The new Draw Steel adventures that MCDM announced has me very excited. One of them is a complete standalone shortish adventure—you explicitly don’t drop it into a larger campaign—in which you play as a group of criminals forced to do an impossible task or be executed (sound familiar?) I love adventures with very specific setups, to give the group a unified direction and a cool concept. Anyone got any other cool adventure (or homebrew) setups? Something that launched the group into the action?

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.

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 :)

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?

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?