Game Wish 68: Multiple GMs

I haven't done any Game WISHes for a while. This week's one is about Multiple-GM Games.

Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you've never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?

I've played in two, one good, one bad.

The bad one was the time I was one of the co-GMs, and it went badly pear-shaped, largely because of lack of communication and a basic incompatibility of GM styles. It was a space opera style game focussing on crew of space pirates. The other GM controlled the overall game setting, but wanted to play a PC as well, so he had me GMing a lot of the individual scenes. Unfortunately things didn't go well; for example, if I was too slow in responding, he'd jump in and take a thread in a completely different direction to the one I'd planned. Eventually I came to the conclusion this just wasn't working, and bailed out leaving the other GM to run the game on his own. The story doesn't end there, though. The other GM eventually quit, and I volunteered to take over the game. It's still running.

The good example was the GURPS cyberpunk game Hawaiian Vacation, which had three GMs. In this case, there was one 'master GM', Maughn, and two assistants who played various NPCs, both adversaries and potential allies. This worked very well, and the whole thing was one of the most memorable games I've ever played in.

Why was this game a success, where the game I'd co-GMed was a failure? I think it was because there was a high level of communication between the GMs, and most importantly, each of the GMs had a clearly defined role.

Would I co-GM again? Probably, because now I know where I went wrong the first time round. It would have to be with someone I know well and had a good rapport with, and we'd need to clearly define each other's roles within the game.