[Warmachinez]

I have GMed SR for my group since 2nd Ed, but unfortunately never played. Luckily I have a new player who is also a DM (DMs Pathfinder for our group one day a week and I GM one day a week). With the arrival of 5th Ed, I can't wait to GM a new camapaign, but I would also love to play a character for once. After a bit of discussion with my DM friend, we came to the conclusion that doin a CO-GM game could be very interesting.

I was wondering if any of you forumites might have tried this and would have sound advice to give or know of Pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks for the help Chummers!

[Prodigy]

It can be fun. Just be wary of using your character as an NPC when it is time for you to GM. The best advice is for both of you to create separate story arcs and not tell each other. Then wing it if one of you derails the other.

[emsquared]

We Co-op GM our Pathfinder campaign too (rotate through 4 GMs > 1 per level where they get 4 - 5 sessions to complete their story-arc), keeps people interested in playing and GMing and creates a nice mix of story and play-types. That said, Pathfinder accommodates this very nicely - the PF Society being what it is, it's easy to explain these very modular/episodic adventures as we're all PF Society members so we just go out on assignments or what not. I could see that being slightly more difficult with SR (explaining the sudden changes in direction).

My advice would be; instead of switching each session, let one GM take the reigns for a set number of sessions, long enough for each GM to complete some portion of a story arc. Seems to me like you'd be stepping on each others toes constantly rotating every other session - not to mention what if a Run can't be completed in one session (which is most, once things get rolling IME anyway)? Then again, that's my GMing type preference - story arcs as opposed to episodic. You could agree to end each arc in a certain location, so the other guy at least knows where the players will be. Otherwise, you might have to have some logical story-construct so that no matter where the players end up, they can get to where the next story is (in PF it's the PF Society for us, in SR they could be bank-rolled corp-runners or something?).

Anywayl, that's my 0.02 cred.

[GiraffeShaman]

There's rpg systems out there built especially for this type of play. Ars Magica was one that I really loved, but could only convince my friends to play it a couple sessions. (Of course, typical disclaimer on this board, it's not a millionth as good as Shadowrun!) Players switch off as GMs in it and even sometimes share characters. And everyone gets a turn playing a powerful wizard pc.

Anyway, we did some of this at the end of my 2060's campaign. The main reason behind it was to help me out and prevent GM burnout, a constant problem in our group of aging players. (If you can consider the 30's aging) It worked out okay, but right away we found out that despite the best intentions, I'm the really only one that wanted to GM, so it went back to normal. We had tons of GMs when we were young, but nearly all have burned out.

So first, make sure that anyone entering the rotation really wants it and isn't just trying to be nice.

One of the biggest pitfalls I experienced is stepping away from your own player character. I find it impossible to properly roleplay a character without falling in love with the character to a certain degree, and this is magnified if it's one of my favorite characters of all time, which it was in this case. And yes, it's best if you love your player's characters too, but I think quite often most of us love our own player characters best. Just Human nature.

 I consider myself an ethical and fair GM, but even so I struggled with this. It wasn't that I was scheming to get my character some mad loot or some stupid drek. No, it's just that it's hard to do nasty things to a character you really love. And then worse, you can over correct and prove how ethical you are by really being hard on your PC, perhaps unfairly so.

It's a bit like the situation where a family member is someone's boss and is unfair to their family member employee, because they don't want to be seen as favoring them. It's not undoable, but it's one of the hardest things I've ever run into as a GM.

As far as plots and story arcs go, we found it worked best with two GMs running two separate arcs, and neither GM knew what was going on with the arc behind the scenes. We used the same group, including the GMs having a PC. Sometimes the GM's PC would be there when the GM was at the helm, sometimes not. The two arcs were fairly easy to keep separate because we each created a different fixer contact and the PCs all got these 2 contacts free. So all stories related to each story arc went through the fixer created by each GM. And not all runs were arc related, but even then each GM used his own fixer and we never touched each other's fixers or johnsons. I asked the other GM to request permission before using my major npcs and agreed to do likewise.  it was never an issue though.

I recall it was a gourmet chef/hotel and restaurant owner that was a Johnson the runners worked for a couple times that I didn't want the other GM to touch. The main reason being he was a Corrupted Mage and had a secret kitchen full of Wendigo chefs. None of which the other GM or any of the players knew about or ever found out. And yes, they ate the food. And no, my PC didn't, since he's a salad eating giraffe shaman. See what I mean, favoritism! No, not really, wasn't planned that way.

[Michael Chandra]

Some people apparently leave out the GM's character and just let them get equivalent rewards behind the scenes.

[GiraffeShaman]

Some people apparently leave out the GM's character and just let them get equivalent rewards behind the scenes.

Yeah, we strongly considered that and it might be a solution for some people. I just didn't like it though. One, I thought it could get kind of unbelievable that the two characters were always vanishing. (Although it is more workable in Shadowrun than some other game systems) Also, I always felt it strange to give karma and monetary awards to characters who aren't there. They just aren't in the same dangerous and dramatic situations. I guess you could assume they are doing other jobs, but it stretches reality for me that the guy that wasn't there gets the same 20 karma when the party breaks into a high security condo and murders an exec and his cyber zombie guardians.

And we didn't want the two GMs to have their characters punished. So yeah, GMs gming their own player character is a fine line to walk and probaly always will be.

[Michael Chandra]

Probably best if the GM characters aren't the ones doing the heavy planning, I guess. If you simply get bossed around and don't need that much initiative on your own, it's easier on that fine line.

[Carz]

My group has run a 'round robin' style M&M game for a while now, plus I run a SR campaign that I allow others to GM in occasionally.

I'd highly recommend that ONE person be in charge of characters and approvals. Its often hard to balance games, but gets much more difficult when more than one person is approving purchases or characters. Admittedly its much more important for characters to balance against each other in M&M than SR due to M&M being more free form in power and character types than SR.

I actually learned this my self from the M&M game where we did have multiple GMs and applied it when starting my SR game - I run the majority of games, and approve all characters and such, but I invite other players to run games (or story arcs) on occasion.

If you are co running with one other person, you might have your co-gm vet your character, while you vet theirs, and maybe all approvals have to go through both of you, if you wanted to really share responsibility.

[Carz]

No, it's just that it's hard to do nasty things to a character you really love.

That's actually a typical thing that new authors have to overcome.

But think about some really good stories that you have read - the main character often gets hurt - badly sometimes. And that tends to lead to the more interesting stories and such.

So hurt your own PC! Hurt the other PCs! And see what new insights into the characters that kind of thing brings.

[Michael Chandra]

Bull killed off his daughter and blew himself up, costing him an arm and confining him to a wheelchair.

[Black]

Kinda tried a variation of this last night.  One of my players didn't have his character, so he got to play the bad guys.  Went really well, and he was much more ruthless heh I would have been.  Great game, made my life so much easier and he had lots of fun despite his various thugs getting killed by the other players.

[GiraffeShaman]

Kinda tried a variation of this last night.  One of my players didn't have his character, so he got to play the bad guys.  Went really well, and he was much more ruthless heh I would have been.  Great game, made my life so much easier and he had lots of fun despite his various thugs getting killed by the other players.

Hahah, cool idea. Kind of reminds me of the famous semi unethical psychology experiment where a prof had one group of students acting as guards at a prison and the other group of students playing the prisoners. Supposedly it was found that seemingly normal people do surprisinigly sadistic things when suddenly put into a position of power over their peers like that.

[mtfeeney = Baron]

I don't see the problem with having a character step out for a few missions/story arc.  You're not a family.  It's a working group.  John isn't there for this arc?  That means you didn't hire him or need him or invite him.  No more explanation needed.  Why did he get the karma and nuyen?  He was working while you guys were busy.

[GiraffeShaman]

I don't see the problem with having a character step out for a few missions/story arc.  You're not a family.  It's a working group.  John isn't there for this arc?  That means you didn't hire him or need him or invite him.  No more explanation needed.  Why did he get the karma and nuyen?  He was working while you guys were busy.

It's strictly a question of style and taste, which varies by group. That solution may work well for many groups. We're pretty hardcore and have things like the optional magic loss house rule, expensive medical care, and so on. In some cases it can be an advantage to miss a session if it's a particularly hairy one. In fact, the last game in the campaign, one I didn't run, the physical adept had magic loss. I'm aware this isn't to the taste of many players and groups, just our own preferences. But it makes it unfair to give karma and money to someone who isn't there and we aren't just going to randomly assign magic loss or lengthy hospital stays for those off screen missions. Not to mention a host of other negative things that can happen from runs, like vengeful enemies and murdered contacts.

[Warmachinez]

Alot of great info here chummers, I really appreciate. Some things I am now planning to do:

Vet each one's character and we both approve the other characters in thegame.
We each build our own story arc, but must lead to same BBG/BBsituation
Not give our characters any Karma if they are not there, although we could have them there as acting NPCs, which brings me to ...
Hurt my own PC and the CO-GMs PC 

Great Stuff!

Thanks