Joint MC'd Games

My regular MC and I have been playing for a few years together, and all of our campaigns have been set in the same mythos. He has been talking about co-MCing a new universe with me. I've really playing through fictional history and enjoyed designing threats  for different parts of the new world but I was wondering about the logistics of this. I see three options.

1) We MC simultaneously and tag in/out between scenes.
2) We take turns MCing every other session.
3) We MC one full campaign and then switch.

I'm wondering if 1) going to be too confusing and awkward. 2) and 3) seem more accessible and also allow for us create/play as our own PC's.

Thoughts?

I think Apocalypse World and its hacks are good candidates for this sort of thing because they already have so much collaborative world-building built in.  While the MC is responsible for the world and making it feel real, many of the cues will come from the players.  Also, I feel like it's less "plot" structured, so rotating through MCs seems to me like a pretty cool thing to do.  The biggest thing is to make sure that both/all people who are going to be assuming the mantle of MC are operating under the same rules, assumptions, and expectations.  You'll probably want to hash out major elements before introducing them into the story ("hey, wouldn't it be cool if giant killer robots starting coming out of the psychic maelstrom!?!), but other than that I say go for it.

And let us know how it goes, and if you learn any valuable lessons along the way!

We did 1) once and it worked out fairly well. One thing to keep in mind is you should reduce the number of fronts you each manage to keep the total number the same. And clearly divide up which threats and fronts belong to whom.

I think any of the approaches could work, though I personally would much prefer #3 or #2 to #1. Switching off every scene makes it very hard to develop any sort of momentum within the session, and also encourages very linear, separate scenes -- there's much less room for cutting between simultaneous scenes, etc. If it was like a first half, break, second half set-up, that would be more manageable, but still seems awkward and fiddly to me.

Of course, #1 works better if you instead just run the game as mostly MCless, so that neither or both of you are just always MCing to greater or lesser degrees depending on what is happening. (I played a playtest of a game just last week that explicitly removed the single-MC role from the AW engine, and delegates MC-esque responsibilities based on a division of Fronts, basically.)

#3 would definitely be my personal choice, especially if everyone can figure out how to keep the campaigns short -- like 6-10 sessions or so -- so that the switching-off-but-staying-in-the-same-Apocalypse feels relevant, and whoever is MCing second still has plenty of room to add their fresh take on the material. Every other session could be excellent too, though, especially if the MCs figure out some ways to make that fictionally or thematically coherent. (By dividing Fronts, for example, or by having a setting that is split in some interesting way.) I think #2 is the best option if you have very compatible MCing styles and also really want to heavily riff on each others' contributions.

Here's a great guide:

http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2867.0

I must've aced the roll with double sixes, that link was lovely.