rotating DMs same group of characters...would it work?

[Gundark]

I am normaly the DM for our group. Sometimes in the past others in the group have expressed the desire to have a turn running their own setting. I'm totally cool with that so we would work out a schedule where we would have alternating weeks. What would normally happen is that I would run setting X and the other DM on his week would run setting Y. All the players would be the same, however it would be 2 sets of characters in (usually) a totally different setting. Now at one time under this system we had 3 different games going on and time wise it was getting hard to remember what happened last time we played in campaign X, and we would get mixed up with what happened in campaign Y.

Anyhow what I proposed to the group is that we should have one setting and one group of characters and take turns DMing. So each DM as a month (we play 2x a month so that would be 2 sessions), his adventure must only be 2 sessions long, where in the next DM takes over with a different adventure that's not related to the past adventure (it could be related tho...which might be interesting, which would kind of be like in English class back in school where one person begins a story and then another takes that story further and and passes it on and so on.) DMs have to clear with the others anything that might mess with their future adventures (ie. destroying the town that the PCs have their base of operations in, having the group taken to another plane, etc.). The DMs involved have a similiar style (so no DM #1 being Santa Claus and the other DM's paying the price), so hopefully this doesn't cause troubles and the other DMs to have to clean up the mess . The others are interested in trying this out. We have yet to pick a setting or system.

There are some pros and cons to this system

Pros

- One setting, one group, hopefully no confusion.
-Characters advance faster as they are being played more
-Everyone who wants to can have their chance "behind the screen".

Cons

-It's harder to do an overarching storyline, and some are impossible (ie. invasons).
-Keeping an adventure to 2 sessions isn't really that realistic at times.
-Grand Dungeons are impossible


Well tell me what you think. Has anyone tired this system? Any major flaws that I'm not seeing.

 

[Peter Gibbons]

Many years ago, my brother and I shared DMing duty for our groups of friends because everyone liked to play more than they liked to DM. Once the other players got the hang of all the rules, we'd get an occasional volunteer to DM and my brother and I got to play our characters at the same time. (Those were always my favorites.) It was a very successful system of rotation.

The essential thing is that the DMs must use the same rules, and respect each other's decisions when it comes to rulings on "gray areas." (For the lawyers out there, I'm talking stare decisis.) And I wouldn't try to limit it to "two sessions" as you suggest; we only switched DMs between adventures, which would sometimes last a dozen sessions or so. Arbitrarily setting a limit like that will eventually makes things feel a little forced. (It also helped in my experience that my brother and I deliberately played characters who had believable reasons for frequently going off on their own while the rest of the party went adventuring.)

Good luck!

 

[lukelightning]

I think it would work fine as long as everyone sticks to the same rules and rule interpretation; in case of disgreement just do a vote or something.

My brother and I used to do this all the time, as it was mostly just me and him and sometimes one other friend playing.

Since we both had characters in the game the DMs character was pretty much an NPC. It may seem like there is a big danger of favoritism, but we eventually got over that and the danger was "anti-favoritism" where we were so careful not to appear like we were giving our own characters too much stuff.

In a group with enough players to have a decent party, it would probably be best for the DMs character to be on a break.

 

[kenobi65]

The first group I ever gamed with (and still game with, 23 years later) has always done this. It's a shared world, though one DM was always the "primary" DM. There's always been multiple DMs in that game, and most players have more than one PC, at a variety of levels (though no one ever plays more than one PC at a time).

It works pretty well for us, as it gives those of us who do most of the DMing a chance to play sometimes, and also gives those who want to DM occasionally the opportunity to do so.

We've never limited it to "you can only DM 2 sessions in a row", or whatever. It's always been more like, "I want to run this adventure, it'll probably take 4 sessions." "OK, sounds good."

The one thing we generally don't have that you ask about is overarching plotlines that span different DMs' adventures. One DM might run a long series of adventures under a unified plot line, but we rarely (if ever) have multiple DMs participate in that. And, that long series could well be interspersed with someone else DMing "standalone" adventures.

 

[Benito]

Our group has done this on several occassions, in the old days in FR and now in Eberron. I'm usually the "full time" GM but when time becomes a constraint for me, there are 3 of us that tag-team GM the ongoing campaign. The key is communication - let the next GM know where you're heading (in general terms if you don't want to blow any secrets) and any future ideas you're toying with. Often times, these discussions between GMs lead to better ideas all around than we each had on our own. In this way, the campaign starts to flow naturally from one GM to the next because you've all had a hand in defining and guiding it while still holding some cards back to surprise the other folks.

That said, I think we're pretty lucky with the group of folks we have around the table: YMMV. We're all older (no one in the group under 30) and we play things pretty casual - none of us are so married to future campaign directions that we go nuts if one GM burns a city to the ground or kills off a major NPC. I actually welcome those kinds of big campaign upsets: gets the creative juices flowing to build bigger, better adventures. Besides, I'm a firm believer that the players guide the direction of the campaign more than the GM - as long as we're running the game everyone wants to play in, it's a success.

- Benito

 

[Rasyr]

It can work with a few adjustments.....

As mentioned above, all those GMing should agree on the rules, and what interpretations of those rules will be used.

Secondly, there should be, laid out in advance, rules for the GMs to follow, such as no giving certain treasure if it is more powerful than xx (where xx is related to the level of the players).

Next, unless the different GMs are willing to share the setting, and NPCs, etc.; you might want to set up, as part of the first adventure, something that allows them to bounce from place to place, preferably without any control (kinda like Sam Beckett in the tv show Quantum Leap, but without the time travel). Perhaps the gods of the characters decide to join together and magically enchant a group of PCs so that they will always appear near someplace where their talents can be of use - they are never told what use, or anything of that sort....). Perhaps they uncover an ancient chinese curse ("may you live in interesting times") which places an aura around them and bounces them to "interesting" places (and anybody who joins the party for a short length of time is thereafter infected as well).

Another point mentioned is the DM-PC. Using the aura idea, perhaps one or more characters/NPCs fail to pop in for adventures (the others held in a mysitcal stasis in some far off plane...)

You can also have each player make two PCs, and then for each adventure, they get to select one who shows up (they would have to deal with both for the setup adventure). This way, the non-appearance of the DM's PC(s) would be less of an impact overall. (and perhaps the DM can use one of the extra PCs as an NPC occassionally, though I would suggest rules for doing this (like the player having veto power over any actions the GM wants the (N)PC to perform - and it only gets 1/2 XP for the adventure).

The biggest problems you will encounter is stepping on each other's toes, especially with NPCs, meta-plots, continuity and power levels. However, the examples I gave above should give you inspiration on how to handle some of these issues.

 

[DaveStebbins]

Both my groups rotate DMs. We don't have a set schedule, though. The person DMing takes a guess at how many sessions the current adventure will last and we try to have an idea of who will DM next and what level the PCs will be. The last adventure took about eight or ten sessions to complete and the current one will probably be about as long. With four DMs, we all get to spend most of the time playing, which is pretty cool.

As others have said, common sets of rules, including how to "give" experience to the DM's character so they don't fall behind while he DMs. Certain DMs are the primary owners of specific villians or NPCs, though they can make cameo appearances in the adventures run by the other DMs, usually in such as way that they would have plot immunity, though it usually is just a "catching a glimpse at a distance" type of thing.

In the end, we're pretty easy going about the whole thing, so it works out really well for us.

-Dave

 

[The_Magician]

That is actually how I started my RPG experience. I had a group of friends, none of us had any experience with RPG and since we all wanted to play, we created out characters and we rotated DMs. Each one of us would DM an adventure and treat his character as NPC. Worked great.

 

[FireLance]

My group has been doing this more or less since 2e. Each DM would basically have his own storyline, so we have the same group of adventurers dealing with multiple (sometimes related) plot threads.

In 3e, the common levelling system and wealth guidelines have made it easier to have multiple DMs. Each DM runs an adventure to take the characters up one level, and at the next session, the players pick whatever equipment they want for their newly-levelled characters, up to the standard wealth levels for PCs of their new level. This way, we don't have to worry about being too generous or too stingy with treasure.

 

[Orryn Emrys]

My group ran a campaign in this manner just last year. We developed an episodic dimension-hopping D20 MODERN game in which we primarily rotated three GMs, with the occasional session with a guest GM from among the players. The rules were pretty simple. As our group's primary referee, I kind of managed the primary campaign themes and the three of us constantly discussed various aspects of the overall story's development.

We called the campaign RED SHIFT, which was a reference to the bizarre ruddy field which appeared as part of our dimension-hopping artifact's activation. The session were each treated as individual "episodes" of the game... we even went so far as to treat the game like a television show on our website, complete with episode reviews and previews, interviews with the "actors", and discussions with guest directors and the primary production team. We even divided the game into seasons, taking a couple months off after the first such period, complete with cliffhanger, to plan the second season. It had something of a Sliders feel, as the characters were transported (usually unwilling and with little warning... the artifact would start beeping at a growing pace to indicate the impending transport of its nearby travellers) at the end of each "episode" to yet another alternate Earth.

The three of us cleverly introduced and intertwined our plot devices. We each played a character who simply didn't arrive with the others during some transports... this mechanic even allowed us to run games normally if a player was unable to attend... they simply wouldn't appear. Occasionally, one of us would run a two-parter to provide a more elaborate story. Guest "directors" would, of course, be required to remain clear of the primary plot developments, leaving the "conspiracy" episodes to the primary production team. We saw many interesting settings in our quest to understand the artifact and force it to return us to our home... which actually happened at the end of the first season. The second season was all about travelling the myriad dimensions in search of ways to defend ourselves more effectively against some of the dimension-hopping aliens we encountered in season one... kind of an SG-1 feel.

It was clearly one of the coolest and most challenging games I've ever engineered. We stopped after season two, but the season closer was spectacular. We might one day get around to season three.