We are considering using 2 GMs in our groups forthcoming L5R campaign wherein we hope to take advantage of each of our GMs ability in action and combat vs intrigue and politics.

Also having 2 GMs, means you have '2' extra player characters which can be used to further the plot and push the game in surprising directions.

We aim not to turn the game into a series of one-up man ship contests.

The other thing is being able to clearly split the low-fantasy/high-fantasy elements up.

Quote from: greylond;453389I love how if he's never done a certain type/style of RPG and asks for information about it and at the same time puts it down...

He ain't a person. He's a ControversyBot. He exists to generate site traffic and does so by trying to polarize opinions about this topic or that.

Seanchai

I have played in 1 game with rotating gm's.  It was a Con game for Shadowrun. First gm was quiet and meek 2nd gm was awesome 3rd gm was the killer gm I talked about in the con horror thread.

For the 2/3rds it was decent....

Quote from: RPGPundit;453321Has anyone ever done that? Run the same campaign but with different GMs taking turns? Has it ever been anything more than sub-par at best?

RPGPundit

We've been doing it with Shadowrun for almost four years now, and it's been great!  We have four people who take turns (plus a 5th who ran an adventure once).  One guy probably does 50% of the games, myself and another doing about 20% each, and the fourth doing the rest.  We've got a few players who don't GM at all, and sometimes the same person will do a whole arc before turning the reins over to someone else.  

How do we make it work?  Part of it is shared resources - we have a set of Google docs that contain a list of NPCs, contacts, etc. and a sentence or five about what part they've played in the past.  We also keep a log of past adventures that anyone can reference.  

The other part is that the adventures are largely self-contained and any GM can riff off of anything that's happened in the past.  This often means that NPC relationships develop in fascinating yet sometimes unpredictable ways for everyone.  It also means that, when planning an adventure, we're rarely looking at some kind of master plan for what we'd like to see happen.  Instead, it's about reacting to what has gone on before and developing run ideas from that.  Often casual remarks by one GM can become important plot hooks or NPCs once another GM takes the reins.

Our pickup game (for when the main group can't meet) has been running for about 3 years and is great.  We switch after every adventurer and it has lead to an interesting and varied campaign.  Just three olds hands getting together to sling dice whenever an opportunity can be squeezed in between the regular stuff.

Quote from: greylond;453389Pundit, dude, chill out. You're such a pessimist. Just because you haven't tried it, doesn't mean that it is automatically "crap" or "sub-par at best." There are many ways to have fun playing games.

I can just see how this sort of thing could have a whole slew of potential pitfalls; it could work at its best if both (or all) GMs were in good communication with each other as to what they wanted to do with the campaign, but even then I can't imagine that things would necessarily run as smoothly as if its just one GM guiding a campaign with a single even flow.

That said, the purpose of this thread was entirely optimistic, it was to see if there were personal testimonials from people who can say they did this, "it worked, and here's why it managed to work..."

RPGPundit

I've sort of done it.  For Shadowrun, we run small campaigns from the same shared world.  No fancy google docs for us, we've got a folder stuffed with notes & npcs.  

Characters sometimes migrate from one small campaign to the next, and sometimes feature the same event from a different angle.  For example, our long-experienced characters make a difficult run, then we go back, make newbies, and play the team assigned to provide a diversion for our "named" group.

But we generally don't rotate DMs until we get to a good stopping point in the story.

Quote from: RPGPundit;453321Has anyone ever done that? Run the same campaign but with different GMs taking turns? Has it ever been anything more than sub-par at best?

RPGPundit

My only experience with this was a complete and rather epic train wreck.

I haven't tried this again in the twenty plus years since the debacle.

I could see where shadowrun could easily sit well for rotating gm's, each gm take on the persona of a fixer and send the gang out on a mission...

I've almost played in several games that were planned to have multiple GMs... but none of them ever got off the ground.
It always sounded like something with great potential... at least to me.

In the Wayback I did play in a fantasy game that had two simultaneous GMs... dealing with different aspects of the game. Partly because it was a large group. But that doesn't seem to be what's being talked about here.

Quote from: RPGPundit;453664That said, the purpose of this thread was entirely optimistic, it was to see if there were personal testimonials from people who can say they did this, "it worked, and here's why it managed to work..."

RPGPundit

If you meant it to be optimistic, then why did you include "Has it ever been anything more than sub-par at best?" instead of saying something like, "has this ever worked well for anyone?"

Sorry, but not just in this thread but many, many times you come off as very negative about any game or style of play that you haven't tried...

Quote from: greylond;453691If you meant it to be optimistic, then why did you include "Has it ever been anything more than sub-par at best?" instead of saying something like, "has this ever worked well for anyone?"

Sorry, but not just in this thread but many, many times you come off as very negative about any game or style of play that you haven't tried...

Because this style of running a game is not the standard style, and one would logically suppose there are very good reasons why it is not.  It is likely to be a sub-par experience for those reasons, otherwise we'd all be doing it.  

Reasons include:
1. Not having a single GM means you don't have a single vision of the world.  This is very likely to hamper emulation.

2. Unless the GM's are very good at communicating and understanding each other, it could be very easy for there to be misunderstandings between the two, about a character, a place, or some detail of the world.  Suddenly you have "Myron the rogue" brutally stabbing someone in their sleep by GM2, when GM1, who created him, imagined him to be a happy go-lucky fellow with a heart of gold.  It would be very hard to have both GMs having the same mental perception of characters and their personalities.

3.  One possible solution to this would be to create rules of separation, of certain areas that only GM1 can go and others for GM2, or certain characters only one GM can use, and not the other. But this can create artificial limitations that confuse the "sandbox" functionality of the game.  What happens if GM2 is running the game, and the PCs say "You know who we need to help us here? Myron the rogue!" and then GM2 has to make him inaccessible not because it makes sense that he would be, but because that's GM1's character.

4. All of the above is still assuming good faith on the part of the GMs.  What happens if there's not good faith on the part of one or both GMs? If GM1 kills off one of GM2's characters, or does a world-changing event, just because he has some issue with what GM2 has been doing?  This sort of thing could quickly de-evolve into a clusterfuck.

5. I would assume that while a given GM is not the Gm-de-jour, he would be playing, right?  So how is that handled? Is GM1's PC only around when GM2 is GMing? Is he run as an NPC when GM1 is GMing? If so, how do you avoid the "GM's PC" syndrome? It doubles the chances that one or both GMs' characters will be the "star" of the show while the other PCs (those that belong to players who are not GMs) will not get to see the limelight.

6.  Finally, it increases the likely instability of the campaign.  With two GMs you double the chance that one of them will get bored, or leave, or die, or convert to a religion that doesn't let him roleplay, or whatever else that causes him to stop running the game.  Granted, you could theoretically then keep going with just the one GM that's left, but at that point you've defeated the purpose of the campaign, and the "surviving GM" is left with a game he has to salvage that was initially only half-his, possibly with a bunch of characters he never knew before, and plot threads he wasn't privy to that he now has to try to fill in the blanks for, or awkwardly excise from the setting.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;453751Reasons include: *snipped*

RPGPundit

One, two, four, and six were all present in the great Talislanta Trainwreck.

Pundit, I do think most of your points have some degree of validity but in practice none ever ended up being huge problems in my experience - and this was the main way most of my groups ran D&D for the better part of the TSR era and I think it usually worked well. If there is less of a shared vision, there is more variety. If there is less focus there is less GM burnout. If you risk one GM 'messing up' another GM's contribution, you learn to deal with or even take advantage of an "imperfect" situation. And I think that rather than point #6 you have more stability of the campaign overall as it's not dead in the water if the GM has to bow out, GMs get the regular perspective of being a player to keep them out of a rut and help GMs and players both understand the opposite side of the table. And in my opinion it's a big contributor to stability that though the GM may change the players have the benefit of inertia from keeping their familiar veteran PCs, who are also refreshed by playing 'out of the box' with a new GM from time to time.

Pundit: How often do you play? I mean not being the GM but just a regular player. I've got the impression that it's not often and/or not for long periods of time. Is it one reason why rotating GMs isn't your cup of tea? Because it means you'd have to play PCs every now and then?