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

[jmucchiello]

I started playing in a system roughly like this, and it's fine only if you don't ever want to have a long-term story arc. It spreads the work around, but its easy to see favoritism when the DM uses his own character as a major or heroic NPC, and it frequently robs the game of continuity or consistency.

That just sounds like bad DMing and if it wasn't his DMPC, it would be a favorite NPC.

Our trick in the big story arc was to pick one of the non-DMs to be the star (a cleric of Lathandar). Imagine his surprise last session when Lathandar died. We DMs knew it was coming but it still had impact.

 

[DaveStebbins]

It spreads the work around, but its easy to see favoritism when the DM uses his own character as a major or heroic NPC, and it frequently robs the game of continuity or consistency.

We don't have DM PCs, the DM's PC simply isn't along on that adventure and picks up equal experience "for free." It's not really for free, though, as the DM's PC usually doesn't get any treasure out of the deal. On the other hand, our group is VERY free with giving and sharing stuff to/with the PC that can best put it to good use, or the to the PC who doesn't have anything cool, or didn't get anything good lately. Not having a DMPC along prevents DMPC problems (such as me being harder on my DMPCs and others being easier on theirs).

Finally, rules variations, we don't have any. The 6 of us are there to have fun and so all rules changes are decided by all 6 players, not just the current DM. While in game the DM's ruling is final, all house rules are decided by the group, not DM fiat. And thus, all 3 DMs run the game using the same rules.

Joe hit on a good one here, which combines with needing similar tastes and styles among the DMs. Our group is playing core rules only, which helps tremendously. Any house rules are discussed as a group, or among the four DMs (which constitutes the half of the group that actually cares about the rules that much).

-Dave

 

[Agback]

I think it could work if all the DMs involved shared a common "vision" for the campaign world and ran similar styles of games.

I did it once in a Castle Falkenstein campaign. There were four of us who rotated the GMing on a strict schedule, with an explicit agreement that we had to wrap up our adventures in a single evening to leave the deck clear for the next guy. And the four of us had very different styles of GMing and ran very different games. That was okay--good in fact. Where we came a cropper was on different ideas of the world (Castle Falkenstein has a very sketchily-described and frankly inconsistent setting), and over mechanical issues (Castle Falkenstein's mechanics are so badly broken that nothing entrusted to them comes out right).