Any DMs here ever have an assistant DM?

+5 Keyboard! said:

Has anyone here ever had this luxury and if so how did it work out for you?

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I'm smart enough to know that I'm sometimes dumb when it comes to remembering the RAW, so when I get a player in my group who is a rules lawyer and can't refrain from piping up during tabletime, I try to appoint him or her the role of resident reference librarian. That person helps recall rules and/or looks up rules when I'm (or anyone else) is in need of clarification.

If you can't beat 'em, have 'em join you.

For years, a friend of mine and I have been co-Dming a pair of games on Yahoogroups. At first we stafrted one game, and talked aboutthe history, politics and rough campaign outline, and then we too turns Dming. He did the first city, I did the first dungeon crawl and we switched off after that also. After a year or so we started a second game in the same world and he mostly took over that game though we do guest^star in each others games. Thre are some NPCs I run exclusively in either game and some he runs.

Luckily we both have very compatible ideas of how the game should be run and rules adjudicated. So if I get into a rules argument with a player, he can jump in and mediate. Or the player can ask for a second opinion. Works out great. But that only works since we qare literally 99.5% in agreement with the rules and our interpretations.

I had Co-DMs only for games at several tables with split/several groups.

Co-DM's are great!

I love them. Let me explain how I've used them in my campaign.

My characters started out in Sunless Citadel and then jumped into RttToEE. By the time they got to the Air Temple, they really hadn't been challenged in a while. So, I invited person A to Co-DM an encounter with me. Basically, when the PC's assaulted the Air Temple, a third faction was going to T-Port in, try to steal something from the Air Temple, and mash the PC's a bit, if necessary. Sort of a three way dance.

To make the surprise better, we floated the story that he was thinking of joining our game and played the Wizard's Dwarven Cohort. At round 5 of combat, he starts interrupting me with "He cannot get to that square." Or, "While moving forward, that Orc is cut in half, from seemingly nothing." At round 7, His DM screen goes up, and he starts placing mini's on the board.

Everyone freaks. I play dumb for a bit, and have my bad guys attack his, and watch as mine get wasted, then I leave the room saying, "I'm going to roll up some new characters." and let him beat on the PC's for a bit. Eventually his group T-Ports out, I come back in and resume DMing.

Really Cool.

The second time I needed help for a huge battle, was at the end of the RttToEE, where I had all the cult members summon Imix. I had my DM from another game, and his wife play Falrinth and Smigmal, since he plays casters very differently from me, and she plays a mean Rogue. They basically got to play PC's against my PC's. Worked very well. Falrinth and Smigmal's players had rules of engagement, and knew that they weren't the stars, but were there to try to add some variety and were very gracious.

The third time I needed a Co-DM was my last session. The players had run roughshot through City of the Spider Queen, and were now back to the original meta plot for Bastion of Broken Souls (Set up 4 years ago, during Sunless Citadel with the plague of soulless births), I upconverted the Titan to a Colossal sized Kraken with the Epic Pseudonatural template added. After the building the beastie with 700+ HP and an 11 attacks of +75 and his peons I was worried that I would go soft on my players, and not utilize all of the creatures bells and whistles. My party Druid has over 300 hp. This Epic stuff is not in my wheel house. My Epic Mystic Theurge just picked up Automatic Quicken Spell, asking if it works on both spell lists....

So I recruited another Co-DM to run the Big Guy, with instructions to kill as many PC's as possible, take no prisoners. And ran about 5-6 Peons myself. Worked very well. I felt in control of an encounter for the first time in months.

As I build out some insane encounters to upconvert Bastion of Broken Souls last act about 6 to 7 levels. I'm going to need that Co-DM to run all this stuff. Our next encounter will have SO MANY Demons. When you are dealing with Orcs 1-18 you can wing it a little, but when the retainers of Demon Lords all have 15+ HD and centuries of combat experience, it helps to have a second set of dice on my side.

I always liked the Idea of the assistant DM running the monsters. That way the DM cant be accused of cheating. The DM just sits there and runs the game, and occassionally tells his assistant what to do, in secret of course.

I used an assistant when I ran Rolemaster. The person kept track of hit points, bleeding, penalties and power points.

Team GMing works really well for Call of Cthulhu, I can tell you that. I nearly always run CoC with at least a team of two. That way you can have players really immersed in their sanity bending role playing experience with an NPC and someone else who can run the rules without stepping out of character. The best CoC around, the Cthulhu Masters Tournament at GenCon often has a team of 4-10 to run a game. It's great.

Having someone to play important NPCs for any really big encounter is always good. PirateCat's game has had some really memorable guest players in that role and you always come away with a deeper NPC interaction.

Agreed. My first really successful co-DM was Mike Mearls, who co-ran a truly wonderful game of Cthulhu with me.

I really like having other people to play certain NPCs. That's where EN World has come in really handy. (contact) playing the dragon Brinedeath, Spyscribe playing an erinyes named Sophia, Ashy playing a fiendish shapeshifter, and many more; my game is definitely better for it.

+5 Keyboard! said:

I've always thought it would be cool to have an assistant DM. Someone that could help me with the time consuming parts of being a DM (rifling through notes or books, tracking initiative, keeping count on PC wand charges, etc.).

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A married couple I know do this; he's a big rules guy so he handles all the encounter creation and rules stuff, and she handles all the NPC interaction and a lot of the worldbuilding stuff. In other words, she does fluff, he does crunch. Seems to work out quite well for them.

DM's assistants? Yes. I call them players.

To be more specific, I usually call them 'shilsen'...