D&D General Anyone Co-DM'd a Session?

[Umbran]

Goal would be to let the players or GM to do more in one session than normal or explore a different style of play.

Okay, so, imho...
To do more in one session - two GMs can support this in a couple of ways.

You can split the party, for example, and run the two parts in parallel, rather than serial. However, if you haven't planned for it, you lose a lot of that gain as the GMs come back together and brief each other on what happened to each sub-group. Also, this runs into issues if the two groups expect to communicate while separated.

Large set-piece combats with many opponents - this is a place where multiple GMs can really shine, as they can divide up the opponents and speed up conflict resolution. This can take practice, but can become quite speedy if the GMs are bright about how they split up the work.

Complex social scenes - like combats, it can be a pain in the neck if there's seven different NPCs that the players want to talk to, but it all has to go through one GM. With multiple GMs, you can split up the NPCs.

The biggest thing is all of this is that the GMs must work together before the session to plan out how they're likely to break things up, and both must understand what all the NPCs are like, and so on. Preparation is key, as the GMs need to both agree on things so they don't tell each other, "No, wait, that can't happen..." or the like.

 

[Umbran]

For 2 DMs running Paranoia, I know you didn't, but I hope you guys made it as confusing as possible, and even stepped on each others toes. . I mean, how fun would that be for a player to ask a question, get two different answers with no clarification as to which was accurate. That would be pure Paranoia for me.

So... We were running Paranoia for a group of 14 players....

In one mission, the briefing officers (played by the GMs) got the order that The Computer somehow happened to have a rational thought, and realized that having Red-clearance citizens, who lacked clearances and much in the way of skills, do troubleshooting was leading to the high failure rate of Troubleshooting missions. So, from that point on, all mission briefings would be done by troubleshooters, and troubleshooting would be done by higher clearance citizens... like the briefing officers.

So we, as the briefing officers, took tall stacks of paperwork (like, reams of paper - this session had the highest printing budget for any of out games) and tossed them through the air over the players, scattering and disordering them everywhere. We then put on little ring-binders of name badges, and played the new "troubleshooters" coming in for their briefings.

The players had to figure out how to brief - the instructions were spread over several sheets in the flung masses - who to brief, and for what missions, while trying to give these orders out to higher-clearance citizens, and then receive them when they came back, and handle the results of their missions. All the while trying to meet the desires of their secret societies, some of which required special interactions with these higher-clearance citizens...

And, let me tell you, when citizen Herc-U-LES gets impatient... well, you don't want him getting impatient, and he was already cheesed off at having to clean out the algae vats in AUG Sector...

We eventually turned this into a 4-hour live action game.

 

[Xeviat]

My partner usually plays in my games, but she hasn't been playing in my Tuesday game. I had her guest star with me last Tuesday so we could play a pack of annoying mephits together (with the goal of trying to get the party to attack us; the party played nice).

I also ran a game, one of my more successful homebrews, where one of the players was secretly cowriting the game. He was playing and the rest of the party didn't know he was helping to write the plot and craft the NPCs. His character was going to become possessed by the big bad and we were going to switch DMing after the first chapter, but the game ended up ending after the first chapter.

 

[jasper]

Yes. I check the rules. The other one did the combat and rolled the damage. Occasionally if we had different combat units. I took one and he took the other.

 

[Shiroiken]

I've not fully Co-DMed (although I could have used one back in the day), but I have worked as an assistant DM at conventions and introductory games while also playing. I couldn't do anything related to the adventure (since I usually didn't know it), but I helped players with rules while the DM worked with other players decisions during the game.

 

[aco175]

Played in a convention with 4 DMs. It started with 4 tables and a few encounters where you could spend the party resources in encounters to gain coin and magic, or save your resources for later. When later came, all 4 DMs joined around a giant battlemap and all 20 players battles each other as teams using the extra magic the earned or having the boost from not spending spells and powers earlier.

It was cool, but a bit chaotic. The DMs did a fine job with one of them more leading the others. One needed to track initiative and try to speed that up. Another more ran monsters when they came a few rounds into the battle royale.

 

[pogre]

I have done it, but not for D&D. We had a Space 1889 game with three game masters back in the day. The lead guy gave the rest of us direction - so we were really more assistants.