Rotating DMs

Bullgrit

Adventurer
My game group is about to start a round-robin-DM-style D&D game, with the DM duties rotating after each adventure.

We're going to use the E6 concept, starting all our characters at 6th level, so each person can plan/make his adventure in advance without worrying about what level the PCs will be when it's his turn to DM.

Have you any experience with rotating DMs, shared world, or such situations with a RPG game? Have an advice/warnings?

Bullgrit
Total Bullgrit
 

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yes, I'm currently the DM of a group that uses the rotating DM system.
What's most important is that you all have a clear understanding of the setting. If possible, use a generic or standard setting as a base to avoid misunderstandings.

With a single DM, the DM may introduce house-rules with or without player agreement.
With multiple DM's, all DM's have to agree on the house rules, since all of them will be required to enforce them at some time.

Realise that a campaign will be difficult, since most of the time part of the campaign will be discovering certain information and acting on that, and with rotating DM's that information will be shared among the DM's, making it difficult not to use that information later on as a player. The best option here is to use some kind of storyline, interrupted with the stories of the other DMs, or simply unrelated adventures.

I don't have experience with E6 (although I'm familiar with the concept), but I assume that even with E6 the characters will become more powerfull over time. Also, the composition of the character group may change because of character death and/or players starting other characters. That also would influence the kind of challenges you can throw at the party without hesitation.... (difficult traps become major obstacles when there is no one in the group to find and/or disable them....)

Herzog
 

I'm alternating duties with one other DM in one of the groups I play with. We've been playing Paizo APs for a long time now -- sticking with a prepared AP like that has helped us manage the exchange of DMing duties, but we're chafing under the need to keep things pretty much as written so the next DM can pick up where the other left off.

We're finishing Rise of the Runelords a week from sunday -- and our plan for the 4e future is to take turns DMing 5-level minicampaigns. We'll each spend a bit longer in the DMing chair (about twice as long) but we hope that will give us enough time to develop interesting story arcs that can be completed before the campaign is passed off to the other DM, whose story and even campaign world don't need to match up at all with the other DM's, although we do plan to keep to a schedule of advancement so the players can keep the same characters from one campaign to the next if they wish.

We've really mostly enjoyed the experience of sharing the DMing duties in this way -- we both like to play and DM both, and this helps us do that. One of the possible problems is that there's vague pressure for us to play characters that serve roughly the same role in the party, and we have very different tastes (he likes clerics, I like rogues). In our Age of Worms campaign, I ended up playing a cleric when he was DMing because there wasn't another healer type in the party, and while I had a good time, I would have much prefered feeling like I didn't need to play the same class as my co-dm to maintain a sort of party balance.

In Runelords we've been able to play different classes a bit better, mostly because the other players have made choices that cover the bases pretty well. But the differences between characters makes a pretty big difference for the party. (For example, my Crusader made an excellent flanking partner for the rogue; the dragon shaman that the other DM plays when it's his turn doesn't, and there isn't another party member that steps into that role very easily, so when I'm not there the rogue's efficacy is much more limited).

-rg
 

Loved it. Of course, the system helped, but let's talk technique.

I shared GM duties with a Matrix prequel game a while back. It was the best time I'd had GMing pretty much ever. It worked because:

1. We established clear spheres of influence. I GMed the Matrix stuff. My friend GMed the Zion stuff. This prevented power-tripping during and between games.
2. We took advantage of having 2 GMs. We could split the group up. We could have 2 NPCs talk to each other without confusing the players.
3. We communicated. A lot. We shared ideas. We talked about what we wanted for the game. We discussed ways we could expand on the movie.
4. We prepared together. We plotted against our players. We brought props. We watched the movies (or parts of them) several times.
5. We used a familiar world. Without needing to worry about the setting, we spent more time on character and plot.
 

I've experienced this concept often but not in a very long time. Back in the day, the group I gamed with had similar interests and influences and having mutliple GMs for a single campaign worked great and kept a concise flavor and atmosphere throughout. Nowadays this seems much more difficult. Say you're running a comic book game and you get one person thinking classic silver age superheroes, one guy thinking independant/Vertigo type stories, a gal thinking Manga and the last GM goes Wildstorm/Image gritty.

Our best use of this technique was our Star Trek campaign. Since ST can have an episodic nature, one main GM 'directs' the overall campaign story arcs and subplots while other GMs run individual adventures and subplots that effects one character at a time. So if one GM, say Joe, has an idea for a cool expansion of Chris's captain character, he can run it and then go back to planning his Vulcan doctor. Then Chris does a story revolving around robots (he just loves robots) and it goes back to the main GM to tell a story about the Vulcan doctor that relates to the crew's overall mission of exploring a nebula near the Romulan border.

At first I wasn't sure if we were talking about this idea or running a different campaign or one shot each week with different GMs taking a turn each week. See my thread, One Hit Wonders for more ideas on this subject.

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I participated in something like this at the local game shop; it was an exercise for training new DM's. We had an overall campaign thread; we were in pursuit of a wandering halfling who possessed a teleportal device created by the god of travel. So each time we changed DM's, we were teleported by the Mage's Guild to a new place where they had heard rumors that the halfling was present.

Each DM was thus free to pick a module or write an adventure that could be in a different part of the world, or even in a different world. We went, did the adventure, and then came back. I, as the meta-dm, always ran the scenes that took place in the "home world" city.

It worked pretty well. We also had a revolving group of players, so team makeup varied from session to session. We tried to limit each DM's scenario to 2-3 sessions (of about 3.5-4 hrs), but some ran longer, and my tie-together sessions were rarely more than 1 or 2 sessions long. I'd do it again, if we could find 5-6 people who all wanted to both DM and play.
 

Unfortunately I've rarely had good experiences when playing in a 'shared world'. Not everyone is cut out to be a DM and sharing the world can have repercussions beyond the inferior DMs game.

My group used to run a shared world all the time and it did, kind of, work when it was just me and one other guy (in non-D&D settings). We had the same understanding of the settings, but some issues did crop up.

Once we switched to D&D, more people wanted a chance to DM. Since we had always done it, we allowed it. Unfortunately the 'guest DM' too often threw in very unbalanced magic items or gold hauls, even if we had discussed it with them. Not to mention often sending the group against challenges far above their level (to justify the Monty Haul rewards apparently). After having a player wreck 'my' campaign (I had taken over the campaign from another DM and was just getting it on track), I restarted the group and dropped in the 'no guest DM' rule. The other DM followed suit and we have never looked back. When the other DMs were given a chance to run their own campaigns, it became apparent that they weren't trying to throw a monkey wrench in someone elses campaign - they just weren't good DMs...

In the Wonderland No More (Savage Worlds) playtest I'm in we had to switch GMs in the middle due to a player moving. The first GM to step up to the plate only lasted for a couple of months before becoming frustrated with the job and then another player stepped in as GM. Apparently the first one to step up had gotten the group off track a bit (he should have been following the plot point scenario) so she has righted the ship, but is still having issues with some of the items he gave the group.

So, from multiple personal experiences, I would be wary of multiple DMs in a setting. While this can be mitigated somewhat with a set adventure path, but there's a reason the phrase "Too many cooks spoils the stew" got coined...
 

Dragon Snack said:
Unfortunately I've rarely had good experiences when playing in a 'shared world'. Not everyone is cut out to be a DM and sharing the world can have repercussions beyond the inferior DMs game.
Unfortunately, there is some truth in this. We used the shared world approach for our (shortlived) Ars Magica campaign which is a good candidate for this kind of thing with its troupe-based style.

Deciding on the setting and theme and creating and fleshing out our covenant worked very well. We were five players and each of us created one archmage, one companion and four grogs in addition to our mage characters.
We also assigned a certain aspect and source of adventures to each player, e.g. I was responsible for anything related to encounters with the Fey, someone else for our diabolical nemesis covenant, etc.

But after a couple of adventures everything broke apart because every DM tried to pull the campaign in a different direction. The changes that resulted from some of the adventures were simply too far-reaching, basically obsoleting the setting and the initial ideas before we were able to fully enjoy our joint creation.

Still makes me sad when I think back - there were so many good ideas, so much potential! *sigh* :(
 

I think Round Robin is interesting, but of course there's the concern that:

1) The DMPG (the character that DM was playing last time) is around to get the good stuff, or things just Happen to him that benefits that DM next time he plays. Or the guy might just put his character in THe Spotlight.

2) Unless the adventures are a series of unrelated events, it would make building a campaign of information that tracks very difficult.
 

The shop game I described upthread had all the problems others have mentioned; monte-haul treasure, over-reaching encounters, and DM-PCitis. Since most of the DMs were brand-new or at least still learning the ropes of DMing, it was to be expected.

Campaign continuity was a loose thing, enforced mostly by me in default. I had to be heavy handed a few times, but always tried to use it as a teaching experience - such as when the archmage of the guild seized the "rifle-wands" we had "won" in one scenario. Out of game, I told the overeager DM that they were just too powerful, but in story I just had the archmage "reassign" them to "the demon-hunting team".

I DO NOT recommend round-robin play for serious campaigns where the actual play is the most important thing. In a learning game, or a casual pick-up game where the main purpose is fun, it works well - with a little attention paid by the "most responsible" members of the group.
 

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