Hi all, I'm 6 months or so into my first proactive campaign. I'm doing it for a group of kids (9-14) in my community. Overall it has been a lot of fun and they really loved the collaborative world building component. But I'm noticing is my motivation and creative inspiration has been dropping significantly. Every week when Thursday rolls around it feels like a slog to design the encounters and do the additional worldbuilding. I have a few thoughts that give context to this and I'd love everyone's thoughts. First, one of my main motivations for proactive roleplaying and collaborative worldbuilding is because I love facilitating the creativity of a group. I used to be an orchestra conductor and I loved creating containers for people to play and be creative while I gently nudged them along. This is true in other contexts as well. I love workshop facilitation, group discussions, and anything like that. Thus, I leaned into collaborative worldbuilding because I wanted the creative ideas to come from *them* while I shaped them. What happened in reality is that, no matter how much collaborative worldbuilding we do, it leaves at least 60-70% of quest design, and other details of world building for me to do. There's just SO MUCH detail that goes into even making a small scene interesting that I'm finding there's no way to have the players cover even half of this world we are playing in let alone the actual encounter design. So, the first thing that's contributing to this dip in motivation feels like I'm actually not interested in doing nearly this much world building myself but this approach actually leaves a surprisingly large amount for the DM still to write. Second... the fact that it was *their* ideas that generated the world (and not mine) I think contributes to this dip in creative motivation. It's not that I *dislike* their ideas outright, but they just didn't pop out of my own creative brain. When I did a DM coaching with Deborah Ann Woll, she emphasized the importance of a kind of "scratch test" that writers do to see what inspires them. Like when you get tested for allergies (or used to), they would put certain allergens on you and see what bubbles up. So she encouraged me to do the same thing for writing / DMing. Write all kinds of scenes, tropes, story archetypes and see what moves you.

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?

Ask your players, above table, to help by signalling or providing cues for when their RP moments are ready to move to the next scene. The last Stars and Wishes (feedback) discussion in my Beyond the Wall campaign was all positive and I specifically asked for negative or things I can work on. One player commented that once or twice I cut short RP a little bit to move scenes. We play online and I generally use the second pause/lull (4-5 seconds wait time) to move dicussion but in these cases it was a pause due to intensity that I did not correctly recognize. The player understood my motivation to move scenes and make sure everyone was involved. After some talks we settled in on cues being the problem and decided I should just ask for help. In the next session when the cue came up to change scenes I queitly asked "ready to move on?" and the player in a relieved voice said yes. I then mentioned that I sometimes struggle with recognizing and told the players they could help me with some form of verbal cue like "I look up to see if Snixx is back" or just breaking character voice and saying "ok". We then moved on to the next scene. It made an immediate difference and shared the table with the players in another way. I suspect that this is particularly important in our online games as so many of our societal norms for this are non-verbal. I suspect I will refine this with this group and then figure out how to write it out as one of our table norms. An aside on "Wait Time", for the non-teachers, we are really bad at this. If a teacher asks a question the students need some time to formulate the answer before responding (particularly if they couldn't anticipate the question such as what they do on their turn in combat). In general, this is a minimum of 3-5 seconds. This is a excrutiatingly long time for the teacher sitting there knowing the answer. To train teachers to leave the uncomfortable silence I have a simple exercise. Have someone with a stopwatch ask you what your name is and time how long it takes you to answer. You try to wait silently five seconds before answering without counting in your head. Most semesters in teacher training people manage to last about 2 seconds. Learning to be comfortable with the silence is really hard.

I hope that this kind of post is allowed. If not, please accept my apologies, I just wanted to post a plug for a great resource that I just came back from. https://dndinacastle.com/products/dmu This last weekend was the first "Dungeon Master University" run by the DND in a Castle company. It was held in Atlanta and lasted 2 days, and it was an incredible experience and opportunity to learn from many of the best in the business. I got to take a Worldbuilding class from Keith Baker (creator of Eberron) and Monte Cook (lead director for 3rd edition D&D and worldbuilder of many many D&D worlds). It was an incredibly educational opportunity, and a hell of a lot of fun. Other classes included Skill Building, Campaign Design and Career Building. There were great seminars on how to run puzzles in great ways from the lead puzzle designer for many major adventures, and how to run games for high level characters from B Dave Walters (who is all over the internet for being generally great as a DM and storyteller) and Live Streaming by Chris Perkins (lead designer for much of 5th edition D&D who now works for Critical Role/Darrington Press). There were "Game Labs" where you could run a game for others including a faculty member and get great in depth real time feedback and advice on how to improve as a DM. I got to play in a game set in Eberron with Keith Baker, and it was really fun. But I think the best part of it was just wandering around and meeting dozens of other cool people who all had the same passionate interest in DMing as I do. I'm usually a really introverted person, but this weekend I had no problem just sitting down for dinner with a group of random strangers and immediatley starting up a conversation in a great welcoming community. It's not cheap, but if you can swing it, I highly recommend it as a resource for becoming a better DM.

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.