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pendell
2011-01-12, 12:12 PM
I've been thinking about this for awhile, and thought I'd ask.

It seems to me that the GM has a difficult role to play , because they must simultaneously act as 1) referee, ensuring fair play and a good time for all and 2) act as the brain behind the BBEG and every faction in the game besides the actual PCs.

Essentially, in football terms, the GM is both referee and coach of the opposing team. This can create a conflict of interest. Kenzerco used to sell little skulls that a GM could decorate their GM screens with, one for each PC death.

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the fairness and impartiality of their referee/moderator, does it?

So I'm wondering if anyone has ever successfully split these roles up; instead of having the DM act as both referee and adversary, give the adversary role to some other player in another room. Said adversary would have access only to the information that the BBEG would actually have, and would perform all die rolls and actions for the bad guys. While such a player would have a great deal of power, they still wouldn't have DM omniscience or the power to Rocks Fall Everybody Dies when they one-shot his super-monster.

This would free up the DM to be a truly impartial referee, free of the need to act on behalf of the non-PC opposition.

Given that I'm not the most creative person in the world, I'll wager that, sometime in the 40+ year history of RPGs, someone has already tried this at least once. Were you one of these people, and how did it work out?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

akma
2011-01-12, 12:16 PM
I was part of a group of players against another group of players battle.
There wasn`t much stratagy.
In hindsight, group versus GM created villain would be better.

rayne_dragon
2011-01-12, 12:22 PM
The closest I've ever done to what you've described is with Ars Magica where basically the players take turns GMing. I think it works pretty well since each person focuses on running their own little story arcs and because they're not a permanent GM there's a real sense of not having the right to invoke "rocks fall, everyone dies" for any reason.

bokodasu
2011-01-12, 12:38 PM
I playtested a game once where each player was two characters (sort of one NPC, one PC), except one player, who was all the bad guys; the GM was more the environment describer/referee. It was superfun, and now I'm wishing I remembered more about it.

In D&D, I'm not sure how you'd balance it - the PCs generally get more screen time than the bad guys, and who the "bad guys" are changes pretty frequently. That player couldn't do any of his scheming at games, and would be limited to social/combat encounters with the PCs. I could see it working in one-shots or final battles, maybe.

Zuljita
2011-01-12, 03:14 PM
in an online game (using maptool) that i ran i had a friend who helped with some ideas on world building and plot. When one of his favorite villans came up i had him log in and RP that villain while i did everything else. I would have had him do combat with this character if it came up. It took some burden off me, but it would have been *far* less practical in an in person game. the other issue I can see come up is that without running the adversarial team, in combat a GM is just waiting to make a call like a ref... not that much to do for him.