Jake
Posted by Jake 
