Round-Robin Campaign

[Fedifensor]

Are you saying the DM gives out gold to individual characters? IME distributing gold is an in character activity the neither requires or involves the DM unless NPCs are involved. The DM should have a DMPC who goes on the missions but that he doesn't over play. That character is just as much a part of the party as any other member and should receive shares in the same manner as any other party member.

Here's how it works. When it's a person's turn to DM, they have two choices:

Choice #1 is to simply have the DM's character in the back of the group - still a part of any encounter, but just using their standard tactics and not contributing in the solving of puzzles or other noncombat situations.

Choice #2 is to have the character in question off doing something else when the party goes on the adventure. This makes things much easier for the novice DM, as it's one less thing to keep track of during combats. However, while the character receives the same XP whether or not they were a part of the adventure, figuring out what gold to give the character is a difficult matter. If you don't give any gold, the character gets behind the rest of the party in equipment value. So, giving gold to the character (representing jobs done while the rest of the group was adventuring) is a good idea. My main problem is figuring out how much gold the character should get.

 

[Acid_crash]

I have only been in one campaign like this and it backfired big time...I think what happened is that the players as DM's didn't discuss how to handle rewards and just assumed that each person could handle it.

Some took things so far that friendships ended. Not good.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

My Story Hour actually details a very long running Star Wars game that was run as a round robin campaign.

There were four players, and three of us would rotate GMs every session. The interesting part was that there was one overall plot, but it wasn't planned out. Each week, the GM would move the events along as they saw fit, building on the last session. New NPCs and such would drop in, and the next GM would run with it. It became a bit of an unsaid rule that you don't kill another GMs NPC unless they say its alright. NPCs would die, but everytime it occurred(not counting random dice rolls, of course), it was in the hands of their creator.

We also kept the group of PCs together the entire time, too. Generally, no one would sit out(barring characters injuries, resting, etc). The GM would run their own character as a pseudeo NPC, and I think from that I've never understood the whole problem with 'pet' NPCs, as we never had that. In fact, we were arguably crueler to our of PCs than we were to the others.

The best part about all of it was that you never really knew where it was going to go. This was extremely refreshing and fun, because new things always just got pulled out of the hat. You can even tell from the Story Hour(based on our notes, which we kept very detailed ones) who was GMing at the time. Not as much which PC is focused on, but through the style of the game and the mood. It changed weekly, and not knowing where it would go next was just great. We also would get together and decide who got to 'kill' the current BBEG.

When a new BBEG was introduced, it was just up to whoever got to it next. There was a large amount of roleplaying involved, so we would have long periods of relative nothing between adventures. I think it does require a certain type of person to work correctly. We all loved our characters, and became extremely attached to them(heck, my own character is essentially me with a few Star Warsy touches to him), but had the ability to allow everyone the spotlight and focused on the story at hand, whatever it might be.

The game is still going, but now there are only two of us. I'm hoping to drag in a third, but I believe its going to be like this for a while now. Not that its any less enjoyable, of course.

 

[Haltherrion]

Are you saying the DM gives out gold to individual characters? IME distributing gold is an in character activity the neither requires or involves the DM unless NPCs are involved. The DM should have a DMPC who goes on the missions but that he doesn't over play. That character is just as much a part of the party as any other member and should receive shares in the same manner as any other party member.

As Fedifensor notes, one option is to have the DM PC in the party, taking risks and taking their loot share. This is what our group more typically does.

But if the DM's PC isn't with the party, it doesn't seem all that fair for the DM to fall behind in XP, gold and magic simply because he took the trouble of refereeing. It isn't always convenient to have the ref's PC in the party.

Most here seem fine with giving the DM's PC equal XP in these circumstances. It isn't much of a stretch to consider that in this off-line activity that earned the DM's PC that equivalent XP, he or she also earned the equivalent loot, magic and/or gold.

Even if the party has chosen to do an unequal loot distribution for some reason, there is still some average loot amount that the DM's PC could receive.

We've always played that the referee's PC got equal reward. Equal loot, equal XP, equal magic. Equal takes some interpretation to be sure and we've never had formal rules for the loot part but the refs seem not to have overstepped their bounds and the non-ref'ing players seem more than appreciative of the refs' efforts.

 

[was]

We tried that once. It was a horrible mess. We quickly found out that some of our group are just bad at it. One week we're in a northern icy wasteland, then suddenly, we're in an arid desert the next. Friggin' portals all over the place. Monty haul adventures and fighting dragons at 3rd level. We eventually settled on the best two and they switch off on a monthly basis.

 

[painandgreed]

I've done this before, but it typcially is common "hack and slash" dungeon crawls. Right now we're switching between two DMs for our adventures. I'm unsure if anybody else is going to DM.

One of the more intersting themes I've seen, is what we tried in college. One person drew up a world and everybody else took a part of it, ie one country. If the PCs were in your part of the world, you DMed. The idea was that everybody could Dm at least once and then the players could jump around and revisit the places (ie DMs) they enjoyed. We discussed such things as awards and agreed that if one DM could give it out, then another could either go with it or take it away. Alas, like many coked up ideas of college, it never came to fruitation. I did however run my section of the world, an island of elves, as a campaign and it was the best I ever ran with another set of players.

 

[Fenes]

We planned once a sort of "Stargate" campaign, which would allow everyone to make up (or borrow) a world and an adventure and DM for a session, then have the party return to home base. Didn't come to pass for scheduling troubles.

 

[DrNilesCrane]

I've organized, played, and DM'd several round robin campaigns during and after college that were generally very successful. Usually we (as a group) started by creating a general framework. For example, one successful 2nd edition campaign began with all of the characters being brought together to repay the debts (in the form of favors rather than coins) of a recent deceased noble in order to help is daughter gain his title and holdings. Each series of adventures involved the characters repaying a debt on behalf of the dead noble, so we could travel alot (based in the Forgotten Realms) and have a wide variety of adventures (i.e. "I'll consider Bob's debt to me repaid if your group can stop these giants from destroying our village!").

We also maintained a "master folder" (pre-web days here) where all the DMs would put their adventures in, but could exclude and designate some things as off limits from other DMs so that they could continue plot threads when they DM'd next. As players, if so and so was DMing, you might come to expect that the adventure could involve a certain adversary or situation, but that wasn't too big of a deal--small price to pay for the chance to play on occasion (I'm always DMing unless it's a round robin situation).

Each DM usually ran for 2 to 6-8 adventures rather than a one shot. We had 2 to 4 "core" DMs who ran a lot and most others dove in with smaller adventures between. DMs got full experience for their character (who generally wasn't directly involved in the adventure) but no loot although the group was generally a little more generous with those characters so they didn't fall behind.

Overall it worked really well, with few rare exceptions. I think a round-robin group needs a fairly good group of mature or like-minded players: if you have one that really doesn't fit, it can break down. Also, I think keeping a list of what rules are allowed, how to generate characters, what players are let in the group (can anyone just drop in?) etc. is critical to prevent any disputes later on ("DM X said I could have this +5 vorpal sword --what's the problem?!"). A good night of pre-campaign planning as a group with everyone getting a chance to share their input can really make this go much more smoothly in the long run, in my experience.

 

[Fedifensor]

Well, I have a basic webpage set up for the round-robin campaign. The framework is that all the characters met in the final days of the Last War, and agreed to meet again after the war was over. Later, the characters will get a patron (or patrons) that employ them on a regular basis for various tasks, providing a common hook to keep the party together.

For those interested, here's the URL:

http://www.peakpeak.com/~fedifensor/games/dnd3e/eberron.htm

 

[Fedifensor]

For those interested in Eberron writeups, the Sample Characters section of my website has a bunch of characters now. My goal is to have one of every race and class (not every race and class combo, but every PHB and Eberron race and base class will be represented). I only have two characters to go in order to meet that goal - the shifter ranger and the gnome rogue.

Here's the link:
http://www.peakpeak.com/~fedifensor/games/dnd3e/eberron/sample.htm