So I recently finished reading through Jonah and Tristan’s role playing book as well as Return of the Lazy DM. Both excellent reads by the way and you should check them out as a game master, but does anyone suggest other books on running games?

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 took a trip down memory lane and looked over my old game prep notebooks. Some of them were more than fifteen years old, and the prep in those was pretty atrocious haha, lots of huge blocks of text and way way more information than I could ever use. What really surprised me is how different my prep was even just a year or two ago—the way I prepare my sessions has really changed a lot over the years, and I tend to mess around with it a lot still. These days, I tend to improvise a lot more, and most of my notes are about player goals, bullet point lists of potential challenges and complications, and a few quick notes on NPC names, goals, and traits, alongside any mechanical stuff that’s too hard to come up with in the moment (puzzles, stats, etc) How has your prep changed? What changed it? I think the biggest influences that changed my prep drastically were proactive Roleplaying, Blades in the Dark, and the videos of Matt Colville (especially his downtime video and his sandbox versus railroad video)

I hope that this kind of post is allowed. If not, please accept my apologies, I just wanted to post a plug for a great resource that I just came back from. https://dndinacastle.com/products/dmu This last weekend was the first "Dungeon Master University" run by the DND in a Castle company. It was held in Atlanta and lasted 2 days, and it was an incredible experience and opportunity to learn from many of the best in the business. I got to take a Worldbuilding class from Keith Baker (creator of Eberron) and Monte Cook (lead director for 3rd edition D&D and worldbuilder of many many D&D worlds). It was an incredibly educational opportunity, and a hell of a lot of fun. Other classes included Skill Building, Campaign Design and Career Building. There were great seminars on how to run puzzles in great ways from the lead puzzle designer for many major adventures, and how to run games for high level characters from B Dave Walters (who is all over the internet for being generally great as a DM and storyteller) and Live Streaming by Chris Perkins (lead designer for much of 5th edition D&D who now works for Critical Role/Darrington Press). There were "Game Labs" where you could run a game for others including a faculty member and get great in depth real time feedback and advice on how to improve as a DM. I got to play in a game set in Eberron with Keith Baker, and it was really fun. But I think the best part of it was just wandering around and meeting dozens of other cool people who all had the same passionate interest in DMing as I do. I'm usually a really introverted person, but this weekend I had no problem just sitting down for dinner with a group of random strangers and immediatley starting up a conversation in a great welcoming community. It's not cheap, but if you can swing it, I highly recommend it as a resource for becoming a better DM.

Hello all, Thanks for developing a community specifically for those of us who are hoping to improve our DM skills. I'm excited to try more of a proactive and collaborative approach with my players. I think if nothing else, it'll make me a better DM. I'm a pretty narrative focused DM, in that on the GNS scale, I'm more heavily into the Narrativism than the Gamifying and Simulation. I really feel that RPGs are a form of storytelling that has a lot of advantages that other storytelling media don't. That there is a game built into the storytelling medium makes it even better. I know that this isn't for everyone, and everyone wants something different from the games they play. But with that in mind, I've lately started studying a lot about how to make my games better and more memorable for my players. Coming across the Gamemaster's Handbook for Proactive RP and the Collaborative Campaign guides was great. My favorite parts of writing adventures are the parts that direclty relate to the character arcs that the players are hoping for. While I love writing the plot and worldbuilding as a whole, the satisfying part and the part that the players are the most invested in are the parts of the world and story that directly effect their characters. On the 6th of next month, I'm going to have a session 0 for an upcoming campaign. I'll be using a lot of the guidelines set forth in the Proactive RP and Collaborative Campaign books, with my own personal twist on it. I find that if you give the players absolute freedom to do anything they want in a game, then they will often do nothing. In my experience, you have to give them a seed of an idea, something to work with first, then they will go further with that than I usually would. Sitting down and asking my group "what kind of story do we want to tell? What kind of game?" would get very few answers. But if I give them a basic milleiu and setting and perhaps some themes, they will go very far with them. For my upcoming (D&D5e2024) game, I've told them that this will be taking place in a city that is occupied by an invading force. I have the name of the city (Chordfall), some of the basic geography of it (in some mountains surrounded by watchtowers) and why the city is there (sits over a series of mines that have a valuable magical resource called Echo-Iron). That is all I know about the city at this point.