When I started playing 28 years ago, my group kind of naturally gravitated to a concept that we didn't even know WAS a concept at the time; A Shared Game World. From what I have heard later, most GMs developed and ran a world of their own, that was exclusively their own, or they utilized a published game world. If they were running a published world, it was no big thing for one of the other players to decide they wanted to run, and just start an adventure in that published world, using characters that had been developed in someone elses game.
If you were running your own unique world, the idea of handing over control of it to someone else so they could run their own game was difficult, to say the least. My group came to this arrangement naturally. We were friends before gaming, and we trusted each other. Tunnels & Trolls was the game we started with, and at the time, while we knew of Trollworld and the continent of Ralph, there was really no material other than solos that we could use for games. So we designed our own. This proved to be an ideal arrangement for cooperation. We all had ideas about what we wanted to be in our world, and because we were friends we tried to see each other's point of view and accomodate each other's needs.
There really weren't any control issues, in part, I think, because we were all new, and none of us had any more experience than any other. We set up a general geography, and assigned areas of responsibility. Then each of us created our own dungeons. There was a very general shared mythology, which grew through play, incorporating the deeds of many of our characters. It was a very satisfying gestalt. After many years most of that group has given up gaming, or moved on to other games. I admit that I have also played many, many games in that time. But that first campaign remains my favorite.
Tags: Campaign Shared T&t
