Same Game twice

[HDresden]

Question has anyone ever ran the same game twice? I.E. Run the game for two diffrent groups at the same time on two diffrent nights?

If so what has your experiances been? Has this been hard to sustain? Did it work for you?

I'm kinda curious to try it just to see how two totally diffrent sets of people react to the same situations.

[madman]

I ran Second Darkness for my pen and paper group and a FG group. I have to say that it was a lot of fun. the things i did for one group got better for the second group. and the groups would pass one another up then fall behind. so that the two groups got the better of it kind of back and forth. all in all it worked out great. And it was tons of fun. it lasted for about a year or so.

Chris

[HDresden]

I'm currently running a game on Wednesdays however I'm considering trying the same game 2 nights a week just to see the difference. I figure prep time would be minimal. My only worry would be getting players confused.

[Andugus]

I have been involved in running the same scenario and campaign for different players. It is interesting to watch different groups of people respond differently to the stimulus of the game. Because of this I would see GMing as essentially two separate games where materials used in one may or may not be utilized in the other.

This is a useful thing if developing content and you really want to playtest and see how it works out with different sets of players. Not so useful if you want to use the same adventure expecting the same results and GM workload. I guess my point is that you will end up generating work for each campaign as their arcs play out in unique ways.

[Phystus]

I've done it with modules in face-to-face games. I think I've run Ghost Tower of Inverness about four times... :D I don't think any of them went about it exactly the same way, so it was interesting in that respect.

But as an ongoing campaign, I suspect the parties will end up on separate adventure paths, and you'll end up having to prep separately for both. You'd still be able to reuse some material, (towns and the like), so it wouldn't be double the work. But it still might be quite a bit.

~P

[HDresden]

True I plan on that aspect off it, however major arc's would still be set in the same area, and thus have the same general creatures, enemies, allies. It may play out different but the same personalities will still be around. Which for me is the biggest workload of running a game is creating the personalities.

[Griogre]

I'm currently running the Wizard's adventure's path H1-3, P1-3, ect on two different days with different groups. As it is based off modules the prep time is the same initially. What does happen is groups tend to do different things and that may lead to some differances in the groups and some seperate prep time for each group.

A good example in 4E is magic items are suppose to be customized for you group. The modules tend to give out generic stuff but often I change the items to better fit the current group.

Thus with an adventure path I have found running the for seperate groups to be very little extra work for another group. That's because the path's plot keeps the groups heading in the same direction.

In face to face games I have used the same world for different groups in that case if they are not facing a common plot line they will almost certainly go to different places and then the amount of work to run two group is a little less than double because while there is some common work it is often smaller.

[Answulf]

For single adventures, I do it pretty frequently.

I have tried running two campaigns concurrently. At first it was less work because of the similar content, but it soon became more work as the paths of the different groups diverged. This wouldn't apply if you were running a railroad-type campaign like an adventure path, a series of published modules or dungeon crawls.

If you create your own stuff, I think the best thing to do is to make your adventure for your campaign players and then run it as a stand-alone with a pickup group as a test first. Get feedback on it, tweak it and it will be in good shape for your campaign. Plus you get to know it better, which makes it run smoother - and you get to play it twice!

[Doswelk]

I have done a variation on that...

When I was doing my Dark Matter Campaign (cannot remember if it was the D20 or the SW one!), I re-ran Exit 23 that's in both Dark Matter books (Alternity and d20) and also ran the other adventure that came in the Alternity book.

The difference was two players had done both before (when we played the Alternity version some 5+ years ago)...

Given the strange nature of my Dark Matter games I told them that if they remembered anything as they played the game so did their characters BUT I may change things from the last time I ran them!

This worked very well and as others have said re-running the game can have vastly different results.