Co-GMing is hard. My husband and I are running an Earthdawn campaign together, and there's quite the learning curve on the best way to split the GMing duties. He's what I like to consider the "lead GM" whereas I am the "assistant GM." This is largely because he is the more experienced game master, but also because I have to miss more games than he does, so it makes sense for him to handle most of the running duties so that things go smoothly while I am gone. The main problem so far has been that we each have our own encounters, NPCs and storylines that we're working on. If the player group decides not to take any of the plot hooks that would have them encounter my material, I get to sit there all night doing nothing. The other problem is one of resources. After too many bad experiences with physical books literally falling apart within weeks of purchase, we decided to go digital for Earthdawn 3rd edition. However, my laptop is on its last legs, and I don't have a tablet. Chris usually ends up having one book up on his laptop, and one on his iPad, and I have nothing. Perhaps the biggest problem is getting the group to recognize me as a co-GM. Because they are so used to Chris as the GM, and because he is the main GM, they direct all questions at him, show him their characters, and generally only go to me as a GM if he's out of the room. I suspect that as I take a more active role and they encounter more of my NPCs, this will diminish, but they still seem to treat me, and my NPCs, as part of the group (even calling one NPC that I was running "AJ's character" even though I didn't even make her, she's a cannon NPC from the books!). Another issue can be undermining each other's authority by quibbling over details of the rules, the setting, and the storyline. It's important to try to present a united front, otherwise the players may feel that there's room to exploit us, just like a little kid playing mom against dad. We quickly discovered that the best way to handle minor questions of rules and story was to send a quick "secret GM message." Thank goodness for unlimited texting! It's a lot easier than popping into another room every time one needs to ask the other a question that we don't want the players hearing. All problems aside, it's a fun experience. We each get to play to our strengths - he's great at coming up with the main story, I'm great at developing memorable NPCs, and we both have lots of ideas for encounters along the way. It also shakes things up for the players. After several years, they're pretty used to Chris's GMing style, but since we're both discussing the meta-story, there's some of my influence in there as well. I'm excited to see how the story unfolds. I'm also excited to see how the group reacts to the ork madame of the local brothel, or my idea for a Windling cavalryman with a corgi mount.

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Copyright © 2012 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.net