Treasure Tables is on hiatus as of December 13th, 2007 -- after two years of daily posts, I needed a break. If you're looking for GMing material, I have two recommendations: the hundreds of posts in TT's archives, and my new project, the multi-author GMing blog Gnome Stew. Happy GMing! -- Martin

Run Club and Revelations

Sun. November 5, 2006 

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.

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Comments

5 Responses to “Run Club and Revelations”

  1. Rick the Wonder Algae on November 6th, 2006 7:56 am

    My gaming group was actually trying something similar to a run club when my wife and I first joined them. Every week a new DM took a turn, but they weren’t one-shots. Let me stress that while a run-club is a GOOD idea, that format is a particularly bad idea. Playing once every month with three other campaigns between is rough on your “What was going on?”ometer. Freed from that kind of issue, I can see the run club being a lot of fun. While I can’t stand sitting through a Star Wars campaign, My wife hates anything but fantasy, and most of our friends act as if http://www.treasuretables.org/2006/10/how-to-be-a-bad-gm-a-primer is their Bible, for one-shots I can handle it.

  2. Martin on November 6th, 2006 8:25 am

    Three or four rotating campaigns sounds like a recipe for forgetfulness and confusion — wow.

  3. Heather on November 6th, 2006 9:02 pm

    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.

  4. Kestral on November 7th, 2006 5:29 am

    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.

  5. SteveS on November 8th, 2006 6:19 pm

    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.