Alternating Campaigns -- one group, two (or more) campaigns

[DanMcS]

It's no problem to context-switch your gaming. The group I play with on saturdays has been doing it for quite a while. We swap settings, rules-sets, even GMs within one campaign, and nobody has had a problem, we actually think it's fairly fun, sampling a lot of settings.

It tends to be driven by who wants to run something. So we have one standing-ish game, playing in the star wars universe using Mutants and Masterminds rules, which is run by one guy.

We have another standing-ish game, run by the same guy, myself, and occasionally others, which is a Hunter: the Reckoning game using standard White Wolf rules.

We've also played one-offs recently; last week it was Gamma World, the week before it was Sky Pirates over the East Indies; both used d20 modern type rules.

The one-offs tend to get played, well, once, unless somebody is interested in running them again. We've played Hunter since last fall, swapping DMing responsibilites around. We started alternating that with Star Wars, which tends to run a mini-arc of three or four sessions, then a couple weeks off for Hunter or whatever.

I find that we tend to have the same interests in all the games; wallopping bad guys and occasional detonations. Other than that, no problems switching games willy-nilly have arisen.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

With one group we play with 2 different DMs, and we alternate DMs every 3 sessions. With another group, we play with 3 different DMs, and there is no clear method of picking who will be the next guy to DM.

AR

 

[JesterPoet]

We play once a week and the other GM and I run for 2 weeks at a time and then switch.

 

[Kannik]

Works surprisingly well...

I've played in a group that played 2 campaigns in an alternating-week pattern and it worked very well, and kept both games rather fresh and the GMs from becoming complete wrecks. Now admittedly they weren't both the same game/genre, so perhaps that helped keep things from being confusing, but I would reccomend it.

I've also played in a group where there were four of us, and two of the players took turns GMing the same adventuring party; similarly, another group there were three of us and we each took turns holding the GM reins for the same group of superheroes, and it worked splendidly. For the latter, the option was either to play 'your' character as an NPC, or have them sit out (but still gain the same XP)... I think we all ended up doing the NPC thing but it may have been easier to do the sit out.

At any rate, long winded I am being, the short of it is that an alternating setup can work and be lots of fun and even advantageous. If you share the same party, you'll obviously need people who are good enough not to treat their characters a little too well when they are GMing... }

Kannik