Co-DMing

[Trit One-Ear]

My best friend and I have talked about this idea for some time. We've come up with several ideas on how to Co-DM a game, but none seem to be the right fit for us.

1 - Rotating DM chair. Problem: We've kinda tried this, but mostly our rotations are few and far between (long adventures, sometimes campaigns). It ends up more feeling like we're taking turns running rather than running together.

2 - Switching off Sessions. Problem: We enjoy playing as much (if not at times more) as we enjoy DMing. Part of the fun of playing is watching the story expand before you, based on your actions. Knowing roughly the plot, and how we've laid out the adventure together takes away some of that fun. Plus neither of us are the best at not letting player knowledge effect character decisions (though we do try to limit that).

3 - Take Turns Planning. Problem: One idea we had was to switch off sessions without any discussion of a larger plot or future plans. We'd share a character, and trade off running and playing each night without discussing any of our plans. This seems problematic to me, as misinformation can easily mislead or confuse players based on two DM's feeding them what's important.
Also, as a DM I love long, over-arching stories, with reveals much later in the plotline. This would be difficult to pull of in this style.

I'm sure many other ways of co-DMing exist. I'd love to hear of any experiences (successful or otherwise) that you guys have had running with two (or more) DM's. And any advice on how we could make this work for our group.

Trit

 

[Breaks]

simply treat it as two campaigns, complete with separate parties/characters.

they can be set concurrently in the same campaign setting, each telling part of the overall story, or can be entirely separate, having no effect on each other. if in the same setting, trade general notes with the other DM so you can avoid similar tropes, and don't do things like destroy some city the other was going to feature as a haven later on, but you don't need to have the same arch-villain or even be in the same part of the world. of course, if you are, you can use the other party members as npcs the current party might run across while in town.

treat the transitions as interludes, spending just enough time with one story/party for your slayer/knight to get bored, for your warlord to want to roll his own dice, or for the current DM to want to get his player on. You can expertly weave these into the storyline to create extended cliffhangers (the party gets captured, end of session, next week jump to the other campaign) or use natural break points like the end of a dungeon crawl or boss fight. or you can set specific swap conditions and keep to them (swap every month, or every 6 sessions, or every time the party gains a level).

if the rest of your party is wholly against making/keeping track of two different characters, treat one of the campaigns as a series of flashbacks, and just use the same characters for both. don't worry too much about explaining how they were still level 6 20 years ago when they were level 1 6 months ago, or how remembering an encounter in the past dinged them up to 7. Single-player rpgs do flashback interludes without disrupting level-flow all the time, and as long as there's a compelling story taking place, such matters are rarely distracting. the future/older party could be newly out of retirement, having to re-learn to fight, for example, or there could have been some sort of mass-amnesia effect that the party is slowly recovering from while investigating (which has some awesome campaign hooks - the party could essentially approach the truth about the "event" from both sides simultaneously, but such a story is more finite, and its culmination would likely end the "flashback" campaign).

theres lots of fun options

 

[Lwaxy]

Not a 4e player but as this is more of a general RPG issue and we co-GM a lot, here's some ideas.

You don't need to make it separate campaigns, we only consider it co-GMing if we are co-running the same campaign.

If you are running an AP, only switch GMs between the modules and don't read ahead. So adventure 1 in the path would be done by one GM, part 2 by the other and then alternating again. Same when you string other adventures together, of course.

If you make your own story, you do not want to plan a lot of details ahead so when you get to play, you can be surprised and not be forced to metagame all the time. It helps to have either clear ending points or open cliffhangers before switching. Cliffhanger for example as in the party has just defeated a young dragon and suddenly a roar and rumble comes from the next cave. The next GM in line gets to decide whether this is another dragon, other monsters or something else entirely - maybe a bunch of dwarfs emulating dragon noises to try and scare the dragon just killed off. It helps to know each other's preferences ad GMing style to prepare such cliffhangers.

Co-GMing is lots of fun. It takes a bit more time in planning a base story if you do your own brew, but it's worth it. GMs with a god complex are not good to co-GM with, of course. You need to respect each other's ideas, leads and plotlines.

Also a good way to get new GMs. One of the girls I GM for now is the main GM in our Eberron campaign. She wouldn't have tried GMing it alone.

Oh and in the case of this campaign, we share a PC so there is consistency in the party.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6678017]Trit One-Ear[/MENTION]
I like Lwaxy's suggestion. I was thinking something similar, but focus more on a shared campaign setting while leaving each of you in complete control of a given adventure (well, as much as any GM is ever in "complete control"). Just tighten up your adventures so they're more serialized/episodic than massive fantasy epics...and of course draw from the shared setting you two are creating. For example ,design your adventures to last between 2-4 sessions, and strictly stick to that. For example, you would stick to smaller dungeons and make sure the players return to civilization at the end. I think to pull this off you'd need to sacrifice a bit (not all) of your tendency for long-spanning plot lines and be willing to adapt to curve balls from your co-GM and fellow players. Of course, if you do want to foreshadow something, you can always return to that in a later 2-4 session adventure you run.

Also, in creating your characters I'd build in reasons to logically explain their periodic absence from the party. Maybe they must report to a feudal lord or church? Maybe they have a family they return to? Keep in mind that your characters is another place you can coordinate background/setting material.

A note on game prep logistics. With this approach you might, at the start of running your adventure, let your co-GM know where you expect the group to end up at the end. No plot details, just geographic location in the setting. This could help them prep their adventure, and they would return the favor. Alternately, you could just plan for a longer than normal gaming break between adventures to allow the other sufficiency prep time.

 

[Umbran]

I don't see how this is 4e-specific. You might get more input on your thread if you post it in Tabletop Gaming. Or, we could move it for you if you wish.

 

[Shadeydm]

I'm currently in the process of planning a collaboratevly built homebrewed campaign setting. One component in that process is the idea of not just encouraging player buy in to the setting but also letting the other DMs in the group take advatage of it by setting their games and or one shots in the same world.
Co-DMing the same party sounds problematic to me on first take but its always interesting to read about other people's experiences. I think I would be a little leery of sharing a party between multiple DMs my gut reaction is there would be a lot of pitfalls to try and avoid. There should be enough shared creative space in a world to allow multiple sets of PCs to observe the ripples or fallout of each other's actions within the world with minimal planning between DMs.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

A friend and I are Co-DMing a 4e game, and have done so for years. At one point, we actually had three DMs trading off, but one decided to drop back to just playing.

We've been mostly successful, and will probably continue. We usually run Adventure Paths, so the over arching story arc takes care of itself (mostly). We've tried it just taking turns DMing and writing our own adventures as we go, and that works, too, but it does take a bit more faith between DMs.

Currently, we're playing through the Paizo Second Darkness adventure path. The process of converting the adventures to 4e gives us some interesting opportunities for creativity and fun, all while we have the AP to provide a story arc as a safety net.

For example, at the moment it's my turn to DM, and I'm running Endless Night, the 4th adventure in the series. We've set the campaign in Eberron, mostly taking place in Xen'Drik and have mixed in a few other adventures along the way. Paizo does a great job with maps and art and story, so we have all of that to draw on, but in most cases the encounters have to be redesigned. And, a lot of the time, those adventures don't flesh everything out, which also leaves a lot of room for building your own content into the game.

It's working for us -- I don't know what we'll try next, but we've got a little while before we have to make that decision.

-rg

 

[Trit One-Ear]

Unfortunately after posting this, I went on a short D&D hiatus. I never came back to thank everyone for their responses.

There's some great advice here; I like hearing all the different ways people have managed to share the DM burden/fun.

The style that closest fits our goals of co-DMing is [MENTION=53286]Lwaxy[/MENTION] 's suggestion of leaving open ended adventures. I'm sure it can work running 2-3 sessions between swaps as well.

The big draw for us is the collaborative element of adventure designing. We both love bouncing ideas off each other in our writing outside of D&D, and feel stifled that we can't discuss plot ideas.

We'll feel around our way of sharing the storytelling seat, and let you know how t works. In the meantime, feel free to add any more insight or experiences you lot may have!

Trit

 

[Dragonblade]

So, I played in an awesome co-DMed game in high school. One of the DMs was an aspiring novelist and she came up with background info, did all the nation building, and the main plotline of the game. She also loved to role-play the NPCs, particularly the female NPCs.

The other DM handled most of the male NPC role-playing and also handled the nuts and bolts of the rules and running combat and monsters.

It was fairly amazing as far as games go. One of the best campaigns I ever played in. Our lady DM had binders and binders full of world building stuff that she would come up with between games, including detailed histories of all the PCs families and lineages and so on. The PCs were all nobility and there was lots of intrigues and court politics.

Another co-DMed game I was in ran a bit differently. One DM ran the overarching plot and did 90% of the DMing. The other DM, would role-play the BBEG's and about half of the monsters in combat. It was fun too.

 

[Unwise]

I have DMed before where I ran all of the plot and adjudications, but had a co-DM run all of the combat encounters. 4th edition lent itself well to this, I would just tell him I want 2500XP worth of bandits to attack the party, then he would spend that XP to make a nasty encounter. It made the game very deadly though. He was in it to win it, as far as the combat encounters went. I told him who/what he was playing and what their motivations were and he did the rest.

Be warned though, there is a big difference between a group of bandits run as normal DM cannon-fodder and a bandit group run by somebody basically using them like a PC. They might have the same stats, but one will be a heck of a lot nastier than the other. In every combat, the 'encounter-DMs' role was for the enemies to succeed in their motivations, not just to advance the story or provide a fun challenge. It made for a very different lethality and challenge to the game.

It also led to some interesting ambushes and reoccuring villians, as when the encounter-DM 'loses', the survivors of the encounter often plotted their revenge, or worked out how to mitigate their losses.