Exp with Assistent DM's

[Delak]

Does anyone have any experence with assistent DM's or now of any articles on them. I am trying to decied if i should have one or not.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Well, too many cooks spoil the soup, I say but it depends on your situation. Do you have a lot of players and need help with the tasks of the game or is it more of a matter of you trying to find someone who will allow you to take a break and play from time to time?

 

[Li Shenron]

Does anyone have any experence with assistent DM's or now of any articles on them. I am trying to decied if i should have one or not.

Well, quite a very short term experience as a matter of fact. I was handling the DM's job over to a player and for a single adventure (3 evenings IIRC) we both DMed the game.

The player handled story design, run the NPC actions and roleplay, told the story and descriptions to the audience, and basically made all the decisions about the reactions of the rest of the world to the PCs and their actions.

I was behind the scenes checking rules, helping run the combat correctly, adjudicating spells, writing up the stats for monsters and NPCs, in other words I was the referee while the other was the director

It went quite well, I think the key point was to keep separate responsibilities, otherwise we would have argued all the time.

 

[Piratecat]

- I like having someone else play important NPCs and complex monsters.

- I find ADMs work best on games that require splitting up the PCs. Mike Mearls and I once co-DMed a game of Call of Cthulhu, and it went superbly.

- Make sure one person is in charge, and NEVER argue in front of players; if you need to discuss something, leave the table for a minute.

 

[alsih2o]

I, too, enjoy having a guest star run npc's or bad guys.

We also have Beale Knight in my group, he knows the rules way better than I do and is almost constantly checking someones facts or decisions to not interrupt gameflow. I call him my assistant.

 

[diaglo]

i used to use a Caller. but that was mainly when i was running OD&D for 14 players.

 

[WayneLigon]

Does anyone have any experence with assistent DM's or now of any articles on them. I am trying to decied if i should have one or not.

I've never used a true assistant, though I have rotated DMing in the same world with others. I've seen it work to great effect, though; a husband-wife team I know of likes to split some of the duties. She likes to do NPC's and personality-related things, while he handles the hard rules crunch of generating characters and monsters and combat. She can do those things as well, but hasn't had time to learn the 3.5 system as well as she'd like. It seems to work really well for them. You might want to consider what, exactly, you need assistance with and pick accordingly.

 

[Kender42]

One thing our regular DM just started trying out was having someone be the "Initiative Keeper" ... What this person (me) did was keep track of the initiative order and call it out to keep the game flowing, while the DM handled the rest of the combat. It actually worked surprisingly well and sped up combat a little too.

 

[Benben]

Does anyone have any experence with assistent DM's or now of any articles on them. I am trying to decied if i should have one or not.

I had a (mostly) weekly game that lasted over 3 years in which I was a co-DM I started out as more of a Logic DM because I would do the number crunching, book referencing, and on the fly npc/monster creation. This changed later on and our duties became more balanced.

It was a blast. We were able to even out our weaknesses, and weave very complicated plots. It's great to be able to go over all of the background events that PCs rarely if ever know about, and figure out what else is happening.

 

[Umbran]

Hm. I've worked on Paranoia games that had 3 GMs and 14 players....

The major reason to have multiple GMs is to allow "parallel processing" - having the ability for GMs perform multiple actions at once. This comes at a cost of having to spend time communicating between GMs. So, there's a balance. If having multiple people working saves you mre time than the communication between GMs, assistants can be an asset.

In most games of less than... oh, 6 PCs or so, you probably don't generally win using an assistant, unless the group splits up. Otherwise, your assistant winds up best relegated to scutwork of setting up battlemats and running the occasional NPC...