Rotating the GM

Question

Is it advisable to run a campaign where the GM occasionally rotates to be a regular player while a player becomes the GM? I've seen some mentions of this strategy to prevent the GM from getting burnt out from always planning, but it seems like having an alternative game going would almost be better. That way you don't have one GM giving out treasure beyond what the PCs should have and the other GM having to deal with it.

Answer 1

It's been a long time that I've played in a group where only one person ever GMed anything... As specific games rise and fall, usually someone else will run something sometime, unless they are a control freak or everyone else is totally slothful (this was the case when I was in high school, though, to be fair). But nowadays, we always have multiple concurrent campaigns going on with different GMs running them.

Rotating GMs within a campaign is different - to a degree, it depends on the nature of your campaign. I've run campaigns that are very coherent stories, with loads of secrets, that I'd never rotate in the middle of. If there's a concrete vision, you don't want to rotate. If there's less of one, it's easier - kinda the "Babylon 5 model" vs the "Star Trek model." So rotating within one actual campaign is possible but is more or less desirable depending on the type of campaign.

In one campaign we proactively said "Hey, let's deliberately rotate every player in as GM." We wanted everyone to get a shot behind the screen, learn what it's like, and give us all insight into strengths and weaknesses, so whenever one adventure finished up, we handed off to the next person. Even the ones that really sucked at GMing had something specific they did great that we learned from - dialogue, pacing, whatever. The campaign conceit was just that we were all pirates and were roving around on random adventures, there was no huge metaplot. We never had any problems with canon conflict or whatnot as a result, and everyone got some GM trigger time. It also made those who seldom GMed appreciate the GM more.

Answer 2

Try the Run Club group structure described by Ben Robbins.

Here's how Run Club works:

1) Every month (or two weeks, or whatever works) someone takes a turn and runs a game. One-shot, short game. No campaign. No big picture. Just a single game.

2) Everybody who plays will GM. Everybody. This is the core principle of Run Club. You cannot play if you will not GM. That's the pact.

3) When everyone has run a game, the round is finished and you can start over again.

That's it. Simple on the surface, but in that simplicity a number of complex issues are addressed.

That may not be a great fit if what you're looking for is a long-running, coherent campaign rather than a series of one-shots, but it's a solid idea if your primary goal is to share the GM load around and make sure everybody gets a chance to be a player.

Answer 3

Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz rotated referee duties in the old Lake Geneva Greyhawk campaign in the 1970s. In almost every long tabletop campaign I've run, and in most of the ones I've heard of, sooner or later one of the players has an adventure he or she has wanted to run. Without any exceptions I can think of, it's been fun to step down from the referee seat for a while and play, and to let the other players get a break from my style of running things.

It does require loosening up a bit. You also have to be willing to accept that someone else may have a little control over your setting for a while, and you may have to deal with changes not of your making. If you're an "amateur author" type of referee, this may be difficult. I've always thought of the unpredictability and shared control as design features, not bugs - for the same reason, sometimes I ask other people to design dungeons or the like for my settings.

Every famous setting has, sooner or later, become "everyone's." It's part of the fun.

Answer 4

In most of the groups I've RP'd with over the years, we rotated GMs periodically, as there's always someone who has a neat idea for a campaign.

However, we've never shared campaigns. Personally, I'd feel to constrained as a GM. How much can I alter the setting? Which NPCs can I kill off? Can I flood or otherwise destroy cities?

Answer 5

My group runs 3 separate games for when the GM gets burnt out. It sometimes gets hard to remember all the different stories, but the players like making different characters to play.

On the other hand, if you want to blow your players mind, work with the other DM and have your two stories come together in a big explosion that melds the worlds. After that, kill the other DM so he doesn't destroy your world.

Answer 6

Rotating GMs is more of a modern development; a lot of the new-style GM-less games effectively rotate GM on the boundary of every scene or every conflict. What you're talking about is certainly a lot more traditional architecture, but I've seen it done extremely well.

What rotating GMs per-story or chapter does require is that the setting as a whole be accessible and either understood by future GMs or be accepted as a very plastic set-up by everyone. This could be as straightforward as the first campaign having been very clear and revelatory, so everyone's on the same page for the next story through, or as deliberate as using Universalis, where everyone constructs the setting together very deliberately, or simply by creating and maintaining a group-wiki as if doing a round-robin writing exercise. Or you could use a well-known, already extant setting like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings.

Ultimately, its going to come down to figuring out how much you can bring people into understanding the setting and create a desire for them to tell stories in it.

Answer 7

This is usually very hard because it exposes the players to the story giving them knowledge that can spoil the game for them.

There is an excellent section written on this in the D&D 4.0 Dungeon Masters Guide. While targeted at D&D, the information is relevant to all tabletop games.

Answer 8

We have rotated GMs within a single setting and did not feel it worked that well .. it felt disjointed.

That said everyone takes their turn GMing using their own settings. We have a couple of people who love running long campaigns and others who dont really enjoy that and run one off games.

The best GMs are ones who still play and the best players are ones who also GM.

Answer 9

One game method that endured a summer was referred to as a "Fractured Multiverse", but it took a lot of preparation to run properly. Each player at the table was responsible for running one game system, and every player made a character dossier that was the basis of making that character in each system present. Whenever a DM/GM/ST had a session to run they would take over and the party would be shunted into that player's universe and the story would continue there. So the Bard in the D&D game would be a rock star in the OWoD setting, then get pulled back to being a musically talented priest in L5R, then catapulted into being a one man Daft Punk in a Cyberpunk game.

This way everyone gets their own arc, the ability to keep the same characters, and a modular state for whomever shows up.