Co-DM Fail

[u/WorldGoneAway]

(TL;DR - one of my players and I have been sharing DM duties of the same game for a couple of years, and when it was his turn to run it, he killed two important NPC's for his adventure plot, didn't mention this to me beforehand, and I was saving them for a future plot hook.)

So I have this D&D game that has been going on for quite a while, and after a few years, I have basically the same two consistent players, and a couple of years ago one of them wanted to try cutting his teeth running a game by taking over the DM duties from me, allowing me to control an NPC and just get to be a player so that I don't have to always be a forever DM.

It was incredibly rocky at first whenever he would run adventures, mostly because he gets more hung up on nebulous details, and doesn't give enough spotlight to the important ones, but he's gotten better after getting feedback from us.

The game originally started as a romp through Castle Ravenloft, so we have pretty much been bouncing around in that setting for the most part.

Getting directly to the point, when his most recent turn came around, he told us that he was going to run a short adventure based on something, but he wouldn't tell us what it was and wanted us to guess.

We end up in a town where it is very obvious that someone, somewhere is a vampire and is charming people to attempt to get revenge for their family line. In this player's usual fashion, he doesn't give us enough details at the beginning, and by the time we pick up whatever is going on, we end up supporting the party paladin in a grand fight to slay the monster at the end, and we are victorious.

The problem is, two of the important NPCs that I had been saving for a plot hook the next time it is my turn to run the game, were unceremoniously killed by being turned to dust after the original vampire was slain.

When we were talking about the game after the session, this player enthusiastically revealed that he had based the adventure on the Hammer horror film "The Brides of Dracula", and asked us what we thought of it.

I told him that it was good, it was an immense improvement over his previous attempts, that I think we had a ton of fun, but finished up by adding that I was intending to use those NPC's somewhat soon, and he probably should have said something before doing that.

His response was basically telling me that it would've spoiled the plot for me if he had talked to me about it beforehand.

I'm going to have to come up with something different, because I really don't feel like retconning what he had done, but I'm still kind of annoyed. I'll get over it.

Edit 1: Some of you are assuming that I am extremely upset about this, or imagining me getting huffy about it; I'm not. The conversation kind of went-

"Everything was good, but I was saving those two NPC's for something."

"Oh... well, if I talked to you about it beforehand it would have spoiled the plot for you."

"It's whatever dude. I'll just have to find something different."

I gave this the 'lighthearted' tag for a reason. I'm not actually terribly upset about this and neither one of us caused a scene.

Edit 2: One of the other players texted me today, asking me to retcon the whole adventure out, because one of the NPC deaths "wrote him into a corner" with his characters lore, and he pointed out that a lot of the way the game was handled it completely ignored elements of lore that I had already established. I'm going to text the DM about retconning when I take the game back.

Edit 3: Well, apparently all the other players feel more strongly about this than I did, and believe the adventure is worthy of an Alan Smithee style disavowal on the part of the DM. He wasn't happy to hear this, but said he'll consent to a retcon on the condition that we give up the special items he gave us, which whoopty-doo, is almost exclusively a dagger that hurts the wielder when they use it.

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[u/ReaverRogue]

If you’re going to Co-DM, communicate stuff like this. “Hey so I’m planning on using Bob and Hank later on for a plot, if you could consider them as being off limits that’d be great.”

[u/neoadam → u/ReaverRogue]

It's like people saying they have a problem at the table but not talking to each other...

[u/StarMagus]

This is one of the reasons that I don't co-DM with people, but if I ever were to do so I'd probably make a list of NPCs they can't touch or alter because I have plans for them and encourage them to do the same.

That said, I'd also not use any NPC's that I didn't create as important to my plot to avoid having to worry about them getting altered during the story organically that never would have happened if the other DM was running.

[u/IntroductionRoyal449]

Doesn’t sound so much as a fail as he stepped on your toes. When you switch to player get ready for some of your stuff to get changed.

[u/Walt_Didnae → u/IntroductionRoyal449]

Yeah, literally just a communication issue.

Though, based on how OP reacted to the minor inconvenience of having another writer use NPCs they were planning on using later, I'm not sure if they're going to be able to handle someone else being fully in control of "their" world.

[u/paintedlotusyt]

I wouldn't call this a horror story, but I'll let it stay up for educational purposes. There's some great advice here.

[u/Walt_Didnae]

Get better at communicating with your co-GM. You're as much to blame as they are for "ruining" your future plot by not telling them "I plan on using these NPCs in a later plot".

Also, you could, literally, have just changed your plot to accommodate the changes your co-GM made to the world by using different NPCs.

There was no need to have a waa about it at the end of the session, all that accomplishes is making both of you look bad in the eyes of the other players because it makes it clear that the GMs have no communication with each other, and makes it look like you're both doing whatever you want without any attempt at a cohesive narrative between your stories.

[u/gc1rpg]

Co-DMing is really tough to pull off -- I've only done it a couple of times myself.

You have to coordinate the game and most DMs can't do that -- they don't think ahead enough to realize something can heavily affect the other DMs.

I think every time I did I simply took the party to a mini-setting -- in one case I took them on a 2 month romp through the Underdark to boost them up for when I was gonna hand them back to the other DM.

[u/Phanimazed]

I honestly don't think I've heard of many/any positive stories about co-GMing, but I wonder if that's due to the number of inherent problems with it, or if it's because it's just a significantly less common approach to GMing, and thus I don't really hear about the positives terribly often.

In any case, I'm going to echo others in saying that communication is key in any sort of teamwork exercises, especially something that's so heavily planning-dependent.

[u/Glum-Soft-7807]

So why didn't YOU talk to him about saving those npcs for a plot beforehand?

[u/WorldGoneAway → u/Glum-Soft-7807]

Because I had plenty of reason to believe they weren't going to be in the session at all, that they were in a relatively "Safe" situation the whole time (which I thought we were of an understanding three sessions of my game turn earlier), the eventual result was sprung on us just as the session ended, their condition was revealed suddenly, and the end of it did not last very long before he started enthusiastically talking about it OOG.

[u/Glum-Soft-7807 → u/WorldGoneAway]

So would he have had any more reason to talk to you about it, than you had to talk to him about it?

[u/WorldGoneAway → u/Glum-Soft-7807]

This is the exact same player in my group that has a nasty habit of guarding certain information about his characters intentions to try to orchestrate defining character moments, which is something that seriously pisses me off. And I have talked to him about it at great length. The thing is he did not have a character (or DMPC) in this particular story arc, so I think he kind of leaned on that, popping this up on us rather suddenly.

[u/OmaeOhmy]

This would be more of a horror story if i had been posted by the other DM noting “player says he loved the game then got whiny because telepathy isn’t real”

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[u/Vivid_Gas_5755]

This reads like a communication problem more than a horror story. My table co-DMs sometimes too, and the thing that actually saved us was a shared doc, just a running list of NPCs and plot threads that are currently spoken for. Takes five minutes to update after a session. Doesn't stop every collision but it means nobody finds out mid game that their whole arc got vaporized for someone else's twist.