@Sektor – That sounds awesome. You know, I think I might suggest that. Take the first session and have us all take 1/2 hour telling the backstory of the the campaign. Get a stenographer, and we’re all set! Awesome idea!

@Scott Martin – I am a little worried about the GMpc, but in one main regard. One person hasn’t done a lot of GMing and questions her own skills. She’s great at making characters and I think it will be easy to fall back on the habits of playing.

@Nojo – That is an issue I hadn’t thought of. Loot, if a character leaves while being played, will be hard to acquire. Especially if one GM runs a monty haul session. We’ll have to work it into the social contract that the characters should have reason for sharing the loot. The idea of a player loot wish list is awesome as well! I think I may write something about that concept, if you’re cool with it.

I’d probably go with xp off screen, and extra loot (figure the loot as if there were N+1 players, where N is the number of players) on screen.

Each GM could be tasked with coming up with a level appropriate loot that perfectly fits the previous GM’s character. If you use player “Loot Wish Lists,” it could just be an item from the list.

What I can suggest, though, is an effective solution to the DMPC thing — at least, it was effective in our last campaign, where only 1 out of 10 sessions could be attended by every single player in the party. What we did was have the PC trod along, but not take part in any social interactions or direct combat. What I did allow (I was the only DM at that time) was that other players could call upon character-specific services (e.g. the Cleric would heal, the Rogue would look for traps, etc), unless it would disadvantage the PC.

Of course, in your case, since the original player of the PC *is* present, you could allow roleplaying to be done by the DM himself (and thus make it a fluff-DMPC), and leave the tactical decisions and skill/ability-uses to the other PCs (within limits, obviously).

One thing to keep in mind when tag-teaming; if you are replacing characters (Joe the Fighter was with the party for the Assault against the Plaid Dragon, but left the party while Dani the Avenger joined for the Dungeon of Dissection), then you’ll want to make sure that Joe advances in power and goodies as if he had been on the adventure.

@valadil – “I did a game like this a couple years ago and it was among the best games I’d ever played.” I’m glad to hear that! If it works out with this game, I may resurrect my one of my old Eberron games with this format. It got handed to me by the last GM, and then I brought it to a semi-quick conclusion, but doing a round robin thing might make that game run for a lot longer.

We were a little less anal about overarching plot than what you had in your outline. The first few games were oen shots, but as we got used to it we started making longer plot arches. It definitely took some getting used to, but once we learned to leave threads dangling instead of closing off everything, we left more for the other GMs to use. By the end it ran like any long running game with an uber plot.

We made leveling simple. Each time a GM finishes, that’s a level. GMs ran 2-4 session stories. It worked out real well.

We tried going with wealth by level, but IMHO we were underlooted. Nobody wanted to be the jerk who gave out that one piece of equipment no other GM wanted to deal with, so we all gave out relatively weak loot. If we had to do it again I’d insist on giving out gold according to WBL and letting players buy and sell as needed.

By far the best thing we did for this game was keep it all on a wiki. Everyone needed to be able to see the other character sheets. Some of us even published the campaign material we wrote up as we went, though it rarely mattered.

From the GM’s perspective, I find it challenging and fun to design adventures that fit the group’s chemistry, so I don’t require the team to have a priest or fighter in the party, for example. Our current D&D group has made it to a very high level without a priest, although we have relied on potions or the occasional NPC hireling a few times. And adventures that are heavy on the undead really make us crap our pants, but we usually get through them ok. (Besides, it’s good for the PCs to have to run away once in awhile, if only to remind them of their own mortality.) If you run a lot of published adventures, such alterations could be a real pain in the butt. However, if you design the adventures yourself, you can play to the character’s strengths (and occasionally exploit their weaknesses, just to keep them humble).