Okay, leaving aside today's earlier polemics, I have been thinking about sharing responsibility for GMing a lot lately.

I live in a small town where there are few gamers and most don't really want to try anyone else's campaigns for very long. So, after a year or so of deadlock over what to play and who would run it, I finally suggested we just trade off. The metaplot was extraordinarily simple: Interdimesional mercenaries. That left us all free to do what we wished in each individual game, and if the world worked differently one day (house rules for Chris are different from mine, different from Mike's, etc.), then so be it. The only thing we were careful about were rules for generating characters and leveling them up, replacing dead ones, etc. Things that affected character power and progression we had worked out in advance. How the worlds worked, and why anyone was there, that was another question altogether. It worked pretty well till I had to change my work times and quit the campaign. The rest quit after I did, which was a disappointment, but still it was the first campaign any of us got going in awhile.

Anyway, I am thinking about designing an RPG adaptation for a Skirmish Game I've been tinkering with for over a year now, and I thought this might be a good time to think about the concept of shared GMing. I'm not sure I'll go that route, but it's worth exploring. Actually designing the game with the notion of Shared GMing strikes me as an interesting prospect, and this game has two advantages in that regard:

1) Being based on a Skirmish Game, the mechanics minimize judgement calls. This minimizes the need for GM power, and makes it easier to share that reponsibility between those present.

2) The setting is essentially a sort of Twilight Zone. It's an odd place that lost people find their way into, and everything in this place is a little conky-wooble. Point being: if the laws of this universe vary a bit, it won't be too big a deal. If everyone in a given setting suddenly acts differently, well maybe the moon is spinning their soul to the left today or perhaps Jimmi wished them all into the field and replaced them with different folks or something. Anyway, shared or swapped GMing won't raise the same consistency issues it could in say a D&D 3.5 campaign. Inconsistencies between GMs can be role played as fodder for the game, and GMs could do their own thing without worrying too much about keeping the world consistent. But that's swapped GMing, not really shared responsibility.

So, what are other people's thoughts on such things. Are there game systems that are designed to share GM responsibility, and has anyone played them? Has anyone else shared out the responsibility for running a campaign? If so, then what sort of arrangements did you make? How did it work out and what were the problem points?

Just fishing for ideas.

Dan

Hm... Maybe I should have put this in the Game Design Forum. Oops!

Ars Magica routinely does this, but I haven't with that.

I have done it in a shared Gurps campaign, three fantasy kingdoms with one GM running each kingdom so we could all play sometimes.

We had two key issues:

1.  It became frankly hard to explain in game how and why the characters kept moving kingdom, given travel times and all.  

2.  Setting consistency.  Stuff crept in, one kingdom had lots of magic, one hardly any, orcs came into the game and so are part of the world, that wasn't terrible but it did create some tensions.

I think using a skirmish game for this is a great idea and would help hugely.

Interesting that you bring up Ars Magica, because communal GMing has been downplayed more and more in recent versions - in 5th edition it's barely mentioned at all except as an interesting optional play style towards the back of the rule book. Anyone know why that is?

Quote from: WarthurInteresting that you bring up Ars Magica, because communal GMing has been downplayed more and more in recent versions - in 5th edition it's barely mentioned at all except as an interesting optional play style towards the back of the rule book. Anyone know why that is?

I hadn't noticed that, interesting, the system lends itself  well to it.

And actually I have done it in AM, I'd forgotten.  It worked fine, the other GM ran a quite different kind of adventure, but he was scrupulous to avoid any conflict between his facts and mine.  I thought it worked well, no problems to report there in fact.

Yeah, I think communal GMing actually works best if each GM is running a distinctly different type of adventure - it makes it easier to avoid stepping on each others' toes.

Quote from: WarthurYeah, I think communal GMing actually works best if each GM is running a distinctly different type of adventure - it makes it easier to avoid stepping on each others' toes.

My stuff was all about issues with the local community and the local power structure, his was about dealing with a powerful local faerie.

So I think you're right.

One thing you might want to try is to plan to distribute the various elements of planning to different players.

For example, everyone might be responsible for bringing a generic battle map plan (or even just a location idea), a statted-out combat encounter, a story idea and a NPC with a short paragraph or so of backstory every session, or every other session, or whatever you find works best without overloading your players.

At the end of every session (or however often the people bring them), the DM takes these from the other players, looks them over, and uses what he wants in upcoming games (alongside his own ideas). It doesn't have to be next session (it works better if it isn't, actually). The three or four (or however many) elements should be designed to work separately, so that you can mix Player A's map with Player B's Archwizard NPC or C's goblin skirmishers with D's idea of hunting after the lost gold of Fingol.

Because nobody but the DM knows exactly which elements are going to be which in any situation (and because the DM isn't obligated to use any particular element, or use it by any particular time), you can still surprise the players and avoid telegraphing what's happening.

With this set-up, you also get a side perk, which is the players can tell you what they're interested in doing in pretty direct ways. If all the story ideas involve shooting, and it seems like the combat encounters are the ones everybody spends the most time talking about, you know they want to fight things. If they write whole novels about the NPCs instead of a short paragraph, you know they want rollicking character exploration, etc.

I got this idea from a campaign I started playing in university five years ago, which ended its first arc with one of the PCs becoming the Big Bad. It just so happened that this PC was the guy who was really good at doing battlemaps and tactically planning encounters in our group. So our DM (his room-mate) got together with him and planned out a whole bunch of encounters and a whole bunch of battlemaps for the dungeon where the final confrontation would happen. But, as a surprise, the DM switched around where the encounters happened and added new features to them without telling the PC.  It worked out really well. We've done things like that off and on since then.

Thanks for the info and suggestions guys. I'm gonna let it all stew a bit, then see what I can come up with.