Sunday, April 25, 2010

Can Round-Robin-style of GMing Work?

I proposed the following game idea to my gaming group today:


I think it would be fun for a "round robin" sort of styled game, where each person makes a character.. and a villian. We roll a dice to see who plays the villian, i.e. GM's it, at the end of each "episode". As each villian is jailed or killed, a new one is made, and after some time in game, the jailed ones get thrown back into the mix to see if any breaks out and so on. I think the characters would be a mix of Batman-esque up to Iron Man-esque to fight said villians.

Of course, if someone has a really good plot and they want to run it because it would fit with the end of the previous plot, no need to roll. This way there isn't just one GM, and so that the villians are ran differently.

I would say the swap happened when the villian got carted off to jail or died, and that any background notes, like what various seedy underbelly elements were up to should be handed over to the next gm

So, any thoughts?

Somewhat immediately, one of the members in our group became worried about what would happen if there was a disagreement with how some of the more subjective elements present in nearly every game system. There was a rather long debate over this, with myself believing that while "shit happens", we were all adults and could get past such problems. His contention was that if one player disliked a general consensus to a rule, he/she might try to against the general consensus when his/her turn came up to GM.

While I agree that this could present a problem, I believe that if the GM at that moment can not stand the fact that he is helping everyone play a game, instead of that everyone is just acting as placeholders in HIS story, then he shouldn't be playing.

So I wonder, how many people out there have been involved in a round-robin-style of GMing and how did it work out for you?

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