Running multiple games in parallel?

[dbm]

This statement caught my eye, and I thought it was worth a thread of its own, rather than derailing the original one:

DM three games a week, more in the winter...plus some once a month games and pick up games.

I’ve never run more than a single campaign at one time. For those of you that do, how do you handle this? Multiple campaigns set in the same world? Possibly even coexisting and with the potential for the campaigns to influence each other? Or going with completely different genres to keep things straight in your head?

Tell me about it!

 

[John Dallman]

I've done this on several occasions over the last 45 years, and never had a problem with it. Specific variants have included:

• Multiple plot lines running simultaneously in the same setting, with different sets of characters participating.
• A long-running sub-campaign in my main AD&D1e setting that is deliberately vague about when it happens in the timeline. I want to have the ability to synchronise it with other plot lines when that's dramatically appropriate.
• Campaigns running in separate settings but using the same game system and related themes.
• Two campaigns run by different GMs in different settings that nonetheless influenced each other through different treatment of shared ideas and historical characters.

None of this seems extraordinary to me. It's ambitious, but I view GMing as a form of performance art, and in art you should be trying to expand your capabilities.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I don’t do oneshots or shorter stuff, only one long campaign at a time with one session per week, and I’m happy with that. That I don’t want more is partly because I can put as much or little effort in prep for my one weekly session as I like, depending on other commitments - it keeps GMing fun, not a stress factor. But mostly it’s because I have a table of great players that are excellent at co-creating fun - they fulfill my gaming needs and hopefully I do the same for them.

But I think it’s also a matter of the types of games one prefer. I want sandboxy organic gaming with lots of roleplaying and improv, and for me that takes more energy and creative juice to run (and give more fun in return) than fastfood style readymade by the book adventures and campaigns. With the latter I could technically see myself running several campaigns in parallel, except there would be no fun in it for me.

 

[Li Shenron]

Multiple campaigns set in the same world? Possibly even coexisting and with the potential for the campaigns to influence each other? Or going with completely different genres to keep things straight in your head?

Completely independent games for me.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I've run two weekly campaigns, but using different settings, systems, and players.

 

[Faxfire683]

At various times I’ve run three games at once over the past several years. It can be really time intensive, particularly if you do it over VTT like I did. It caused me to grow and change my expectations though—for instance, for a long time, I felt I had to have nice VTT maps prepped with lighting or interesting stuff for every scene, and using integrated monster functions. Now I do scenes for dungeons or other big set pieces (or just grab a DysonLogos map). Otherwise, I have a blank white map that I use the draw tool to sketch a rough scene on, just like I would a physical map.

My prep evolved too. As a new GM not using much structure, it took longer. This year I challenged myself to use the steps from Sly Flourish’s Lazy prep and hand write everything in two pages facing one another in a small prep notebook (you can find the steps in his Lazy GM Resource document). I leave out steps if I don’t need them, and sometimes one half hour of prep can carry over to multiple weeks (sometimes my players take their time dungeon crawling). I run pre written material straight from the book and either have premade modifications in my small prep book or change on the fly.

I have only run 5e long term campaigns, mostly because I’ve trained most of my groups in playing TTRPGs. In the future, I hope to run different systems. I usually do drastically different settings and themes, mostly so I don’t get bored prepping (once I was running WOTC’s Lost Mines of Phandelver, Shadow of the Dragon Queen, and Empire of the Ghouls from Kobold Press simultaneously). I keep all my campaigns in the same prep notebook, and tab each one with a different color sticky tab so I can flip between session notes quickly—I also use extra space on each page to document major events in each session for myself.

As an additional caveat, only one group is usually weekly, the others tend to be biweekly, or have even longer stretches between sessions due to player availability. I think you have to look at your own goals and availability. If running multiple games works for your personal life and is something you enjoy, you’ll get better and make it work. Otherwise, one game that you enjoy is way better than burning out or not playing at all. I’ve definitely had weeks I needed to cancel due to just being overloaded in my personal and professional life, I just try to be proactive in letting the players know so I don’t let my friends down.

 

[bloodtide]

This statement caught my eye, and I thought it was worth a thread of its own, rather than derailing the original one:

I’ve never run more than a single campaign at one time. For those of you that do, how do you handle this? Multiple campaigns set in the same world? Possibly even coexisting and with the potential for the campaigns to influence each other? Or going with completely different genres to keep things straight in your head?

Tell me about it!

I always use my own homebrew world and Multiverse, so that is not really an issue. Game 1 and 2 are set roughly at the same time, though they are thousands of miles apart on the map. Game 3 is set in the far past of games 1 and 2. (The winter games on summer break now 4 and 5 are spelljammer games set in the near future and wildspace of 1-2 and game 6 is in the recent past. This all is fluid as time flows for each game as events happen or don't happen.

In general, week to week, the games don't directly interact much. Though each game does hear the news and rumors of the other games often enough. And everything is connected indirectly, and sometimes more so.

And one player, Charlie, does play in both games 1 and 2, playing two characters that are brothers that don't get along often. As part of his 'campaign journals' he writes letters to and from his two characters.

Every so often a player will join another game for a session or two. Time and Space don't matter much here as magical travel is possible.

Every so often we will do event cross overs, often for holidays or other such breaks. Often on Black Friday or that time between x-mas and New Years when lots of people have free time.


Story Time

Way back when: I worked at the rec as part of the "keep the kids off the streets" group. I had plenty of boys playing RPGs. After a bit a girl, Kim, approached me and wanted me to run a game for her and her girlfriends. After a bit I gave in and so started The Princess Game: bored princess who secretly adventured to have fun and save each of their kingdoms. A bit later I was in line at IGA and the woman behind me noticed my LOTR t-shirt. She mentioned D&D and said her daughter plays that game. We chatted and she mentioned she might want to play the game as her daughter said it was so much fun. I said okay, and a week later Mary had rounded up a couple of other women that wanted to game.

So started MAD, Mom's Against Dragons. A group of mom's playing tough queen characters, very "anti-princess". We game at one of the women's place as she has a huge rec barn and we can drink there. Both games go on. As it turned out Mary was Kim's mom...small world. They don't really talk about it much to each other, for whatever reasons.

We get to the end of the school year, and the end of The Princess Game. They finally confront the lich lady who has been the cause of most of the problems from game 1. It is an epic battle....and they loose. Epic fail. They are deep in to lots of drama. Not even close to having any teamwork, stealing the spotlight from each other and worse. The lich laughs manically as it destroys each of their kingdoms making them watch.

Knowing Mary is nearby I send out a text describing the situation and ask if she wants to help. She does and heads over. A paper with the needed game information is smuggled out to her by the fifth column.

The Princess use their Last Resort: a gate ritual that drains their lives. They hope to get a solar to put things right.

I describe the gate opening and out of the Blue Clear Sky........

........................Mary comes in on cue

Kim whines "Mom, get out don't ruin my game!"

Mary just ignores her and has her character....a queen paladin no less attack. Kim is beyond amazed to watch her mom using all sorts of D&D worlds as she attacks the lich lady. Mary, was of course, trained by me everything she knew about D&D....so she knew what she was doing. Mary's character not only took out the lich ladies protections, but rejuvenated the Princesses just enough. They attacked and defeated the lich......barley.

Mary then left as quickly as she came saying "see you at home" to Kim.

A couple months latter, for a special Labor Day Game.....the Princesses got back together to save their kingdoms.....with surprise guest stars MAD. Together they did a bit of timey wimey time travel to save the people of the kingdoms ("our kingdoms are the people, not the land"). For a nice capstone on it all.

 

[MNblockhead]

Even if I had more time, I don't think I would want to run two campaigns in parallel. But I would like to run a lot more one-shots and mini campaigns in different systems.

 

[aco175]

I'm towards the end of one campaign and we started another loose campaign that we play generally around holidays. It started when my son would come home from college and only have a night of play. I set up the low level PCs as henchmen of the higher level Pcs when that group first took over a keep and wanted to make a home base. I had the low level PCs show up looking to be followers and only found a few servants needing help. So, we have 2 campaigns going on in the same time and place, but most things do not overlap. We player a dragon attack on the town with an undead army and I converted the new BBD adventure, Hold Back the Dead to have the low level PCs hold part of the wall from the undead as the high level PCs made larger decisions in town and battled the dragon.

In the past when I had a couple campaigns going on they never were part of the same timeline. It might be a weird alternate Earth thing where I used the same adventure or town, but in one campaign the town might be destroyed and the other nothing happens. It all bounces off the players and how they do and want to do.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Never tried it myself, but I've seen it happen. You just gotta be willing to put a lot of time into it.

For myself, I find I need to set aside about as much time for prep as the session will run; ie a four-hour session will take up to four hours to prep. Most of this time was getting the VTT ready (maps, assets, etc) so might be shorter for a live game if you only do sketch maps.

But it also depends on how much time you spend prepping plot points which I know varies quite a bit between dms.

But that means running two games a week for me would be about 16 hours per week of dedicated dnd time. I can do that, but am not sure I want to.

When I've seen it it's either been a pro dm or led to burnout.