Hi all, I'm 6 months or so into my first proactive campaign. I'm doing it for a group of kids (9-14) in my community. Overall it has been a lot of fun and they really loved the collaborative world building component. But I'm noticing is my motivation and creative inspiration has been dropping significantly. Every week when Thursday rolls around it feels like a slog to design the encounters and do the additional worldbuilding. I have a few thoughts that give context to this and I'd love everyone's thoughts. First, one of my main motivations for proactive roleplaying and collaborative worldbuilding is because I love facilitating the creativity of a group. I used to be an orchestra conductor and I loved creating containers for people to play and be creative while I gently nudged them along. This is true in other contexts as well. I love workshop facilitation, group discussions, and anything like that. Thus, I leaned into collaborative worldbuilding because I wanted the creative ideas to come from *them* while I shaped them. What happened in reality is that, no matter how much collaborative worldbuilding we do, it leaves at least 60-70% of quest design, and other details of world building for me to do. There's just SO MUCH detail that goes into even making a small scene interesting that I'm finding there's no way to have the players cover even half of this world we are playing in let alone the actual encounter design. So, the first thing that's contributing to this dip in motivation feels like I'm actually not interested in doing nearly this much world building myself but this approach actually leaves a surprisingly large amount for the DM still to write. Second... the fact that it was *their* ideas that generated the world (and not mine) I think contributes to this dip in creative motivation. It's not that I *dislike* their ideas outright, but they just didn't pop out of my own creative brain. When I did a DM coaching with Deborah Ann Woll, she emphasized the importance of a kind of "scratch test" that writers do to see what inspires them. Like when you get tested for allergies (or used to), they would put certain allergens on you and see what bubbles up. So she encouraged me to do the same thing for writing / DMing. Write all kinds of scenes, tropes, story archetypes and see what moves you.

I pulled together a group of story focused players to try an emergent campaign (collaborative+proactive). I am going to use this thread to share periodic updates on how it is going and what is working. Meetings will be sparse this fall and then weekly after the new year. It is five players from my in-person games who had to move out of town.

We’re finally ready to release the remaining interviews we did a few months back! This week, we’re chatting with the Justin Alexander (aka the Alexandrian, and author of So You Want to be a Game Master) about all things GMing! You can watch it on YouTube, or find additional discussion and commentary here on the lab under the classroom tab. https://youtu.be/QuuzPIZZSq4?si=qoq4bTsDIPFfGlpq We’ve been chatting with some of the best GMs in the business in a “GM Masterclass” style podcast, aimed at providing advice and techniques for more experienced GMs. We’ve posted our chats with Bob Worldbuilder and The Questing Beast, and you can look forward to some wonderful folks as we continue posting new interviews in the coming weeks! You can also find shorter clips of those interviews on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

I started DMing my first campaign yesterday. I wanted to share this shot of my set up because I think it's epic and augers good things about how this will go.

Over the holiday I made a "dice funnel" to let me players roll their own secret checks. It was an I'm bored and I am not going to do real work project. Basically, the players throw the d20 into the funnel and tells me their modifier, it drops it gently down into my cardboard dice tower, and finally into a tray on my staging table. After the roll I hand it back down the table. Seemed fun, so I kept it up for one session for each game. Now the players are unanimous that it should stay. They are never unanimous on the first take. Jokes on me. They also say the polka dots (the oldest bed sheet we had) have to stay. No eye of sauron for me. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FDKpvHdGXCI. Context: In PF2e when a character would not immediately know the result of a skill check (e.g. stealth) it is a secret roll and the GM is supposed to roll for the player. On VTTs the player hit roll, but sees ?? on the dice, in person I didn't have a solution.