Category: RPG Tips (Page 1 of 2)

I recently saw a quote about Star Trek novels but this made me think about best practices for shared campaigns with multiple GMs.

“Before the litverse, novels had a responsibility (possibly an actual rule from the publishers, but I’m not sure) to “put the toys back in the toy box” when done. In other words, existing assets (characters, ships, structure of existing galactic politics, etc.) had to end up the same at the end of the novel as they were at the start. This restricted the novels is in a certain way – despite how much danger he might be in, you know Sulu isn’t going to die if a novel is set anytime before Undiscovered Country.” (Source)

Probably any shared universe (be it a Traveller, D&D, or any other setting where GMs take turns running games for the same group) needs a chart of things that are “fixed” so the toy box is in order for the next GM.

So something like a “Session Zero”, but for Co-GMs.

We’ve had a really good experience in several of campaigns in our game club with rotating GMs in a shared campaign, so I’m very interested in this topic.

I think I’m finding that the easiest thing is to keep the PCs focused on smaller scale events rather than ‘save the world’. That way there’s not much ‘canon’ they could really effect.
“Save the world” doesn’t always mean that the PCs encounter a world-shaking event, but rather it can simply be “save their world”, which could be a regional issue or a PC related issue that may not directly impact the larger scope of the world. To the heroes it’s still a huge deal but their actions won’t necessarily change the geopolitical framework in the world.

Here’s a video that is worthy of review on this topic as well:

An article from the “Playing At The World” blog has several interesting insights. The thing that stands out to me was the point that, given these conflicting player goals, you can never really have a “perfect RPG” that meets the goals of all player types.

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A great new video showing how you can use the Overviewer App to turn your iPhone or iPad into a document camera.

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I was experimenting some more with my Paper app on my iPad to mock up how I’ll likely run my DicehavenCon V Conan game. I created a custom ‘wallpaper’ with areas to track Doom and Momentum. Using a stylus I can sketch maps, write down initiative (for games that use it; Conan actually does popcorn initiative instead), and generally keep that fast, freeform theater-of-the-mind with some rough maps GM style that I prefer. Also, with Zoom, players can mark up and annotate the map as well and move their drawing around (effectively, using tokens).

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If anyone ever wants to use a digital map with fog-of-war effects for in-person gaming, this looks like an interesting solution: InfinitasDM. Read more.