I'd love to follow some of your guys games if you guys post them anywhere. I love learning by watching, and I think the main people I follow are more reactive roleplay games. So it'd be cool to see some of your guys proactive games in action for ahem. Research purposes.

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 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.

Hi, first post here. I've been DMing 5e for my friend group for going on 6 years now. In the last year I've been trying to use the principles of proactive roleplay, to highly mixed success. We play remotely, due to geography, which obviously introduces quirks and nuances not present at an in person table. Personally, I think it weakens the community element, but short of a significant lottery win I don't see how to change that. But getting people to send me their goals is unreasonably difficult. I've made it as low friction as I can, with a shared Google Sheet. They can punch in goals, things they want their character to buy, a wishlist of sorts for items, a column for little downtime activities. They've got a box each to tick when they're done. Doesn't mean I need a weekly update, so long as that box gets ticked each week and I know I can export that to a to-do list for prep. In the last 3 months I can only count 2 weeks where that tickbox has been done by the whole group. This week, none of them did so. We've had discussions, and people have said in the past that they're all in on the idea; they like it and think it makes for a better campaign. But they don't follow through on their part. 2 of the 4 have DMed, so they know that prep can be a slog. Something a player wants to do, that they came up with with a few minutes, can turn into hours of finding/making maps, picking enemies, writing NPCS etc etc. Right now, I'm in a bit of a hole of being angry and disappointed. I've written 3 different drafts of what I want to say, but I don't know if any really hit the core issue well enough. Part of me wants to just take "carry on and try to do better" off the table. We've been there before, and people did not do better. Some did worse. The other ideas I have are less satisfying, like dropping the approach entirely, or don't hit the real problem, like moving to a fortnightly game to give them more time. So how do people keep their groups on track?