As irrational as it is, I've always been kind of embarrassed to bring this up with other gamers. But in most of the RPG groups I've been a part of, there hasn't been a fixed GM. Everyone in the group will have a character, and whoever has a good idea for a story runs the game that week. So right now, I'm one of the most frequent GMs of our group, but I also have a character named StreetGod. When I'm running, I come up with some reason StreetGod wouldn't be there to help out (luckily, he does a lot of drugs--it's less lucky while he's actually being played). This is because I kind of see it as "conflict of interest" to run your own character as an NPC, since as GM I have the power and incentive to fudge dice rolls that would normally splatter StreetGod's shaman-juice all over the wall. The sucky part is that the more I GM, the less karma I get, since my character sits out so often.

Anyway, this multi-GM system was just what I cut my teeth on in high school, where all of us knew each other. Once I left small-town Ohio and met other gamers, I got the impression that this was not the norm at all. I've gotten some very strange looks from other gamers when they find out that there's not a steady GM at my table.

Does anyone else do it like this?

Sounds mostly like my experiences. I'm generally the GM in our group, in whatever game we're playing. But there are times when I want to play. So we do switch off in our games, letting newer GMs try the waters, that sort of thing. I try and not interrupt to tell them how I interpret a rule, because that's an asshole thing to do. I still do it sometimes. I'm an asshole some times.

I digress. As our players come along and we try to encourage them, we tend to have more games with other GMs, to the point where we'll get together for a run, and one of them will say "Hey I had this great idea for a run that I wrote up! Mind if I run it today?", and we'll adjust. Usually it works that smoothly. But once you get to a group with 5 potential GMs (which has happened) it can get interesting.

You tend to have more people with their own opinions on rules. Generally we say "This GM Right Now, This GMs interpretation". Cuts back on the bickering a bit. The other problem that I've seen in some groups like this (not my last one, but others) is that you get a bit of favortism from GMs after a while. Especially if you've got Pc vs PC issues (I'll have SinN, our "guest speaker" elaborate on that later;) ).

What I've found works best if you play often, and change GMs often enough, is for each player to have one character for one GM. So if you have three GMs, each player should have three characters. Ideally, that forms three different groups, and hopefully in three different cities. You get a much wider bredth of games types, feels, locales, and experiences that way. However the main point is that you don't have one GMs game getting it's alance thrown off becuase of someone else's one shot, or a long arcing campaign ruined becuase another GM offed an important PC in some random ambush.

Most of the groups I've played in tend to swtich GMs from time to time, as the guy running the games doesn't always want to run everything all the time. It's a much needed break, and a good idea IMO. It just takes a little work and cooperation from everyone to keep everything balanced and even.

*Taps the mic and clears throat*

Um...is this thing on? Thank you for having me today as a guest speaker on the issue of multi-GM's.

The problems with GM favortism and PvP, is that they go hand in hand. In a group I was in, there was quite a bit of Player vs. Player. Now for veteran players like myself and Fisty, this may not be a problem, and making games quite a bit funner. Sometimes conflict can add to the game, if there isnt enough already. For example, in three seperate games, and three seperate sets of charactors, Myself and Fisty's wife, Plan B, had charactors that just could not get along. And eventually went from rivals, to bitter enemies. Seeing how we had a inpartial GM, and we both understood that it was just a game, it was very entertaining for us to plot against each others charactors. But, in the current group I was in, there was so much favortism( And Ill admit Im guilty of it) and PvP, that it started to spill out of game. We got a handle on it. One way by making one of my charactors and his rival (Another PC) become a team, and bury the hatchet. This is an effective method, and there are many others to choose from. Its not rocket science, it a game. So yo can figure it out.

Also, theres the long standing issue of "Co-GMing a campaign and/or game." I cant tell you how many times a member of my group has come to me or another member and said, "Hey, Ive got this great idea for a game/campaign. I want you to run it with me." Normally Im extatic to help a member of my group with an idea, seeing is how Im the most expeireinced. (With shadowrun atleast. Ive got one guy in my group and has so much knowledge on the subject of RPG's its uncanny) Now the problem with co-GMing is that you dont have the normal freedom to do what you please with your game. Everything has to be, or should be, ran by the other guy. What I love about running my own campaigns is that I have control of what happens, so if Ive got something big planned (Example: The team travels the world in search of various items, and clues regarding a treasure, takes 3-4 sessions to complete, only to find out that in the end they were working for GhostWalker; Or the team gets three seperate jobs from The Black Lodge to steal various items that will later be used for a ritual to destroy the Vatican, only to stop the ritual and save the day and find out that the men who were trying to destroy were actually Catholic Preist's betraying the church. Thanks Fisty, Great game. ) it wont be disrupted or changed because another GM did something in their game(Killed a important PC or NPC, destroyed or created something, had an event take place that seems more important than the task at hand, etc) in the middle of your campaign. In the end Ive found that Co-GMing is very difficult, and shouldnt be attempted unless you and your Co-GM have a complete understanding of each other, and the goal in which you hope to acomplish with your game.

Thank you, and have a good day.

*Gathers notes and walks off the stage during a painfully awkward silence.*

I'm too much a control freak for that sort of thing.. once the campaign gets in my hand I make it my own. The rest of the people can wait their turn.

Overall I find though we swap out systems or GMs for another story about once a year.

In my opinion from my experience, rotating GMs can be a great way to reduce GM burnout and gives GMs a chance to play, and also to let the group experience different ideas and game style. Back in the day I used to GM SR3 but I really appreciated it when occasionally one of the players would get an idea for a campaign he'd like to run, and would run it for us. I remember that I often did "vanilla" SR 3 but occasionally someone had an idea for a present day scenario using SR3 rules, or wanted to do SR steampunk, or something like that, and we'd experiment a bit and switch up GMs. I always had a lot of fun with that.

A seperate idea I like is the idea of a "sub-processor" GM. Let's say that as the GM you want to run a game with lots of tactical combat and a really high body count. You really want some meat to eat and you can't stop throwing out lines from Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. So, you arrange a scenario where the player characters and a 20-man platoon of strictly average soldiers need to defend a fort from an invasion force of 100 paratroopers including 4 snipers, 1 mortar crew, a few machine guns, and lots of riflemen, and it's all about the players taking charge and managing their defenses, using cover, prioritizing the mortar team, and so on. But suddenly, even if you consolidate all the paratroopers into one giant initiative roll for all of them, and consistiently make them all dump all their pool into their first attack to simplify book keeping, you still need to make 100-200 attack rolls per turn! It's very helpful if you've got a "sub-processor" GM who handles the crunch for you, or perhaps writes a simple computer program that quickly generates 200 attack results and filters out the ones that didn't roll high enough to hit a target behind cover, while you focus on tactics.

It's a lot of work, but when you have got a pile of 100 dead NPCs that was actually rolled out all at once and not handwaved, you feel like the Conan of GMs.

Rotating GMS per campaign, even if you keep the same characters, seems fine to me. Rotating GMs within a single campaign seems like a very bad idea to me. But that's personnal preference I guess, I don't see it as a cardinal sin or anything.

Right, what we always did was each GM would run a differnet campagn and we would have different characters for different GM's.

You correct to say playing your own character as an NPC is potentially wrong, that was how we avoid it. There were 3 of us who took turns and had differnet campagns.

Austin's was more combat related in CFS, Bills was the main campaign and out of Seattle. Min was New York based.

If you do this sort of thing, I recommend that you give Karma to the group, rather than to individuals. That way, the entire group is at, say, 30 Karma, rather than having everybody at 30 except the new guy played by the former GM.

We had a new guy in our older, more experienced group (the new guy was actually SinN). It was actually kind of fun having a runner with less skills and experience. It made it seem a little more authentic in my opinion. Not all runners are created equal after all.

We did start offsetting the karma difference another way. Because we did generally have one or two people running most of the games, and others changing out on occassion, we'd award the GM a little karma for running a game, that they could spend on their characters. This was before we did the hard and fast divide of one group for each GM. We had on average five players (sometimes up to 8, one game with 12!) and three people that would run games on a regular basis with the occassional "Guest GM". Over all it made for less seasoned runners except for the core groups, but on the plus side, players got to try out different character ideas and types.

we have 2 guys who more or less do the GMing . . but everybody else who wants to gets a go . . evry one of us has mastered at least once, as far as i remember . .
and IF we allow a GM's PC to run along as a GMNPC he/she/it gets karma like the others . . if he does something stupid he gets shot, like the others too, so it balances out quite fine *g*

...our group has gone to rotating GMs (especially after I had been in the command chair constantly for over a year managing both a 3rd ed and 4th ed campaign, can you say major burnout?).

There has been discussion of letting characters bridge from GM to GM, but I agree with Fisty, separate characters for separate campaigns is the best rule. Every GM has a different view of the world (moi included). My campaigns tend to include a lot of original gear and equipment and have their own canon that pretty much ignores the GD/IE metaplot. I also have major NPC figures of my own that another GM necessarily wouldn't feel comfortable running. I still tend to do a long running underlying theme but split it up into short arcs (2 - 3 sessions) to accommodate switching GMs. Furthermore one GM is experimenting with a new twist on the mechanics which really makes it difficult to manage a character from another campaign (in essence we would need two different versions of the same character). Now while I like the way the experiment is going I still plan to GM with the existing 4th ed mechanic as is (with some houseruling for Hacking) as does our other GM.

Ok, now I'll throw out something really crazy. My Call of Cthulhu group, at the end of our first campaign, decided that our next campaign should be "Mad Max Cthulhu." This first campaign hadn't been a rotating GM; I'd done it the whole way through. But I had little idea what the players wanted with "Mad Max Cthulhu." However, one of the players had put a lot of thought into it. He drew up maps of a catastrophized North America (stuff went down in 2012 on his timeline, by the way), came up with a history, yadda yadda.

The problem is, he's never GM'd before, so he asked if I could do it. I told him I could, if he'd do it with me. I'm running the first adventure, and he'll run next. If anyone I play with reads these, you should stop reading now.

Ahhh yes, the overambitious n00b GM with the overly-artsy idea. Bring the popcorn because it will be a train wreck, and bring some marshmallows for when the roasting commences.

I have to agree with Ronin here. The new GM should probably stick to running a couple of basic games first before he goes for something so ambitious. Most GMs that go with this whole "Great idea I just had!" idea on their first run out tend to get tripped up on the rules while they're trying to describe how cool their awesome NPC or great new run idea is. Have him run a couple of regular runs first to get his feet wet. Otherwise, it'll probably come down like a house of cards.

I'm not that concerned about it, actually. The nature of the "overly-artsy" idea he had fits naturally with a new GM, I think. And sorry about this, but I never know who's going to be reading the internet: