Spinning off from Robert Rendell’s thread, here’s the shared world/open table setting that I’ve been working on. It’s intended to occur in real-time, and permit a rotating GMship. The ideas I have are as of yet untested. Has anyone done anything like this in practice before?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwbHes6iNuGrdThPNXQwTi1HdTg
I like it a lot. Very nice setting for open table play, and allowing anyone to GM would make for quite an interesting campaign, assuming that everyone is on a similar page. It takes real advantage of the on-the-fly play-to-find-out nature of Dungeon World by giving each GM just as much information about the world as any other player (because they are all also players).
By “real time”, do you mean that the game time a character experiences in a session subsequently “locks them down” for an equivalent amount of real time, and they can’t participate in another session until they’ve returned (and recovered etc.)? That might create a bit of an “energy barrier” for visiting sites that are more than 3 days away from town, since it would take more than a week of game time to get there and back (and assuming players would generally have a weekly schedule of availability). OTOH the idea of “if you want to play more, GM some games” is nicely viral 🙂
Have you considered the Greybark campaign’s idea of each player (including the GM) picking only one element from their session to make “persistent”, reducing the volume of facts about the world that need to be carried forward? Given that the campaign might end up with many GMs, it might make things more manageable. Or it might be fine.
Yes, I have considered that PCs might get locked out for a long time. There’s a few options, such as “shrinking” the map to put more things within that radius, offering the ability to create portals between town and a certain site to shorten travel time, or changing the time scale to 1 RL day equaling 2 game days.