I have a question for those of you who played BECMI1e/2e D&D. The game has undergone some significant changes over the years. Personally I see them as positive as it has a much stronger emphasis on group story telling. While I really enjoy this aspect, I have found there's an incentive for every character to have some tragic/epic back story and for every story to have a fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance feel. So here is my question. Does anyone miss just a good old fashioned dungeon crawls where the stakes are just the lives of the PCs and the monsters in the dungeon and where modules could be played in 2 or 3 sessions (they were only about 30 pages long) and were truly modular. Modules today are anything but. Getting ready to run my own campaign now is so much more work than it used to be. As this question relates to proactive Roleplaying, it seems to me the modular approach to published materials from the 80s is more amenable to this style of play because the story arcs are much shorter. You can jump from one module to another tweaked for your characters goals. Has anyone run proactive Roleplaying in large published modules currently available and also run the smaller modules? Was there any appreciable difference?

I'm getting ready to start my own homebrew campaign in January. Since reading PR I've decided that I will provide the world and how the different factions will operate but my players will set their own goals and dictate where the game goes. However before they set their goals I want them to gain knowledge about the world from inside the game. My plan is to play the first three sessions as a prelude to the world. In these sessions they will learn several things that the average person in this world do not know. They will learn about two secret factions within the theocratic government that oppose each other. They will learn about different forms of magic and get trained in that magic. They will have an opportunity to join a secret underground organization and meet several key NPCs. They will meet the BBEG in a vision and have an invitation to join him and they will be invited a secret faction that are working against him. With all that knowledge they can then make informed choices. Have any of you tried this approach to proactive roleplay?

Nice to meet everyone, my name is Anthony! I have been playing RPGs consistently since 2020, mainly in one campaign that was running "Castles and Crusades" but switched to Dnd 5e 2024 last year. This year, I decided to try my hand at DMing and I have run a total of three one shots, though I am preparing for a few more one shots and an actual campaign in the nearish future. The systems that I'm either actively using or wanting to use are Dnd 2014/2024, Cosmere RPG, Daggerheart, Draw Steal, and Blades in the Dark for non magical style campaigns (there are others, but I primarily want to use these systems for now). My first campaign will hopefully be the time travel one of Zaman's Guide to the End of Time, though that setting is mainly around one city with limited time traveling to other areas, I'm kind of curious how to do a proactive campaign within this kind of setting that essentially requires the users time travel to the location, though I have some general ideas (establishing "what" should happen and not "which faction" will do the action as of late). I'm about halfway through the Proactive Roleplaying book, but I heard about this group from Ginny Di :)

My Kingmaker game seems to be falling apart. We have reached a stage where the players are not biting at adventure hooks and talking about their characters not being engaged with the kingdom. I think there are two problems (1) they are waiting for something in the story to engage them and (2) the end of the last chapter was wonderfully climatic and wrapped up most of their ongoing story arcs. I am grateful for the Collaborative Campaign Design book for giving me language to think about the character arcs more constructively and the Proactive Book for letting me push some fo the character engagement stuff back on them as the owners of their characters' stories. Now I think I will find out if the real problem is (3) player boredom after 94 sessions. I would love to finish the APs story, but have a hunch the best answer will be to start fresh.

I've been enjoying reading "So You Want To Be A Gamemaster" for the last month or so. Even though his discussion of Rumor Tables focused on hexcrawls, I am excited for its potential in my new city-based proactive game. The basic concept for hexcrawls is that the rumor table is populated with nuggets of information PCs can pick up that will direct them to hexes (get the story moving). Characters might pick them up chatting with a merchant or tavern keep, as 'treasure' in a foe's things, a mysterious note passed to them, as the result of some divination magic, or just shared between sessions as stuff characters heard going around town. Fundamentally, the Rumor Table is a mechanism to get enough world information to players that they can make meaningful (informed) choices. And it solves a problem I often struggle with and was anxious about for the proactive game. In my city campaign they will be a mechanism to share faction goals, progress on those goals, and introduce NPCs they might look for to connect with those goals. I can probably work in some city crawl type clues as well, particularly if getting to the location can start them on one of their goals. Alexandrian Article: Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables