players taking turns to dungeon mastering, how does it work?

[Red Bear]

sometimes I hear people say they have a group with two DMs, when one is not DMing he is playing a character and sometimes they swap, but I don't understand, in this way don't you have a player who knows too much about the story/world?

[Knaight]

It's not a structure that works particularly well for games centered around mystery and the mysterious. For the rest knowing about the world doesn't necessarily mean that much to begin with, and as such it can work just fine.

[Koo Rehtorb]

It's fine for games that tend to have self-contained arcs. You go to the dungeon, you do the thing in the dungeon, and then you leave and never see that dungeon again.

[Mastikator]

The issue I've found is when one player either doesn't know enough about the world or has a different vision but is still expected to DM.

Whether it's a problem that a player knows too much depends entirely on the player.

[Firest Kathon]

I think it works best when running games in a published world. I.e. in one group I play in one we play in the Forgotten Realms. No mystery about that world, anyone can just go and buy the sourcebooks. The individual story arcs are however separate - one GM runs a story about Zhentarim influence in Waterdeep, another GM runs a story about a Netheril city and so on. So the knowledge of the world is shared, but the backgrounds of the individual story arcs are known only to the respective GM.

[Darth Ultron]

If your talking about all the DMs using the same world, setting and all the players keeping the same characters. Then, in general, this is like several parallel worlds.

So each DM is, sort of, running a game in an Alternate World that is a ''close copy'' of each other. So each DM(soon to be player) does not know anything about the other DMs world. So no one knows any 'secrets'.

In general, your not going to ''switch DMs'' at random or every week. Most of the time you will switch DM's between adventures. So for a couple weeks the game is ''the lizard men of black swamp'', then the next DM takes over for the ''werewolf of farmvile'' adventure.

[Mike Miller]

In my group, we have a main campaign with one DM. When he can't be DM, I run a second campaign. So we have alternating DMs with 2 campaigns.

[Quertus]

Usually, GMs run consecutive adventures. Thus, what the previous GM knows about the inner workings of the adventure he just finished running is largely irrelevant to the current adventure that the current GM is running - and is stuff that they may well have explained to the group at the conclusion of their adventure anyway.

That having been said, there are groups that will run through the same module repeatedly, bringing new characters through old terrain. Apparently, there's this thing in role-playing games called "role-playing", where you make choices for your character based on what your character knows, and what they would choose to do...

So, normally, such knowledge won't come up, and, even if it does, some groups don't have a problem with it.

[2D8HP]

My old gaming circle of the 1980's had multiple GM's, and sometimes we played war games with no GM's from time to time.

We just didn't use the same exact worlds or characters, though they could be close.

There was no formal rotation, it was all pretty ad hoc, and just based on who felt like doing what.

Long many months campaigns just weren't something we did because we'd switch out what we were playing too often.

We probably had at least ten times the number of first level D&D PC's than we did any other levels of D&D characters, and it would be similar with other games, we just didn't stick to anything long.

We were quick learners with short attention spans, so lots of different games/adventures/genres.

[CharonsHelper]

My buddy and I ran a campaign by co-DMing and trading off the same character (who had multiplicity personality disorder - my version of him was actually blind ). We were roommates at the time, so we chatted about the general direction of the campaign but avoided specifics of our sessions.

It worked out pretty well - though I ended up doing nearly 3/4 of the DMing since he missed a few sessions entirely due to his band's gigs.

[Glorthindel]

One thing that such a group has to be very careful of, is respecting each others work.

I was in a campaign with a rotating DM, and due to some DM's reversing or undoing the effects of other DM's work, or taking items or NPC's a different DM had created, and twisting them to other completely different uses and personalities, the campaign collapsed to infighting and petty one-upmanship.

[Jay R]

I had one game in which another DM took over an area I already knew a litle about.

I was designing an abandoned dwarven home under the mountain, and the other DM had a large desert with a ruined castle in the middle of it. I told him that the castle had been blown up by a huge alchemical explosion (which also leveled the forest and created the wasteland), and that, in a vault down below, there needed to be a single treasure, small enough to fit in a 1 inch by 1 inch by 4 inch box.

But he didn't need to know that it was the little finger - and the phylactery - of the lich who currently ruled the old dwarven kingdom.

[LibraryOgre]

Depends on the group. Ars Magica does this a lot, and this post lays out some of how it can happen easily.

[Chad Hooper]

When I had a group of players who all had several years of experience as PCs in my world, we started occasionally switching off. When it came to the world, god/desses, etc., I was the "alpha DM", others weren't allowed to change that stuff. We also weren't allowed to kill off another DM's NPCs as a plot point or story hook (if it happened in the "normal course of play" it was kosher). Each of us ran completely separate "episodes", as it were, but we encouraged each other to build off of plot elements from each other's previous stories. As I recall, we ended up with a couple of recurring enemies, one in a position of legal and/or political power superior to us.

When we switched over to Ars Magica, I was Alpha Storyguide because of my greater familiarity with the rules and more experience in game mastering, world building, etc. We then divided up the area around our covenant, I got the hills and forest to the east, another SG got the coast and most everything south of the covenant, and the third SG got everything north. In the case of this game, we all knew the end of the covenant in its Winter season but were playing in Spring just starting it up. Our Covenant's Winter was to be Kragenmoor from the movie Dragonslayer

Both worked well for our group, YMMV.

[Legato Endless]

I'm currently 21 sessions into a Star Trek RP that rotates the DM every time we get together. Because each session is modeled after an episode, it keeps things discreet with a defined beginning and end. The next DM can either run an episode centering on something else, or they can pick up one of the running story arcs. What one had in mind with a potential plot point is shared with another DM on an ask to know basis. The only two provisos are once something happens in an episode, it's canon and you can't go back and retcon it, and any disputes are ultimately resolved by someone we elected as an arbiter. So far we've never had to invoke that.

The biggest issue with the rotating format that I've seen is NPCs. So long as you keep the plot from getting convoluted and learn to not sweat minor continuity issues, you can make a decent narrative by the seat of your pants, it's not like solo DMs don't do this.

Characters are different. You could keep NPCs monopolized by the DM that introduced them, although this can lead to an artificial feeling when someone who should show up somewhere doesn't. Or you can let each DM do whatever they want. The problem is when one DM has a different interpretation of the character, or simplifies/exaggerates what was a more complex personality into something more archetypal for reason or the other. Dramatic personality shifts can be jarring and it's harder to sweep that kind of alteration under the rug.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I'm one of four GMs in my current game. We take it in turns to run short, mainly self-contained adventures, over one or two sessions. We share the world, have freedom to create anything that doesn't write over one of the other GM's creations.

Example: I started the games off by having the PCs meet on the roads coming into a cross-roads hamlet, then get confronted by some ghouls haunting the place (because a priestess was wrongly killed by the villagers). The party dealt with that, bonded somewhat, and moved on together.
Next session, we diverted to the old capital so the newbie paladin could report to her order - but the place was overrun with skeletons, some vampires were raising up the old queen as a lich, and we barely escaped alive (with some rescued refugees). That really brought the party together!
Since then, we've had a theme of the rising undead menace, trying to find out how to kill a lich, and other such things dominating the adventures - We ran messages to regional allies, there was a quest to find some relic weapons, and so on.
But also, we've had adventures that are nothing to do with the lich queen - we're passing through some place and some weird fey enchantment has sent all the villagers mad, we're using an old dwarven road under a mountain range and accidentally trigger a series of puzzle traps, and so on.

What it does really well, I think, is it takes the pressure off each GM to always provide a game every session - and it makes us all invent things that are collaborating with the other GMs, bouncing off their ideas. I think it's made us all more creative, and happier to be running and playing the game.

[Zombimode]

sometimes I hear people say they have a group with two DMs, when one is not DMing he is playing a character and sometimes they swap, but I don't understand, in this way don't you have a player who knows too much about the story/world?

GM1 runs the first part of his Eberron epic.

After that he (GM1) runs a light-hearted Adventure in Golarion, dubbed "the Island".

Now, we are back to GM1's Eberron epic, now in the second part.

After that, GM2 will step in to run his Ancient World Magnum Opus (or at least the first part of it), set in a mytholigical Earth roughly in the 3rd century BC.

Then plan is we will get back to GM1's third an final Eberron part.


In between there is talk that another player (which would be GM3) wants to run some StareTrek one-shots.


As you can see while we take turns in DMing (or at least plan to), there is no overlap in Setting and Story.

[Aresneo]

My group has had success with rotating GMs by having each GM have a set story thread that they are focused on. For example when GM 1 is running a session it likely has to do with the Orc horde massing to invade the kingdom, GM 2's sessions are more focused on stopping a plot from the disgruntled ex-court wizard, and GM 3's sessions are dealing with the mysterious secret society that has been attacking nobles. When these plots overlap the GMs will talk to each other, and the GM most familiar with a plot may take over running a scene or two during what is normally another GMs session. We try to keep each session fairly self contained and episodic, with the overall plot threads being there, and a GM may choose to run an adventure that has nothing to do with their main plot that week.

When it comes to NPCs we had set information about them that the GMs share and discuss, and GMs are able to mark NPCs off limits to the others if they have major plots based around them.

[GungHo]

We rotate with the same world, but we're both in different parts of the world on different sides of a continent with a significant continental divide (mountains, volcanoes, and rifts above ground, rifts and lava below ground). The campaigns are contemporaneous. Sometimes they hear of each other, but it's always a bit of a telephone game. When we have a third DM (rare), its entirely underground. There is no acknowledgement of whether or not it's on the same world. They think they might be, but they're actually trapped on the moon. They're looking at the third party any time they look up.