Chaosmancer
Legend
I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea of DM-less D&D (which would in fact be DM-full D&D, as everyone would in effect be part-DM, part-player) and running into some snags:
Who designs the setting on both a macro (kingdoms, cities, etc.) and micro (dungeon layout) scale? Or, if the dungeon is being generated randomly (for which there's systems all over the place) without a larger setting behind it, who does the random rolling for such?
Assuming random rolling, whichever player wants to roll, maybe they even alternate.
Maybe they do something like The Quiet Year and collaboratively build the dungeon locations and kingdoms, then roll randomly for the contents from various tables.
Who runs the opposition? Even in a random dungeon you're sometimes going to random up some opponents, who plays those? (and if it's one of the players, isn't that person immediately in a conflict of interest in regards to running both sides of the combat?)
I've seen DMs allow players to run monsters all the time. If you are dealing with veteran players who don't want to cheat, there really isn't a problem with this. Maybe have multiple groups run by different people, so no one is on an "off-turn" for two long, since they could have two different turns.
Who keeps the secrets? In a randomly-generated dungeon the dice will occasionally come up "trap", which becomes rather pointless if everyone knows about it. Ditto secret doors, teleporters, and other such delights. And any sort of mystery-based plot or story goes out the window if everyone already knows the secret behind the mystery.
Depends on the players. Maybe they have a deck of cards with various traps, or a different table. Maybe they have no problem knowing something out of game but can play as though they do not know it in-game. Many players claim to be able to make that separation, this would be just one more example.
And while, generally, I'd say you could not run a mystery this way, you could run a mystery module written for playing this way. It wouldn't be easy, and it would be very easy to mess up, but theoretically possible I suppose.
If playing online e.g. on roll20, can DM privileges (such as to assign tokens, hide/reveal the map, etc.) be assigned to more than one participant in a game?
Yes they can