Need advice for starting a Megadungeon-themed game

Hey guys! So I'm close friends with a couple of DMs and players across four or five campaigns of a shared friend group who've always had the same issue: one or two of our players being unavailable each week, leaving us to stew for months at a time.  To help fill the void, I've made the suggestion of a casual, rotating DM pick up type game of 5E where we play in the same huge, ever expanding dungeon that partially repopulates each time the players leave.  The size and makeup of the group doesn't matter, and you can run the game as long as you want. It's a lofty ideal, but I want to make it happen.  Here's some question I have before I start Does roll20 support multiple DMs? Even if it does, how has your experience been with that?  Would I be better off making one "TheDM" account and sharing it with friends who want to run games? How would you go about making a repopulating dungeon where players don't get bored by going through the same rooms and content over and over and not adding anything on? Checkpoint Portals? Multiple entrances? New rooms and additions to the dungeon? Rules to help new, level 1 characters catch up really quickly to their cohorts? What infrastructure should I set up in the forums beforehand? Links to Monster Calculators and Combat Calculators? (Yip yip!) A unified treasure rolling table/treasure guidelines used by all DMs? Rules on shopping outside of the dungeon? What general advice do you have from past experience/common sense that you'd give to someone trying to organize this? 

JagOffAllTrades said: Hey guys! So I'm close friends with a couple of DMs and players across four or five campaigns of a shared friend group who've always had the same issue: one or two of our players being unavailable each week, leaving us to stew for months at a time.  To help fill the void, I've made the suggestion of a casual, rotating DM pick up type game of 5E where we play in the same huge, ever expanding dungeon that partially repopulates each time the players leave.  The size and makeup of the group doesn't matter, and you can run the game as long as you want. It's a lofty ideal, but I want to make it happen.  Here's some question I have before I start Does roll20 support multiple DMs? Even if it does, how has your experience been with that?  Would I be better off making one "TheDM" account and sharing it with friends who want to run games? You would make all the GM's co-GM's and they will have all the capabilities of the game's creator inside the game. The one with the highest subscription should make the game as any game feature such as dynamic lighting, api scripts, etc.. is based on the creators subscription. JagOffAllTrades said: How would you go about making a repopulating dungeon where players don't get bored by going through the same rooms and content over and over and not adding anything on? Checkpoint Portals? Multiple entrances? New rooms and additions to the dungeon? Rules to help new, level 1 characters catch up really quickly to their cohorts? What infrastructure should I set up in the forums beforehand? Links to Monster Calculators and Combat Calculators? (Yip yip!) A unified treasure rolling table/treasure guidelines used by all DMs? Rules on shopping outside of the dungeon? What general advice do you have from past experience/common sense that you'd give to someone trying to organize this?  The rest of this is considered offtopic for this forum and should be pursued on an appropriate forum. From the Roll20 Community Code of Conduct : The Roll20 Forums exist to discuss topics directly related to the use of the Roll20 program. Anything that more fittingly could be discussed on another website SHOULD be discussed there. Here are some good places to discuss this topic: /r/rpg /r/dnd /r/dndnext

Multiple DMs: I know it's possible, but I've not been in a game with multiple DMs Making the dungeon: For some reason I see the tower from the first half of the first season of Sword Art Online when you mention this. So, maybe not so much that they leave the dungeon as there are "safe zones" along the way where things can be bought/traded. In order to move deeper into the dungeon, they've got to beat some boss or figure out some puzzle. The dungeon can be as big as you need it to be, just add more levels. For helping new players (I am admittedly not terribly experienced at GMing) it seems to me that it would be better to have new players start at some percentage of the party average or the max player (not sure which would be better). If your party is at 15 and someone needs to roll a new character; starting at level 1 is pretty much just asking for needing to roll a new character again, whereas starting new characters at say 70% of current party average would give you a level 10 new character (still significantly lower than the party, but not an insta-death/totally useless party member). Infrastructure: I know you aren't a pro member, but it might be worth it to have the creator upgrade to a pro so that you can use scripts. I'm thinking particularly for your treasure tables you could use the recursive tables script to create interconnecting loot tables that get rolled automatically from within Roll20. Seems like the best way to make sure everyone does it the same way. This would also be useful for setting up the shopping possibilities so that the same level of gear is available from DM to DM. Similarly, I think I'd have all the DM's get together and create a monster index of characters in the journal (if you had pro, you could make this in a 'repository game' and transmogrify whatever is needed for a given session into the live game). DM's would then simply pull the monsters they need for the session and the stats and tokens are already setup (again ensuring consistency from DM to DM). General Advice: Haven't done anything like this (and am fairly new to RPG's), but it sounds like a blast. Not sure how prevalent they are on the LFG page anymore, but there are usually at least a couple "shared-world" games on there, and most of them have wiki's and forums setup that you could probably stalk for ideas on making it work.

I used to run a "GM school" in one of my games, I would bring in aspiring GMs and let them see under the hood. I also usually open up my one shots to interested players after they are run, so they can see how I did things. As far as advice Don't do it, it will eat your soul!  Actually, all seriousness aside, Roll 20 is perfect for giant dungeons. Just break them up into small pieces so you don't overwhelm your players computers, also, you can recycle "used" sections and add/subtract a few details, add new enemies, lather rinse repeat,