Ok, I've been thinking of making an rpg for awhile now, but so far I only have half-baked ideas and such, however I have several ideas about what I want it to be, one big thing is that I want the GM to be able to play as well, for this I have several ideas;

Currently my favorite is what I consider the dealer system like in a card game, one person GMs then after a certain time it moves on to the next person, with this is a matter of scale, should the GM switch each round, (probbably the fairest but too much work) each session, (currently my favorite) or each adventure (good for keeping focused through out the adventure, but again too much work)

Another idea is too split things up between the players, each player would control / decide on a monster, an NPC, etc.

Currently my favorite would be session most of the time, with adventures thrown in for plot advancements, with each player taking turns deciding on the major parts of the setting.

Any thoughts?

The grandmother of co-GMed and GM-rotating games is Ars Magica.

The easiest way to do it is just to pass GMing whole and intact from one player to the next. You can do it by time (like, I'm GMing now, Meg's up when we finish this adventure) or by subject (like, I'm the GM when the characters go into the woods to the North, Meg's the GM when they go down into the city).

More complicated, design-wise, is divvying out the GM's responsibilities among the players. For examples of that kind of game, maybe look up Universalis by Ralph Mazza and Mike Holmes, Polaris by Ben Lehman, Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon by Emily Care Boss, Shock: by Joshua A.C. Newman, 1001 Nights by Meguey Baker (disclosure: Meg and I are quite close), Spione by Ron Edwards. Those are off the top of my head, and a biased list; there are plenty more if you dig around a little. Co-GMed games represent a smallish but distinct and thriving design movement around here. You'll be in good company.

-Vincent

In Mouse Guard, if your patrolmouse dies, you take over as the GM.

-L

Luke wrote:
In Mouse Guard, if your patrolmouse dies, you take over as the GM.

Like Vincent said, there has been a lot of work done by people around here on the subject of dividing up the GM responsibilities. You can get a lot of good advice by asking around here, reading older posts or reading the games promoted in the site. Even Forge games that still retain a GM are likely to change the usual power distribution in ways that give players more say in the game.

The question of how to divide up these responsibilities is one that is bothering me right now, so I don't think I can help you very much here, but I do have one piece of advice: prototype! Thinking about your game is a whole lot harder when nothing is nailed down yet. Don't worry too much in getting it right on the first go. Instead, try to make something playable as soon as possible. Once you have something solid to base your questions on, it becomes much easier to see where problems may lie or what is not helping your central premise.

Sorry if this doesn't help you much, but it is a mistake I often make. I often think about things in such an abstract level that there is very little insight that I can get from my questions.

In Robin Laws' Rune, you play Vikings with a rotating GM who gets experience for his or her character based on how harrowing an encounter he or she is able to run.

Collaborative Roleplaying: Reframing the Game by Emily Care Boss is a neat article discussing various ways to spread typical GM tasks among all players.

7VII7 wrote: I don't so much want to have Co-GMs as get rid of the GM entirely and have the players take over his responsibities and will still be able to play while GMing however I can't help but think that there's too great a risk of cheating, I know most people won't abuse the power but they'll still cheat in little ways...

Luke wrote:
In Mouse Guard, if your patrolmouse dies, you take over as the GM.

-L

In Lee Garvin's <a href="http://www.skirmisher.com/control01.html">Control, a character who advances far enough into the conspiracy can challenge the Controller (the GM) and take over running the game.

Paul

Hi,

Cheat at what? Breaking the rules or breaking how the fictional world 'aught' to work? Roleplayers often seem to consider both as cheating, as if how the fictional world 'aught' to work is a set of rules as well - when really they all have one one single rulebook between them and in terms of fiction, multiple individual ideas of how the game world works, which may match in some ways but not in others. It always surprises me how roleplayers, upon finding a discrepancy between them in how they think the game world works, never seem to think 'Damn, were all working from different fictional rules on this - lets all give up thinking the fiction is any sort of ruleset we can adjudicate our activity by!' and instead leap to thinking 'He's cheating!'. Cause we always think we make sense and it's always the other guy who's random/non sensical/cheating.

Or did you mean cheating at breaking the books rules?

Yeah, as I see it, there are two things at issue here.

"Cheating", which I take to mean actually breaking rules in the book, like rolling a 5 and saying you got a six, or telling someone to roll five dice when they should have only three.  I think that's a red herring, as has been described.

The other issue, as has been raised, is "conflicts of interest", which are a genuine problem.  That's like when you're responsible for providing adversity (like "there are five orcs here") and you're also responsible for overcoming that adversity (fighting the orcs).  This isn't so much a problem because people advantage themselves, as it is because it's just no fun in play.

So don't worry about "cheating", but do worry about conflicts of interest.