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?

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)

Something that I heard in a Matt Colville video I was watching again recently (I think it was the Running the Game on losing?) has been rattling in my mind. Essentially he implied that new players, at lower levels in TTRPGs are more willing to take risks than players with more time in the game, higher level characters etc. I think that's fairly accurate, but I've noticed a related feature. In my experience, both as a DM and a player observing fellow players, the behaviour persists into a new campaign. Even on their new level 3 characters people carry that risk aversion with them. My working theory is that they feel the new character is better- they've learned more about backstory, more complex/rewarding builds etc, so they feel more protective of the new character. I've noticed this so much so that I've seen a player go in to their first campaign complaining combat isn't deadly, and on the next campaign and character they're asking for character death to be impossible, the monsters to be unable to crit, and for fewer combats. Personally, I run 5e near enough RAW, so actual character death is pretty unlikely. You can still see it though, people will avoid fights, avoid going into dungeons and chase down items like adamantine armour or a periapt of wound closure to make them tankier. I floated the idea of using the lasting wounds optional rule table, and was met with a wave of people hating the idea. Is this something any of you have noticed/experienced? I'm not sure it's an outright problem per se, but it's a change that has to be navigated.

Hello everyone! Excited to have found this community. I’m a new game master and loved the proactive campaign book when I read it a couple of years ago. So, when I found out a sequel was coming, I started googling and came to this site! Woohoo! I have a practical question that I’d love some collected wisdom on: how do you provide just enough information about your world to give players enough to build interesting and informed goals (as if they have been living in that world). Especially if you are using published settings like Midgard (Kobold Press) or Fearun/Forbidden Coast (D&D). Maybe this will be addressed in the upcoming book, or if this was explicitly handled in the first please let me know! Been a year or two since I last read it.

For GMs who regularly run games with people they didn’t already know. Bonus points if you’ve ever been paid for it. Hey everyone —I found this community after reading Proactive Roleplaying (which I love), and it got me thinking more deeply about why some tables hold together for months (or years) while others slowly fall apart. I’m especially curious about games with strangers or semi-strangers, where chemistry isn’t a given and commitment is harder to predict. Rather than asking for advice, I’m trying to understand patterns. So I’ll start with one question: When a campaign falls apart, what’s usually the first crack you notice? A few optional prompts if it helps you think it through (no need to answer all of them): - Is it something mechanical (scheduling, rules, pacing), or something social? - Does it usually show up early, or after a few sessions? - Did you see it coming, or did it blindside you? If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d also love context like: - Whether you run paid or unpaid games - Whether your players usually come from friends, marketplaces, Discord, etc. I’m mainly interested in how real tables behave — not how we wish they did. Thanks in advance. I’ll be reading and asking follow-ups if that’s okay.