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I too summon a bump upon this thread (he'll probably be in a day or two or something).

I'm going to start typing now, but I may not finish this before I go to sleep.

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.

It 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.

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.

And it's more fun for me.

Jake

Let me get back to you on that. I play Classroom Deathmatch the same way, but there are a few obvious differences that are worth addressing.

Um, there's an rpg called 'Pany Explosion'?

WTF?

It's a hybrid title of two staples of the psychic schoolgirl genre: panties showing as the highest point of embarrassment for the girls, and using mindpowers to explode things (like heads). Emily Care Boss suggested the title, I believe. It also totally sounds like a title translated from Japanese. :)

if it sounds feasible to run CD gmless with no prep i might have to add it to my list of possibilities for my Gen Con Pity Party. i don't think playing CD light-hearted and campy is the BEST way to do it, but i think it's an option, and one a certain type of friend of mine would probably enjoy.

Filip, I think that before I answer you I should say that comments I made above are neither rules nor guidelines, just an explanation of how I currently play the game.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykThe "when the game was working well" part seems tricky to me.

What I meant by "when the game was working well" was when all the players understand the rules and want to play the game. This doesn't have anything to do with consensus. It's just a matter of each player understanding how to play.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykAlso, my guts tell me that in actual play you might be doing something not mentioned above, due to it being just so obivous for you. Apparently, you're acting as a facilitator, being the person who provides and explains the rules. This alone gives you a lot of authority in the group. As you mention, you're the one telling the players when to start the final encounter.

The point is that it doesn't matter who is in charge of these specific duties. It doesn't have to be the Superintendent. The duties can easily be distributed among other players. As long as the players are aware that these duties need to be taken care of, it doesn't matter who does the job. Because A lot of the games I facilitate in this way are for new players I do have to take a kind of central role, telling them when the final encounter can start or how to frame a new scene.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykI wonder whether there are other areas where you're effectively in charge. If there are, without it being clear who in the group has the final authority when it comes to those matters (e.g. the game designer at the table), your experience might be difficult to replicate. And if so, having those responsibilities clearly distributed could be integral to "the game working well", I guess.

I don't think there needs to be any kind of final authority at all. As I said in my earlier post, there are four things that the Superintendent does during the game. As long as the other players are willing to do these things, there's no reason for a single player to take the Superintendent role. All the players need is a clear understanding of what the superintendent duties are, and an agreement that they will all work togetehr to fulfill them.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykDo you know about someone else trying the same method without you at the table? How did it go?

Just the games I've been in. Both of the regular groups I've played with over the last year have played this way. In both cases it went very well. Both of these groups were very aware of how the game worked, and I definitely wasn't the facilitator or central player in eitehr of those ongoing campaigns. What I mean is that thee players didn't look to me for guidance in the way you were describing before.

Posted By: Filip Luszczyk1. Normally, the Superintendent narrates the results of all NPC actions. Without a single one, should the player narrate the results when spending Demon Dice, or should his Best Friend or Rival do it?

I don't know. It could work both ways, and I think I've played it both ways. I think the right answer here is to go with whatever is the most fun.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykIf more than one player wants to spend Demon Dice at the same time, what to do?

They could take turns? Or work together to frame the action?

Posted By: Filip Luszczyk How to handle side conflicts (with this method, are there any conflicts other than those with the Demon and between the Students themselves, in the first place)?

When you say side conflicts, what do you exactly mean? Pretty much every conflict in the game is either a demon conflict or a conflict between students. There isn't really much besides that.

Posted By: Filip LuszczykSince everybody can control the adversity all the time, are there some things you do (or specifically don't ever do) to avoid hitting the Czege Principle?

I think the really obvious key to this is that you don't have the same person creating the adversity and the resolution. I guess I didn't explicitly say this, so let me do so now. The way I'm proposing playing allows a player to frame a scene allowing her or another player to address their Agenda, and another player (or multiple players) providing conflict to keep them from doing this. So, for example, I frame a scene that i hope will allow me to address my "Murder my father and steal his psychic energy" Agenda. You and another player decide to provide some adversity. You decide to use some Demon dice to set up a conflict, while the other player decides to start a conflict between my student and her student.

The only two jobs in question are basically running the Demon and running NPCs since everything else is well suited to be done collectively.

I kinda lean towards the boring and non-helpful answer that things would probably just "work out" if you got going. The player who brings in the NPC in a scene could run it for duration of it. If some PC isn't present then it might be suitable for that PCs player to take that job. But since the conflict rules are constructed the way they, it might turn out that the player of the PC not present is still the most active player in the scene due to describing outcome for being best friend or rival of those PCs in the scene... so there are no guarantees for anything really.

Something that might ease up the running of the Demon is to have the group create it together. Then everyone knows what it's like and don't have to hesitate too much when there's a good spot for the Demon to appear. As with NPCs, it'd work fine with letting one player run the Demon for the duration of the scene, or just pass that duty on when you run out of juice. That's a thing that happens too after all, and hence I'd say it might be a idea to distribute those jobs too rigidly.