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.

Hey everyone, we’ve got a new interview to check out! https://youtu.be/Oc0LsOhj5fE?si=1DDsEVjlE3JAHHdS This week, we chat with Val from Corkboards and Curiosities about all things GMing, particularly styles of play and preferences when running the game. If you haven’t checked out her channel, I HIGHLY recommend it, she’s got some of the best production value for TRPG videos out there right now and some amazing advice.

All games zeroed! And game one of “The Ether Frontier”! Posting my in-person Daggerheart games in three different threads here… Please post accordingly so I know which game you’re commenting on. 🙏 One thing I’ve noticed is that emergent/proactive play is pretty streamlined in the Daggerheart system during world-building and character creation. I’m also taking some of my lessons learned from previous campaigns since reading the PARP guide and gauging ahead of time how proactive and goal-oriented the players want the campaign to be. That means these three different campaigns may have varying levels of proactive versus reactive play. Stay tuned!

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)

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?