Multiple GMs

[Arraxis]

I recently discovered Adeptus Evangelion, and it sounded cool, so I brought it up with my gaming group to see if anyone was interested in playing, since we didn't have a game running. We got to talking, and somehow we thought it'd be a good idea if everyone took a turn at GMing for the game, with each GM being responsible for a separate base in a different part of the world. Each player will also have an Operations Director at one of the bases they aren't GMing for - which is basically a support character who gives aid to the pilots.

Some of us - including myself - haven't GM'd before, and I can see that there could definitely be problems with every person being a GM at least some of the time. We've all agreed to do our best to avoid metagaming, but there could be issues with story consistency.

Does anyone have any experience with similar situations, or with having more than one GM, or simply have any advice, either about the situation or running a game? We haven't had the first session yet, so I've no idea if it will continue like this, someone will decide they want to run things, or if it will crash and burn. Still, I'm definitely willing to give this a shot and see how things go. After all, it's Evangelion - chaos and insanity are part of the setting.

[Beelzebub1111]

I've resolved to never ever ever ever ever do this ever again. At least not in the same campaign world. If another player wants to GM, he's gotta do it in a separate campaign world or at least an alternate universe. Then again, I like to plan what's happening in the world at any given time and sharing notes would be spoilers.

[joe]

I've done this (a long time ago), and it worked out well. We separated the players by corporations in a modern game, with different corporations acting against each other. There was a sort of collaborative story going on, so there wasn't a whole lot of toe-stepping. It's also to note the campaign wasn't super-serious either though.

One thing that happened though is the people less confident about taking a gamemaster role dropped out in doing so, so it was more like 3 gamemasters in a roughly 8 player party, with each gamemaster stepping in when a character affiliated with their corporation appeared.

[EccentricCircle]

Rotating DM games can work very well, especially for a more episodic storyline where there is an over arching plot, but theres doesn't need to be a strong link between each bit of the plot. There should always be one DM (we call them the Executive Producer) who is in charge of the whole thing and coordinates the other DMs in the group. Then each player fuctions as a writer of a TV series would, with control over what happens in their episode and the ability to expand the world and introduce new ideas for the other writers to pick up and run with, or which they can revisit later on. Then a chief writer and executive producer DM writes the start of the campaign, and plots a series of major storylines to run throughout. they can give suggestions to the other DM's and make sure that everything gets tied together. That way you don't just have everyone pulling in a different direction until the whole thing falls apart.

I'd also suggest each DM having a few sessions to run their plot, rather than swapping each week, which doesn't give anyone the time they need to do their ideas justice. I'd also set up the DMing rota early on with the order of DM's for the first cycle worked out. After that people can volunteer games as and when they want to as the game goes on. But its good to give everyone their chance early on so that it doesn't quickly deteriorate into one or two people having ideas ready while the people with less experience or time can't get anything off the ground because someone else is always running the next game. once everyone has had a go at DMing this becomes less crucial, as most first time DMs will either be inspired to greatness or will decide they don't want to DM again.

[valadil]

We did a rotating GM game where we all took turns GMing. It was awesome. Best campaign with that particular group.

Here are the rules we used to make it work:

Everyone GMs for 2-4 session adventures. After each adventure everyone levels.

Characters were built in advance. Nothing was set in stone, but we showed everyone else what we predicted to do with our characters. We vetoed anything too powerful.

World starts out as generic fantasy land. We built it as we went.

Notes of NPCs and worldbuilding ended up on a public wiki. After your adventure, anything you left open was fair game by default. You could reserve an NPC and indicate you wanted to reuse him later. Only one of us bothered with that.

No secret backstories. This wasn't really a hard rule. It just made sense.

[Arraxis]

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the idea about not switching every week is something that we expect to work into. We're thinking everyone has one week at first, to get everyone used to the system and to start things off slowly, and from there we could work our way into story arcs, where one GM runs things for multiple sessions. It's all experimental, so we've no idea how it'll go, and we're prepared if some people don't want to or aren't cut out for GMing, or even decide they aren't interested in the game.

We're also not going with secret backstories for obvious reasons - a little unfortunate, as a couple of us rolled 10's on Eva creation, which ruled out the Black Box option.