Quote Originally Posted by Easy e View Post
When you are a GM, you get a very different perspective on role-playing games than when you are a player only. Many table issues and misunderstandings could be resolved if everyone at the table had this shared perspective and experience.

This process makes sure everyone has that perspective in a structured way.
This is an interesting conversation in and of itself.

So, sure, if everyone has GM’d, everyone has GM’d. Kinda a tautology, that.

However, while Bruce Wayne responded to the gun-related death of his parents by becoming a vigilante crime fighter who dresses up as a bat and refuses to use guns, Bruce Payne might well have responded to the same stimulus by dressing up as a rat, and using guns to fight crime.

The point being, the same stimulus can teach different people different lessons.

So it’s not the case that “everyone running” will put everyone on the same page, to remedy such problems. It gives them experience with other points of view, and gives them the background to use to form a vocabulary about such things. But if two neutral players run games, and become dead set on their respective, opposed positions (like CaS vs CaW, or illusionism vs honest), then everyone having run games could actually cause problems rather than solve them.

More insidiously, the belief that “everyone has run a game, therefore we’re on the same page” could reduce the impetus to use preventative tools (like “session 0”), potentially resulting in more and worse problems than a naive group that understands their naivety.

On the flip side, if everyone is experienced, no one is naïve, and you cannot elicit the naive response from the group. If you care.

Anyway, if such “table issues and misunderstandings” are a concern, sure, getting everyone experience GMing in their own one-shots can be advantageous. But I would recommend tools like “session 0” and “developing a shared vocabulary” and “cultivating table culture” to be more valuable for this purpose.