Interesting Game Mechanic

[Memnoch3434]

My friend's and I have been throwing the idea around for a while. We started a game (originally intended to be a 1-shot) with a large inescapable (for now) dungeon where with each room the role of DM is passed to the left.

I started the game by giving a vague purpose to being in the tower/dungeon.

After that a few ground rules:
1. The character you are disappears when the characters enter your room.
2. You cannot carry any item that you gave to players.
3. You earn exp for the rooms you create (encounters etc, etc)
4. (so far unwritten, but kinda obvious) A group consensus can overwrite or undo any and all things done by a single DM (giving out 10k exp for example).

The game was designed also to be played without all persons present (rooms should be designed so that going back to them is somewhat unnecessary).

Has anyone tried anything like this before? Did it work well or fall apart? Any forsight we might have missed?

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I think you're onto something.

My friends and I designed but never got to play a "Psudo-zombie apocalypse" campaign, where a city that had been sealed for 80 years finally had the gates swing open. The adventurers go inside, and it's rather Racoon-cityish. Real foggy, only can travel in certain sections at a time.

We would alter DMing different sections of the city. One guy designed a corrupted temple, I had a sewer, suburban neighborhood and market square. Another guy was designing a city park.

We would just handwave the DMs absent character as poking around somewhere, or having had returned to the gate and stepped out of the city. your rule about earning xp for creating we covered with the assumption that while your character was away poking around someplace, they had some sort of minor adventure/encounter and earned some solo xp.

 

[GunbladeKnight]

Sounds a lot like what my friend did. Only, they were more time based instead of room based (so they could venture into the open world). If someone was uncomfortable with DMing, they could pass. It was encouraged to try it, though.

From what I heard, they had fun when they did it and were planning to do it more times.

 

[Greenfield]

You've just described a micro-sized version of our regular campaigns.

When we do it we pick a world map to use. We've used Harn maps, some from SJG, Middle Earth, it doesn't matter. Then everybody makes up a character, and the country they come from. General description is usually enough to begin with.

We agree on an over arching goal, the grand mcguffin if you like. In one it was to find all the pieces of the shattered World Crystal, the artifact made by the gods as the template for our world. We had to put it back together, or our wold would slowly die.

In another the goal was to find the lost secrets of magic. We'd banned a lot of spells (like all 9th levels, all the Raise Deads, and pretty much everything not in PHB), as well as most Prestige classes and all the feats for creating permanent magic items. These were the secrets, lost over time, that the gods needed us to recover.

Once that's all agreed upon, the game begins. Someone starts the ball rolling with an opening adventure. It runs in the land they created, and they are, of course, free to do anything they want to that land. When the adventure is over our mission will lead us to another clue, or fragment, secret or whatever the campaign goal is. Coincidentally, this will be in the land created by the player who becomes the next DM.

When someone takes over as DM, their character becomes an NPC. They usually run off to tend to personal business while the group is in their home neighborhood, and they come back with Exp that matches what they would have gotten, and similar treasure.

And, yes, the group has the power of veto if an adventure is just too sucky to believe. "So we all wake up and say, 'Wow, what an odd dream..'", and life goes on.

IT works well.

 

[Memnoch3434]

I'm glad that more players have tried this.

It was lots of fun I haven't looked forward to the next session like this in a while. So far the best part has been the obsidian rod I placed in the first room. I had no intentions for the rod at the start of the dungeon but the next DM did something with it and so on.

We would alter DMing different sections of the city. One guy designed a corrupted temple, I had a sewer, suburban neighborhood and market square. Another guy was designing a city park.

That sounds really cool. I wish I would have used that in my last zombie game! Honestly may end up stealing that idea.

Sounds a lot like what my friend did. Only, they were more time based instead of room based (so they could venture into the open world). If someone was uncomfortable with DMing, they could pass. It was encouraged to try it, though.

What kind of time intervals did they have for changing?

Once that's all agreed upon, the game begins. Someone starts the ball rolling with an opening adventure. It runs in the land they created, and they are, of course, free to do anything they want to that land. When the adventure is over our mission will lead us to another clue, or fragment, secret or whatever the campaign goal is. Coincidentally, this will be in the land created by the player who becomes the next DM.

If this game becomes permanent I like to think we might end up doing something like that. For this game we specifically made no over-arching story to begin with, but that may come to pass in the rest of the first dungeon. There was a short story to start the game off with, but nothing more than your run-of-the-mill experience.

 

[GunbladeKnight]

They used 15-minute increments. Here's the blog post where he talked about it after: Throw Out The Dice: The Rotational Experiment - The Results

The rest of the blog is a good read, especially for starting GMs.

 

[Greenfield]

We tried one without that long term goal and, in terms of story and campaign continuity, we found that it lacked something.

One bit of fun in several of these was the "strange bedfellows" aspect. We had characters from nations that had a history of warfare and/or rivalry, forced by circumstance to work together. It gave good grist for the mill, in terms of story and interplay.