One of my oldest D&D experiments happened when I was back in high school. A group of friends and I tried to build a campaign together, and we would each take turns DM’ing. There were 6 of us total.
So that meant there were 6 player characters, but one of those player characters would be the DM’s character every session. You would request a turn to DM and you would be put into the queue, and every DM’s adventure couldn’t require more than 2 consecutive sessions as DM (unless queue was empty). This constraint did cause some issues with transitioning between adventures.
We were all inexperienced in D&D and DM’ing as a whole. We were all pretty young as well. We didn’t really understand what went into making a great D&D campaign.
Sounds like a great idea on paper, but our inexperience with D&D quickly showed. 6 people with 6 different DM’ing philosophies running a campaign in the same world eventually led to a completely incoherent experience.
One DM was super into roleplaying. One DM hated RP and only wanted hack-and-slash. So you’d go from doing an RP heavy session where everything was resolved through communication and negotiation to a session where you appeared in a dungeon to slay monsters.
This part in itself isn’t necessarily bad on its own. The problem came from the way the transitions were handled. The players would finish a long roleplaying session of political intrigue, and the very next session would start with them in a dungeon. Due to the time constraints of 2 sessions, the DMs often felt pressures to get people right into heart of the content. This meant nothing could be a slow burn and it would be difficult to set things up in the long run.
Another DM was into low fantasy (think Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Chivalry) where magic was awe inspiring. Even simple spells were something to behold and be blown away by.
Another DM was into high fantasy anime settings, and an encounter would be like a fight in Samurai Champloo mixed with magic from .hack.
While not every single area of a D&D world will be similar in terms of magic accessibility, it was difficult to get a handle on what was powerful.
As a result, the world and the story were completely incoherent. Power scaling was out of control because some DMs wanted to be the “fun DM” and would just dump experience and items on players like crazy. Then came the biggest problem of all – The metagaming.
The problems with DMPCs is pretty well documented by other people and their experiences, but what if the DMPC would be a player next week and for the following month or longer?
This brought up a whole new suite of problems.
Some DMs would give the party their character’s dream item(s) to make their character super badass and awesome and it basically became a power fantasy expression and less of a fun world and adventure. Wow, coincidentally, the DM with the PC that uses scythes gave us a +5 Keen Scythe from a chest in a level 5 dungeon!
Then it took a really bad turn when one player metagamed super hard. He found that he could hold the current DM’s character hostage for items. Yep. That was the beginning of the very quick end of that campaign.
It started as a grand adventure about fighting orcs, saving cities, and hunting treasure. It became a game of appeasing egos and hostage situations. And if the DM punished someone for doing that, that player would just volunteer to be a DM soon and get retribution on that former-DM and restore their character.
We all remained friends, but it was over a year before we played D&D with that group again.
In retrospect, there are definitely ways that this system could have worked. We were all inexperienced, and I think we all thought we’d have the same ideas about what made a fun D&D campaign.
World building, power scaling, and player conduct would needed to have rules established out of the gate. I imagine writing a cohesive and interesting narrative from start-to-finish would be impossible, though, so it would likely need to be treated more like a serialized adventure from TV shows and less like a grand, Lord of the Rings-style adventure.
It was definitely a learning experience. Even though this could be done a lot better, I don’t know if I’d ever try it again. Maybe a shared world but the campaigns are individual to each DM?