Round-Robin DMing

[Varianor Abroad]

I participated in a round robin world for about 3 years. There were, depending on whether you count one-time DMs or not, 7-9 DMs that worked on it. There were 3 that did the bulk of the work though - they all lived next door to each other so that provided a certain synergy.

Overall, it worked really well for our extended group of gamers with 20+ years of experience apiece but no time due to lives, kids, jobs and more. We created a shared world with lots of blanks. The basic rule was 1. core books only. 2. No adding any rules from other books without the whole group agreeing to it. 3. No "subtracting anything - i.e. rules or creations of other DMs without permission.

In general people were great. We all sort of staked out "ideological turf" and developed certain areas. When there was crossover, people consulted each other and worked it all out. What was really cool was dropping and idea out there and seeing what people would do with it. This produced some fantastic adventures completely unexpected by the initial authors.

The only drawbacks were the occasional personality clash and some message board clashes over rules. I still regret the arguments - I participated in them - but it happened to coincide with "learning to play nice on the Internet" so we all managed to "grow up" out of that.

I think it's a great idea with the right group of people.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

I don't like two DMs running the same world/characters.

Never saw it work.

I've seen it work but the campaign was pretty craptastic. By necessity the adventures are episodic & vary wildly in quality. The creativity of some dms come into conflict with the norms established by previous dms, & you can end up with a disjointed 'campaign.'

It suited a style of play that required little immersion, beer & pretzels stuff. Which might not be so craptastic if that is what you like.

 

[Hawkshadow]

A while ago I co-GMed what I'd call a heroic horror game (sort of a League of Extraordinary Gentleman) set in a very near future Chicago (the League was actually based out of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park). I was the primary GM but whenever the other GM wanted to run something, his character would be sent on assignment somewhere else or be otherwise occupied, and I would bring in a character to play.

The campaign only lasted for a few months, (and ended because the other GM became too busy with RL and the game was at his house) but while it lasted it worked very well. We were also beginning to consider having a few sessions where one of the other players ran a few games, though we never got a chance to try that out.