Rotating Through the Gaming

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play TTRPGs in general, and D&D in particular.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a gamer, you might want to give this one a pass.]

During the heyday of my old gaming group, there were always at least 3 or 4 of us who were willing to be GMs, but none of us who wanted to be the GM all the time.  For a while, we “solved” this apparent dilemma by just having one person GM until they got sick of it, then someone else would step up.  Everyone else would typically keep the same characters, even.  (The problem of what to do with the new GM’s old PC was, partially, what led to our policy on “GMPCs,” which will one day be its own blog post.)  But, eventually, we came up with a new idea: game rotation.

The idea was fairly simple: everyone who was willing to be a GM, and who had a good idea for a campaign, would go into the rotation, and we’d do a different campaign every week (we typically gamed once every week).  Being the nerds we were, we managed to complicate it a bit more than that by instituting a voting system.  Basically, at the end of each session, the GM for that session would say either “okay, that’s all I had prepared,” or they could say “I could go again, if you guys want to.” If they said the former, the next person in the rotation was up, the end.  If, however, they said the latter, then the other players would vote: were we actually interested in continuing this particular campaign for another week, or were we ready to move on?  Simple majority made the decision.  I would guess that maybe half the time that the GM indicated they were amenable to continuing, we voted to do so.  The other half, we would just move on, and that GM had a leg-up on their next turn at bat.  No one ever took offense, that I recall, for saying they could go on but being voted down to do so.  And I would guess that, over the nearly ten years we employed this system, the number of times we voted to play the same game a third week in a row could be counted in the fingers of one hand.

Short version: we switched campaigns a lot.

And I’ve been really excited to talk about this system for a while now, because there were a lot of great things about it.  Here are the primary reasons this was a fantastic system:

• No one ever got sick of being the GM: you were only doing it once a month or so.
• No one ever got sick of their characters: you were only playing that person once a month or so.  The rest of the time, you got be someone entirely different.
• Being exposed to different GMs with different styles is good for players, and in turn it makes them better GMs.
• It relieved a lot of the pressure for those who wanted to try being the GM for the first time.  You only had to worry about doing it for one week, and then, best case, you’d have 3 or 4 weeks to work up the courage to go again, and, worst case, you could say “man, I really didn’t like doing that!” and everyone had 3 or 4 other games to enjoy, so: no big deal.
• Assuming you were sticking with it, instead of having only a week to prepare some elaborate adventure, you basically had a month.  As we all got older and busier, this particular advantage cannot be overestimated.
• Since you did have the option of bowing out if things got too complex or too overwhelming, everyone felt more freedom to be experimental.  Try something new!  What the hell: worse come to worst, we can just toss out that campaign and you can come up with a better idea next time.
• Perhaps the best of all, we tried new things.  New settings for D&D, sure, but whole new systems.  We played Vampire (the Masquerade) and Mage (the Ascension), we played Star Wars (both the d6 and d20 versions), we played GURPS and Traveller and Call of Cthulhu.  We played weird shit, like the Wheel of Time RPG and In Nomine and homebrew shit we made up ourselves.  Because, again: why not try something new?  Could be fun for a while, you might discover a new love, and, as always, the worst case was we’d just fallback on our several other campaigns.

So it was an awesome system that we employed, as I say, for what I’m pretty sure was close to a decade.  But, you know, it wasn’t perfect.  There are a few downsides to this system:

• Even though you’re gaming every week, it’s often the case that it’s been a month since you played the character you’re picking up on any given night.  It’s sometimes hard to remember where you were in the story and sometimes even who your character actually is, especially for newer campaigns.
• Being experimental is awesome, but it does mean there are failed experiments.  I only got in a few sessions of my awesome gender-fluid Trinity character, only one of my Shadowrun character (who I can’t ever remember now), and none for my Hero or BESM characters.  I also don’t remember what I came up with for BESM, but my Hero character was a decently interesting Jekyll-and-Hyde type who I was kind of looking forward to.  (Hero is one of the few systems where that kind of character is actually buildable without jumping through a million hoops and bending a billion rules.)  Better that we tried and failed than never to have tried at all, I suppose, but they were bittersweet experiences, for sure.

These are all important considerations.  Still, I feel the good outweighed the bad, and I would definitely recommend this system to any gaming group looking to solve some of the same issues we had.  When I decided to make playing D&D with my kids a weekly thing—effectively replacing my old gaming group with one that I grew myself—I knew that I would have to institute game rotation again.  Primarily because being the sole GM in a serious, weekly game at this point in my life would probably kill me.  I already stress myself out constantly over how little time I have to do all the things I want to accomplish.  This should be a fun thing with my kids, not something that makes me feel like I’m failing to get shit done in my life.

Of course, my youngest 2 children aren’t ready to GM yet (okay, that’s what I thought ... originally).  So what we came up with was a system of 4 campaigns to rotate through:

• The Family Campaign, which I run, is our long-term, serious one where everyone has put the most work into their characters.  It’s the one where I spend the majority of my prep time.
• The Clown Campaign is another one I run, but this one we run straight “out of the book,” so to speak (that means that we use a pre-published adventure where most of the work is done for you).  For this one, we chose Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (which is, weirdly, neither about a dragon nor a heist), which is a fun, somewhat open but somewhat constrained, flexible adventure that I can have fun with at the same time that I don’t have to put too much effort into.  The campaign derives its name from the fact that the 3 characters are former clowns who came to Waterdeep with the circus and then wandered off to have other adventures.
• The Freak Campaign is being run by my eldest.  It’s also D&D, but it’s even less serious than the Clown Campaign: it’s specifically where a bunch of wacky characters (I play a unicorn, my middlest plays a nothic, and my youngest plays a homebrewed half-elf-half-changeling staff master) meet in Sigil and then get kidnapped by crazy lich who just wants to send them off on adventures while they watch, because they’re bored of having been alive for so long.  Our first mission was to raid a black dragon’s hoard (we started at 7th level for this one), and now we’re running through an updated version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
• The Lizard Campaign, also run by my eldest, is our primary non-D&D campaign.  It’s ostensibly a Shadowrun campaign (meaning it uses the standard Shadowrun setting), but we started out doing a Powered by the Apocalypse version called Sixth World.  Lately, the kid has been playing around with a homebrewed conversion to mostly-5e rules.  But, either way, it’s a very not-fantasy, cyberpunk-y sort of campaign where the 3 of us are all reptilian based mutant siblings: I play the oldest sibling, a crocodile man with some spirit powers, my middle child plays the middle sibiling, a chameleon ninja; and my youngest is the youngest, a lizard hacker.  Tone-wise, it’s somewhere slightly more serious than the Clown Campaign but less so than the Family Campaign.

Additionally, my youngest—remember, she’s still only 8 at the moment—has already jumped in to to try GMing, running a Dungeon World game (with my eldest as assistant GM) which we sometimes call the Red/Blue Campaign, due to its setting in a divided city where, on one side, everyone dresses in red, and, on the other ... well, you get the picture.  The city is ruled by a king and queen (one on each side), who have two twin daughters, tragically separated by their parents’ division.  I play a dhampir (that’s a half-vampire, for those unfamiliar with the term) and my middle child plays an otter-kin (that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like), and our goal seems to be to reunite the city.  Once we can figure out why it was spearated in the first place.  Did I mention that this kid is 8?  It’s a fairly complex plot, overall.  But she doesn’t always have the patience to be in charge.

My middle child has zero interest in being in charge of anything.

Now, we have a tendency to play these games 2 or 3 weeks in a row way more often than my old group did, but that’s partially due to my kids not having the stubbornness to stay up all night like we used to when I was young.  Many times after a few hours, they start to run out of steam, so we just call it and say “let’s play this again next week!” We’re about 2 months away from our one-year anniversary since we started this system, and this is what our rotation has worked out to so far:

• 12/11/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 12/18/19: Clown Campaign
• 12/26/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 1/8/20: Lizard Campaign
• 1/15/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/20/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/7/20: Clown Campaign
• 2/12/20: Lizard Campaign
• 2/19/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/22/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/26/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/4/20: Family Campaign
• 3/13/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/18/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/25/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/8/20: Family Campaign
• 4/15/20: Family Campaign
• 4/22/20: Family Campaign
• 4/29/20: Family Campaign (finish up), Freak Campaign (intro)
• 5/6/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/13/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/27/20: Clown Campaign
• 6/3/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 6/10/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/17/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/24/20: Family Campaign
• 7/1/20: Family Campaign
• 7/8/20: Family Campaign
• 7/15/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 8/6/20: Family Campaign
• 8/26/20: Family Campaign
• 9/9/20: Family Campaign
• 9/16/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/23/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/30/20: Freak Campaign
• 10/7/20: Clown Campaign (proposed)

There have been a few weeks when we skipped roleplaying (often on those nights we would play other games, like Munchkin or Stuffed Fables or whatnot), and that one night where we played half a session of one campaign and then half a session of the next one, but overall we’re not doing too badly keeping to the schedule, if with a lot more contiguous runs than we used to have in my old group.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if people are keeping interested and not getting bored.  Which so far seems to be the case.

Maybe this is a system that your gaming group wants to explore, especially if you have a “one person GMs all the time” style group currently.  Give your GM a chance to shine as a player for a change!  Let your players experiment in the GM’s chair without the pressure of “this is what we’re doing now” looming over them.  Try out some new games as a change of pace.  Variety is the spice of life, so they say.  Why not extend that metaphor to your tabletop gaming?