If a forever DM finally gets to play in a game should the new DM give him some extra spotlight?

If a forever DM finally gets to play in a game should the new DM give him some extra spotlight?

No.

/thread

>forever DM has to watch the new DM run the game badly
Why would you do something like that?

No, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of him/her finally >playing< like everybody else has been doing for so long.

OP here I wasn't asking about making him the main character but maybe just letting him be the face of the party and get like 10 mins of the game more than everyone else.

>forever DM has to watch the new DM run the game better than he ever could

It's a sobering feel, senpai.

If he wants to do that he is 100% free to be a bard or take the reins as a party leader himself in a non-forced way.

That's likely to happen naturally.

How much time, how much spotlight, you get as a player largely depends on the energy and creativity you bring to the game, and the degree to which the rest of the group looks to you as a leader. If you usually GM, you're probably high on those metrics.

>If a forever DM finally gets to play in a game should the new DM give him some extra spotlight?
>No.
This

>That's likely to happen naturally.
Plus this.

Now that's been answered, when *is* it okay to give a player some unnaturally extra spotlight?

For my part, I'd say when the shy, always quiet player actually engages and speaks up.
Let him take the focus and give him some leeway if it encourages him.
I hate seeing a kindling spark of interest get snuffed out because it has nothing to do with the job at hand.

I thought I'd never see it. A tabletop cuck.

I don't see a problem, sure.

I'm gonna try and hijack this thread with a slightly different question: when you take over the role as the forever DM, how much input to the campaign does the forever DM have?

A little context for my situation. We had a long lasting DM who was pretty good and at some point he started to let me do one shot missions in the campaign whenever he wanted to play as a PC for once. It was a good system and the other players liked the differing styles. However eventually, forever DM had to move overseas for work and he handed full control of the campaign over to me. Now since the setting was entirely homebrewed by both of us, naturally he still felt attached to the setting and would regularly hold conversations with me on stuff he had wanted to include in the campaign if he had had the time and I obliged him since I felt it was his right to have a little control over his setting.

However, he managed to come back to the country after just a few months but kept letting me be perma-DM since he claimed that his work was keeping him too busy. However, he does occaisionally guest in as a character. The problem is, now that he's essentially an actual player and I am the DM, I don't know how much right he should have in dictating what happens in the campaign. He still messages me asking me to include certain things he wanted to do and sorta expects me to include them. Not only that, he inquires about what my plans are and its obvious when he plays that he tries to "help" me by convincing the other players to follow my rails, which just makes me feel like I'm railroading by proxxy (and I hate railroading). Should I tell him he needs to ease off control as a player now?

I've been forever DM longer than most by me have even played.
Finally got a chance to play, and I couldn't do it.
I didn't understand the setting or the cultures, and all my questions went unanswered.
It was like being trapped in a single NPC.
Nothing I did mattered and there was nothing to explore.

Tell him you're fine with the campaign going off the rails. Tell him that if he's the one not fine with it, he should come back as the game's GM. Tell him he's welcome to be a GM (or a player) regardless of the situation.

Do you feel like you don't have enough agency over the word? Maybe you would like a sandbox style game.

Yea maybe. He definitely won't DM since he says he just doesn't have the time. I just wonder if I have the right to cut him out of the planning process since he's a player now, but he's understandably attached to the outcome of this campaign.

Maybe say that if he's going to have so much control over the campaign's setting that it would only be fair to offer the same opportunity to the other players as a courtesy. Of course, that could make running the game messy for you as a game master, so don't say that if you feel it wouldn't fit with your style of running the game. Alternatively, as you said, you can cut him out of the planning.

To be clear, this isn't a threat or ultimatum you're making, just the courtesy of being evenhanded to all of the players. If he objects, then I don't know. Personally, in that case, I would just let him have his way but point out that this is all the more reason for him to come back as a GM.

Thanks. I guess I should just go be a grown up and tell him he needs to decide if he's a player or a "co"-GM. I just don't want him to feel I'm muscling him out of his own game.

You should be really overt, and tell him not only about the issue in and of itself, exactly about how you're feeling about his unusual status, the internal dialogue you've been having over it, and the uncertainty that you're carrying about potentially pushing him away. I'm a forever GM, and yeah, if I handed the reigns to someone else for a setting I put a lot of work into I would be very tempted to interfere. Chances are, he doesn't really realize what he's doing and if you communicate well it'll clear up with no hard feelings anywhere.

It hurts so much....

i know these feels bro