ars ludi continues to deliver quality GMing ideas, this time with Run Club and Revelations
Run Club is the formalization of a round-robin GMing arrangement, where every player takes turns GMing one-shots. Ben goes into depth about why you might want to try this out (to give a first-time GM a boost of confidence, for example), and what concerns your group might have about Run Club. Ask Your Players to GM at Least Once, here on TT, dovetails nicely with this post.
Ben’s post on revelations addresses how to make the most out of those game-defining “Aha!” moments. He explains why revelations can be tricky, and offers some excellent suggestions for nailing them — like not planning every finicky detail of the actual “reveal,” so that you stay flexible.
Three or four rotating campaigns sounds like a recipe for forgetfulness and confusion — wow.
Ouch, I have a hard enough time remembering where we left off when we play once a month in ONE campaign. Can’t imagine rotating through that. Rotating with one-shots can be fun, though; back when I used to review more RPG stuff my husband, some friends and I would rotate through running the little $5 modules I’d get for review. That was entertaining, and it made a great way for inexperienced GMs to get some experience and feedback without pressure.
Actually, I like the Rotating GM situation. I do think it’s best used for one-shots and a series of short campaigns though, to prevent players from having too much confusion about what’s going on within the game.
Plus, with rotating GMs, you don’t get as much GM burnout and it gives time-hassled GMs a lot more time to prepare.
However, I personally believe rotations should only happen at the ends of arcs, so that you can say easily things like “last time we played in this world, you guys took down Xo’Raoth the Black, the ancient black dragon that was terrorizing Peaceville. I’ve got your character sheets, and you guys can add another 10000 XP, and if you want, new characters will start at 7000 XP less than the old ones.” This way, it’s not quite so bad to revisit older games, as player and character memories are both equally likely to have faded, rendering the ‘who did what’ problem a bit easier to handle.
Plus, I love one-shots and one-offs, since I have a tendency to make oddball ideas and that makes it a lot easier to not feel bad for actually running them.
I think the idea is not to have 3-4 different games a month. But one regular game 3 days a month, and then 1 game each month run by someone else. So normally there will be only one week between regular games, except one stretch of 2 weeks.
Then once a month one of the players runs thing. Sounds good to me.