I love a good solo or co-op game, but I also happen to play a few board games with programmed "game masters". Sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a deck of cards (as with Fallout the Board Game), and sometimes it's an app (as with Mansions of Madness). When something's programmed, it's essentially a script with choices ("do you want to do this or that?") or conditional statements ("if you have this item, then you do this action"). The eternal question is whether a script is as effective at running a game as a live human being, and the obvious answer for anyone who has had a great game master is an emphatic of course not. The games I play using a scripted game master are entirely fulfilling, however, so maybe the answer is yes. Or maybe the answer is both?
I once tried playing Mansions of Madness with my partner. Every time I started diligently setting out Interact and Search tokens on the board, she would tell me not to bother because we could just see the tokens on the computer screen. And she had a point.
There's a sometimes uneasy balance between a scripted game master and the players, because as a player you usually have enough control over the script that you can just skip over any "tedious" parts. I was talking to a friend about Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and he said he'd aged out of them. Actually, he hadn't. He admitted that as a kid, he would often just skip ahead to each possible pathway, and then choose the "right" one, and he'd skip over combat under the assumption that he'd win in the end anyway. For the record, I never did that. I guess I enjoy the "tedious" parts.
A live game master is a component, I think, that makes tedium less tedious. Maybe the game master introduces a challenge to an otherwise mundane activity. Or maybe the GM insists you give details about how you achieve even your mundane goals. Or maybe the GM has a charisma, in real life, that makes it fun to chat about imaginary anything.
It's hard for a script to achieve that. Even as AI is introduced to some games, there's an uncanny valley that's likely never going to be bridged. No matter what, you know it's AI, and imagining game worlds is all about belief. You have to believe the game master is authentic, and you have to believe in the game world enough to care about it. I mean, you don't have to. You can still play a game without that. But then you're playing against a script again.
If you've been a game master for a few games, you probably have a story about the time you utterly failed. I don't know what happened for you, but I've tried teaching a friend a game I didn't understand yet, I've tried running a complex module I hadn't read in advance, I've thrown too much combat at a group that wanted puzzles and puzzles at a group that really only wanted combat. The list could go on, but you get the idea.
Similarly, I've also been failed by game masters, and probably so have you. But it's only a game, and we all get through it, and hopefully adjust the settings so it doesn't happen again.
My point is, a human game master isn't a guarantee of a fun game. Sometimes a script is more predictable, and there's always the manual override of just not doing the thing the script tells you to do. When there's an insistent human running the show, that's not always an option, or at least it's not always an easy option.
When I play a game solo, I tend to prefer playing against the game. Then again, I do solo play lots of games that have no solo mode, so I end up playing against myself very frequently. There are obvious differences to these two methods, but one I sometimes forget is the way the story of the game happens.
When you play a game with a solo mode, the story is set. It's you against the mechanism. You're going to battle it out until you reach the win or the lose condition.
But when you play against yourself, the story is less clear. It's you against you, but which you are you going to let win? Do you even have the choice? Just how hard is the other you going to play?
When I play against myself, surprises abound, and I don't mean on the game board. The surprises happen in my own head. It's a constant struggle, for me, to figure out what's "fair", because I always suspect myself of going to easy on the other side. The brutality I sometimes adopt isn't competitive, though, it's hyper-analytical. And it's from that, I think, that a story emerges. Through obsessing over the rules and the "smart" way to antagonise the other player, I seek to justify the events happening on the game table. A narrative forces its way through the game, not from a script but from the process of utilising the game mechanics to bring about a win condition.
Something similar can happen when you play against a friend, but I think it tends to be only certain friends. You have to find the friend who's concerned as much about the narrative of the game as with winning. Not everyone does. Not every game master develops a new story out of the events happening on the gaming table.
I recently got introduced to HeroQuest, which I'd heard of but had never played. I played as Zardoz, and I immediately decided it was basically a perfect game. It's all the fun of a dungeon crawl with a defined set of assets, and a tidy little script for the game master. But as a game master, I knew I could override the script as needed (and I did need to, when the game started going so late that it looked like we wouldn't finish).
I can imagine Mansions of Madness benefitting from a similar hybrid mode. It would be easy to implement. One player has the app, the others don't. Simple, and I think it could add a lot to the game.
It doesn't translate to all scripted games, but I think it's something to consider trying when a scripted game master experience isn't working out. I think there are advantages to both a scripted and a live game master, but if there's a game you enjoy but for the way it's run, don't hesitate to try switching things around.