Rotating DMs?

I'm now thinking about a DM in the centre of a doughnut shaped table, slowly rotating while running the game.

I am in a group now that started out with that concept in mind. I have DM'd once out of maybe 10-11 times. The other DM gets lots of ideas and wants to try them out, so I have acquiesced. In retrospect, I am not sure that was a good idea for me to just say "sure, go ahead, I'll just keep playing", but in any case, I think it is a good idea in concept but difficult in execution. Like the example I just gave, one of you is going to have to be the manager of who decides when so-and-so DM's. And the players may get a bit fatigued based on the style of the different DMs.

77IM said:

I'd like to play more often, so I'm going to pitch my group a campaign with "rotating DMs", where several of us take turns DMing sometimes and playing at other times.

Has anyone tried something like this? How did it go? Any pitfalls?

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JASPER HEAD STARTS SPINNING. OH MY GAWD. BLOOD ON THE WALLS!
I NOW TAKE TO DARK AND FORBIDDEN PASS BACK TO 3.5 BACK TO 3. BACK TO 2E. AND YOU ARRIVED AT YOUR DOOM. JASPER'S 1E GROUP.
7 players 6 DMs. No waiting for the game. No completing a game either. We would play almost every Friday and Saturday about 7PM to 11:30PM. Lots had a midnight curfew on the weekends. Do some research. Look at all the modules published before June of 1982. Now we played in them lots of time. Our set up was generally
Week 1 Able runs on Friday. Then Baker on Sat.
Week 2 Chappie runs on Friday. The Doggie on Sat.
Week 3 Echo runs on Friday. Then Jasper on Sat.
Sometimes we had two dms running the same module. Factor in Other than D&D activities and you see the time frame gets long.
JASPER'S 1E GROUP COMPLETED ONLY TWO MODULES With the same dm from OCT 80- MAY 82 .
You scream. You fall forward in time. Into 2E and 3E. Jasper now has a house. But his normal group was compose of military, college, parents with kids, and most belong to the same other hobby (SCA). Some of the dms were doing homebrew adventurers. And we generally went 3 to 4 weeks under the same DM. I finished Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury. We were also branching out to other systems.
You scream again and again. insert jasper mad laughter.
Falling forward again. To 3.5. Mostly the same members of the 3E. But we were older and other non D&D activites would take over. I think at the end we had 2 DMs doing 3.5 E. One was doing Gurps. I was doing traveler T20 system.
You scream. Jasper screams. We all scream for Ice Cream.
You fall forward to this line in this post.
If you were going to multiple DMs. Just do short under 20 hour to complete one shots. But you could take other people's advice.
Jasper giggles. Wiggles. and Ziggles.

Morrus said:

I'm now thinking about a DM in the centre of a doughnut shaped table, slowly rotating while running the game.

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That would be awesome! Have a giant lazy susan the DM can control via foot pedals so they could be face whatever direction they want!

I am currently playing with a group that meets weekly. Every-other-week we alternate campaigns. One week I run OotA as the DM. The next week I am a player in another DM's homebrew campaign. The group seems to be pleased with this routine.

Morrus said:

I'm now thinking about a DM in the centre of a doughnut shaped table, slowly rotating while running the game.

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Me too, which made me concerned. I occasionally suffer from vertigo and generally don't deal very will with dizziness.

More seriously, my game group has a rotating DM chair - sort of. It is mostly me, but another of our players has DM'd for a few sessions and likely will again in the near future. My wife has also DM'd a one-shot for this group, and would like to do something a little longer next time.

Planning and communication. The outgoing and incoming DM need to share a bit of info on the end point and start point so that the flow doesn't seem too disjointed. If it is a casual group and you just want to hand-wave it, then that works too.
We've had a couple casual discussions about Dungeon of the Mad Mage since each level of the dungeon is supposed to be fairly self contained. It gives us a city as a base of operations and lots of dungeon to play with. The honor system is pretty key for this to work - NO PEEKING at what you are not running. Since we are all mature adults, I don't anticipate this to be a problem.

For example:
DM A: "My thing has us on a boat heading north."
DM B: "Cool, I'll see if I can get you somewhere closer to the coast before you take over."

We also try to find convenient reasons why the DM's character is unavailable.

One variation of sharing GM responsibilities I read about recently, and is detailed here:

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

IMO it's going to depend a lot on the type of campaign. If you're pretty much just running published adventures tied together with a bit of backstory, then there's not a lot to coordinate - especially if you're doing something like "We're going to do some starter stuff, then run Dungeon of the Mad Mage until 20th level." You have to coordinate schedules and such, but the DMs aren't really doing anything but running sessions, you'll want to hand over some bits of 'what the enemies are up to' and make sure neither of you are doing treasure too differently, but that's not that hard. If you're doing a more involved story, though, then the DMs need to be on the same page, and doing surprises and plot twists gets really tricky. You'll need to plot out the overall story, and be prepared for each other to damage story lines the other had planned on. If it's a campaign with significant PVP, this is obviously going to cause big problems when the DMs PCs want to fight someone, but that's pretty unusual.

We sort of did this. I’ve been DMing what is intended to be a weekly game at the local library. Last year, if I had to be away that day, one of the players would fill in as my backup DM. I was running published adventures (first Tier 1 SKT AL modules, then TOA). My backup much prefers to write his own adventures, but he would write one shots that fit into the storyline we were doing; When we were hex crawling, he’d often have a one shot waiting in the wings that could be dropped in whenever. Our DM styles were quite different. A couple of times I was able to get there late and play at the table, and his style always reminds me of Mercer. I’m not nearly as good at role play as he is. He’s far more generous than I am with magic items. He even created a homebrew specifically for one of the characters that is pretty OP; but, that player is not often there, and even when he is, he forgets to use it, so it hasn’t been an issue. We stayed in pretty close communication, and it seemed to work well. Unforunately, he got a part-time job last spring, and this fall they gave him an afternoon/even shift on the night of our weekly game. For various IRL reasons, I can’t change the day of the game, so if I can’t be there, we can’t meet. (In all truth, everybody’s schedules got busier—all the players are in high school or middle school, and the older they get, the busier their schedules.

I think it worked for us because I was clearly in charge, he was a fill in, we both seemed o.k. with our different styles, and the game was designed as a drop-in.

We do it but it works better if you rotate characters too or the DM characters lag behind in XP. Any characters can die or leave and affect ongoing plot points so that comes with the territory but I find the timeline can get a bit screwy sometimes with characters in different time zones.

Also, the other DMS sometimes conspire against you :-o. My character has lost three magical items and only gained one extra, dammit!