GM Assistant

Have you ever had a co-Game Master to help you run your game? How did it work?

A friend asked to join my campaign but I already have too many players, so I offered him to be assistant GM. Now, though, I have no clue what he should actually do.

First time I hear about dual GMing but you could split the mechanic parts (combat, puzzles,etc) and the roleplay parts (npc handling, planning). That should keep you both entertained

Gygax and Arneson used to have co-DMs. Greyhawk especially became a huge campaign with multiple parties traipsing all over the place.
Two gms at once is weird, though. I'd suggest letting him play, but having the players elect a caller, which is what they used to use for large parties, which could often be 10+ people at Gygax's table.
A caller's job is to be the one who tells the DM what everybody's doing, and to handle the other players and make sure everybody's ready for their turn and deciding what absent players are going to do, stuff like that.
That way the DM doesn't have to deal with Greg being in the bathroom and Dave looking at his phone when his turn comes up. The caller deals with all that bullshit, reducing the load on the GM and smoothing the game out.

Two GMs could help you keep track of things not usually covered in normal games, like food/fuel consumption

That's pretty trivial, though, you just need a time tracking sheet, and mark down when torches run out or whatever, then just tick off a turn now and then, depending on the rules for your edition.

That sounds thrilling, sign me up.
It amazes me you'd even suggest that. Do you even listen to your own words?

He can help you arrange materials like character/NPC sheets, plan the encounters, play them out alongside you to make enemies more unpredictable, and maybe most importantly, he can deal with RP whenever the party has to split, so that someone at the table doesn't have to get bored for half an hour while someone else plays.

I suppose it really depends on the campaign fro my point of view, I think it could work in an open world campaign without any particular overarching story you could swap off creating new content for the party to see once the current bit is done, then run it and the other guy makes more etc. In a more typical focused game with an overarching story and defined adventures to go on it doesn't really help much though.

I ran my schools D&D club from freshman to senior year. Needless to say, I got swamped with players. Twelve regular, with the same four popping in and out of play.

So I did what any autistic teenager would do: I made three groups of four, grouping similar players and characters together, and ran them all within the same world.

I had two friends who co-GM'd for me, using my notes and materials for their games. At the end of every session they would file a report with me and we'd figure out where the story would go from their.

Campaign lasted four years. I don't believe I'll ever do something like that again.

Long-time DM here, mainly online over voice for the last few years.

I have a woman in my group who can't always make it to sessions, just most of them (we run 2 sessions every week, one 2-3 hours one 3-5 hours) so instead of playing a character like the rest, she just plays anything she likes or that I need and that enhances the experience for everyone.

Do the players make an enemy? She can play it, and even decide how it acts in the long term or what kind of goals it has, it makes it much more interesting for me since the npcs end up more alive and I can be surprised by characters I originally created. She's also great at just acting out banter, so if a player ever hits on a barmaid, asks a peasant for directions or starts haggling over the price of shoeing a horse, she has it covered.

I'm pretty lucky though since I play with people who mainly do it because they enjoy playing the parts of characters and experiencing the world, not people who just treat me as a videogame engine that runs on beer.

A DM makes the world come alive to the players, but if you have two DM's they can also make the world come alive for each other.

It really requires that you're more into improvising or just seeing what happens, rather than one of those people who just need 5 people to spectate and grind through his premade story.

I never said it was a good idea. But having more 'admin power' would be one of the only real advantages of 2 GMs that I can think of.

I have a behind-the-scenes co-GM who comes up with most of the ideas for content in the game - the themes of dungeons, NPCs, quests, etc. She's not experienced with the system and is too anxious to run the game in real time, but loves the planning aspects of GMing, so I am happy to let her do most of that for me, leaving me to just run the games with her notes/prep.

How about a larger version of the OP pic?

It was aweful.

I used to run a game for a high school group in their library. Just a bunch of untouchable nerds and I needed some volunteer work so they made a "PnP club" type deal. Had board games and stuff too.

Turns out the group of 4 players became 10, So I figured I'd have the group split at some point and meet up later. Decided my best friend, who wanted to help, could take them.

I should have known better, but my friend is an extreme pop culture game guy, and fucking has no imagination, and literaly copies animes and games.

10 sessions later, they meet up again. My party is well balanced, still powerful but not gods, tactical and diplomatic.

His group now has npc's goku, krillin, a witcher, and have destroyed 19 towns promising goku they would buy him dinner if he did it. They can all fly and shoot energy beams and dont really use dice anymore.

We ended shortly after. His group seemed to have fun, but it seemed like the 'fun' you get from being given hard drugs: yea its nice for a bit but its empty and debilitating to future fun.

If you're playing Ars Magica, it's practically a requirement.

>Not playing whatever you think is more fun.
>Thinking that there is some kind of inherent value in grinding and slow progression.

It's 2016, games don't have to trick you that they're deep by only feeding you the fun in a trickle.

I'm not saying that I think anime lol is better than gritty fantasy strife, I much prefer the gritty, dangerous, low-power stuff.

But I would never let the system tell me what kind of fun I'm allowed to have.

Your friend seemed to have a blast, you just seem smug.

This. I like too because that way one GM can deal with all the roleplay, scene setting, narration, all that shit.

Other guy can manage the group for group decisions, stops the Greg's and Dave's from pulling their usual bullshit and keeping conversation generally on topic.

>multiple GMs leading multiple parties through the same world
>face of the world changes between everyone's sessions

That sounds fucking awesome. Any stories? Did the other parties ever bump into each other or anything?

One thing I found reduced a lot of work load for me as a GM was having Pokemon-style re-appearing characters.

In my game nearly every town larger than 10,000ppl had an "AdventureMart", run by a poor Pakistani man with a thick accent. Every time a player asked him "hey are you the same guy" he'd be all like "no no that's my brother Habib! he's nice guy"

I also had this shitty, cowardly, weakling of an NPC recruit that followed/bumped into the party during the 1 year campaign too. He was a typical Simpons-style pimply teenager with his voice breaking all the time. He was great comic relief for the party cuz they party was always trying to play pranks on him or fuck with him. Best part was when the party almost wiped fighting the BBEG and Jenkins fucking went on a bloodrage and saved the party. Apart from the cliche ending on that campaign though the players loved that guy so I had him as a recurring senior officer that showed up every so often for years afterwards.

I had a few other characters similar but he was of particular note. It was nice having familiar Nurse Joys and Officer Jennys in every town though. The players felt like they had more attachment to a town or city instead of not really giving much of a shit.

I've been a player in that scenario before, its not as bad as you think as long as both DM's can agree on a certain point in which they want to progress the campaign.

the one time i did it was when one of our groups DM's continuously was just making new campaigns left and right, and we finally convinced him to have a second dm so he wouldnt have to dm as often, and mother fucker still ended up backing out of it and left the other dm in the dust to try and pick up the mess that campaign was

overall basically as long as everyone is on the same page you should be good

I have done this thing on both sides.

In short, an assistant GM or co-GM or sub-GM or whatever you or xhe want to call it (we respect all GM identities here, no judging), is a subordinate to whom you as the guy running the show delegate some part of the ideal GM workflow. In this regard, xhe functions like any other subordinate to whom some measure of authority or responsibility has been delegated. What those things are you delegate would ideally depend on you—give your helper tasks both in- and out-of game at which you are less efficient than you could be, which require more thought or time than you have to spare, or which you just don'e like to do.

Shit at drawing maps? Delegate!
Love drawing maps but cba to stat up every conceivable thing that the party munchkin might want to know? Delegate!
Don't have or can't remember to use time tracking sheets or the like? Delegate!
Got more than one group or type of monsters in an encounter? Split them up and delegate one of them?
As per the above, in any encounter where there are mixed mechanics just delegate the most straightforward to your helper while you handle the kind that requires more subtlety; i.e., your helper runs some support monsters while you run the BBEG, or the tagalong quest NPC or the captured prisoner or the periodic environmental hazard, or whatever else makes your set piece pop.

Even better than all of this a second brain to help you come up with adventure hooks, plot elements and entanglements, relationships between people and places and concepts, etc. Just by being someone who is not you, a second person will help you to avoid becoming predictable in the way you present encounters, in the types of encounters presented, and so on.

I did that for a long time.

Did the scheduling, kept the turn order straight, answered questions about what the dice pool was, etc.

Worked pretty well actually.

...

thanks man

I had a guy who didnt really want to play as a character (at first) but liked hanging out with the group so I let him be some/all of the monsters during combats. It made it interesting because he played them differently than I would have and so occasionally added a bit more complexity to the fights.

While a player, I was a sort of assistant planner. One of the PCs during the sessions, but I would talk for hours with the GM about upcoming plots and ideas.

It helps that I can avoid metagaming.

In the process, I became the setting loremaster. About 80% of the current setting was provided by me, and the GM picks this and that for the adventures, and we incorporate the shitstorms the players did afterwards.

Finally. Thanks based user.

Here's the kind of assistant I'd like to have.

I decided to cop-GM a game ONCE, never again will I do so.

The DM was constantly unprepared, and was always trying to murder off players for no good reason. He would try to run sessions when he wanted to be doing other things, and it would show as he would be talking about going to do that instead of DMing when everyone is at the table, if not fidgeting with a cell phone or computer. When a player hit a point he didn't prepare for or couldn't handle he would just try to off the character because he thought it was funny or cool to do so. After sessions he would ask me how he could do better, and even after feedback continued the same patterns of behavior.

These types of behaviors are often worse when he is the PC, as his habits of showing up late if at all became a matter of several other people in my normal group deciding to not invite him to games or play in games he was the DM of.

I've been a part of a dual DM game twice, first as a player and second as a co-DM.

The first time the DMs kept getting into fights because they did no prep and couldn't agree on what was happening and the assistant got booted from the campaign.

The second time a good friend and I got put in charge of combat while the main DM left to watch Korra and would come back to do her story bits. After the paladin killed a bridge toller for charging him money, I wasn't feeling like the campaign was going to go anywhere and I left.

The Main DM was the same for both of these.

I co gm a campaign as an equal partner. It's more work, but the result is much better.

As a GM aid maybe you can act out NPCs, take care of the sounds and handouts, and manage the group dynamic when it wanders away from the game.

Just make sure the power dynamic doesn't affect the social order too much. You're not an employee.

I'm a player in my campaign, but the DM usually outsources statting out NPCs to me, and I spent months as "The guy that actually knows the rules" until people finally started getting used to the system

you have a few options here
>possible roles

you have too many players so easy way to split the party if your into that

find out how they normally like to play and have them play the encounters there best at (combat, espionage, barter / trade, ext.)

you can get pregenerated maps but they don't always make sense. if the coDM likes cartography than it would be a good idea to use that.

also as DM you need to keep the game moving and after the encounter you might have lots of things you need to shift through to get what you need. while you get organized you can have your coDM run a short encounter.

running a military campaign? you need to keep track of troops, supplies, alliances, finances? coDM can help a lot.

the short answer is that in a perfect world a coDM will do what ever you cant and help keep things moving.

>keep things interesting for the coDM

if they like role playing then have them do the noncombat encounters and role play as the NPCs

if they like roll playing then let them help make the game more balanced and help make mechanical incentives for role playing that doesn't actually give them too much of an advantage to wreck the game but enough to encourage them (easy for players who are either roll players or role players harder for players who are both).

maby he's a plotter which has many possibilities. if he's willing to play second fiddle you can let him play the part of a BBEG. but only if he is willing to loose control of his player and let him get defeated as well as dealing with the players screwing with things that were already set in stone. or maby you can let him help you wright the campaign

I've been an assistant GM a couple of times for 4E, once where we had a huge group, routinely 10-15 players, and once where the GM didn't know 4E rules as well as I did so he ran the game and I was a rules compendium in talking form and helped the other players figure out what to do.

Not really a co-GM but an assistant, keeping tracks of everything, taking notes of what is hapening so i can focus on storytelling, making sure i don't fuck things up in regards of my notes due to sub-par improvisation, that sort of things. I usually suggest new players to do it when i have no spare room for a game, helps them have a idea of the gigantic amount of work a GM has to deal with and teaches them a modicum of respect for the GM. Sometimes.
I got a girl as an assistant who was a very solid improvisation actor, sure helped a lot at some points letting her do the talking.

Once ran a game under one, his daughter co-DM'd. Worked out really well, she handled a lot of the paper work, all the dice rolls, drawing maps, moving figure, and asking players what they did, while the DM focused exclusively on narration and NPC interactions.

Also if you use roll20, one could be on map drawing duty while the other guy is busy with his part.

I have all of my players act as 'assistants' managing initiative tracking and whatever so I can keep things moving through combat instead of having to pause to adjust everything.

I had co-Storytellers many a time.

I would basically assign them various NPCs beforehand and write out scripts, sometimes even whole dialogue-trees, with special note concerning information that HAD to be conveyed to the Players.

On other Occasions, the party would split up, and I would give my ( extensive ) notes to the co-GM so he could handle the smaller part of the party ( mostly with simpler plot and stuff, sometimes small fights ), while I would stay with the larger part of the party and do different plot progression.

This worked very well, true separation of players, a getting-back-together-scene where they had to catch up would always provide us with the time to compare notes and be sure everything had been covered. This worked out really well, although it was ALOT of work for me.

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another time I had a co-storyteller whom I assigned a NPC to infiltrate the party to. It was his job as a hobo-type underclass socialite to go off to gather info. I would feed him most of that beforehand or in the evening and tell him when to get back to the group. He also had scripts and hints to drop so the other players could EVENTUALLY figure him out. Fun time, as he enjoyed his role as an undercover saboteur.

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another time me and another guy co-GMd. He had one group of players, who were high social class dudes in a mansion doing politics and shit. Those guys would play every other Monday.

My group would play every Monday, and they were essentially the Henchmen. We would be on Missions every Monday and doing shit, and for some brief time every other Monday one or more of the henchmen reported back to the Grandes about their progress and discoveries.

It fell apart due to the other GM, tensions, a girl being a bitch, and problems ( the other GM didnt properly prepare his rounds, even though it was only every other monday, so the other group got quite bored )

I did a campaign as a Dual DM a few years back. We'd basically take turns running an arc of the story (usually 3 or 4 sessions at a time) while the other was just a player. It let us not be forever DM and avoided getting burnt out so we managed to run a better campaign. If I ever DM again i'll probably do the same.

Yes. Not exactly as co-GM, but as literal assistant.

Back at the uni, one of my players was sharing his apartment with two chicks. They were not playing, but they were always present, so once I've asked them if they would like to help me run the game just to see if they will like TTRPG at all. I've talked with them about the incoming scenarios, the roles that are to be played and what each character should know and say plus preparing prompts for them.
Worked pretty well, especially after few games, when they've both get hang of it and treated it as if it was improvisational theatre

You could give him the tools of a villain.
You are the objective arbiter, he's the goblin king.

our group will do this for a person that wants to learn D&D, one DM makes sure that mechanics run smoothly, and that rolls are good, and the other DM makes the story and the world around you

My experience is that a co-GM is there in order to alternate running sessions, so everyone can play.

Nothing worse than a freeloading player who never runs games.

That's pretty par for the course for my group. Multiple people in it have GM'ed at different times so they're all generally familiar with rules stuff. So when it comes time to have arbitration, or something will slow the game down, multiple GM's handle different people at the same time to keep the game flowing smoothly.

Thanks for the tips everyone, you've been great help.