Hey GMs, we opened an optional paid tier for this community last week. The "Gold" premium membership includes: - Monthly workshop calls to talk about your game with Jonah/Tristan and other Gold members - Monthly "proactive packet" resources to drop into your game (enemies, locations, factions, loot) - Priority signup to the weekly proactive roleplaying-style games we run - More/better resources available in the classroom tab At midnight tonight (ET), we'll be closing the Founder's rate of $15/mo. and switching to our regular price of $29/mo. If you're on the fence about joining Gold, now is the time to act before the price increases. As a bonus, members who upgrade to Gold and choose the annual plan also get: - A signed copy of The Game Master's Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design - Enrollment in an 8-week proactive roleplaying campaign overhaul workshop, which we will NOT be selling separately If Gold sounds interesting to you, you can read the full details here. You can also upgrade from that page (instructions at the bottom of the navigator). Whether or not this is for you, we're happy to have you here in the Lab and posting about your games! See you in there.

Other than Tristan and Jonah, have the rest of us gotten to play in a game with a GM following these proactive principles? I have not and I wonder if that is one of the challenges I am facing, that I don't understand the subtlely of how some of these principles feel or should feel in practice. I don't have first hand experience with which things a GM does enhances or supports proactivity and which errode it.

We're running an 8-week workshop series about converting/creating a proactive roleplaying-style game with your group! The purpose is to help you turn your current or new campaign into a proactive, character-driven game and practice designing encounters that respond to your group's goals. Here's the syllabus: - Week 1: Welcome & About PARP - Week 2: Creating/Refining PC Goals - Week 3: Faction Design - Week 4: NPC Design - Week 5: Location Design - Week 6: Rewards - Week 7: Conflict - Week 8: Encounter Design + Testing Extravaganza This is a workshop we've run before and gotten good feedback on, but we've added/refined some things that I'm excited to show you. Enrollment in the workshop is a free bonus available to Gold members who signed up for the annual plan, so if you are interested but haven't done that yet, go check out Gold. We'll be recording the workshop and posting it in the Classroom for everyone else. The main drawback of the recordings is that you won't be able to work through the exercises with us and get feedback, but you'll still be able to do them on your own. Attached: some feedback from our last round of workshop members. If you're interested in joining us for the workshop, check out Gold!

It was great to meet those that joined last night. There were only 5 of us, but I see that as a strength as everyone could be heard and there was some great insight given. Afterwards I had the following thoughts (some of these will make sense in general, others might only make sense if you were there last night) 1. How can players really set goals when so much is unknown to them. My campaign is 4 sessions in. I doing a homebrew world where so much is not what it appears to be on the surface. Should goal setting sessions be done periodically, say at the end of every subplot? 2. Eric had the idea of doing mini sessions/one shots to give context to character relationships. To expand on that idea, what about a West Marches style campaign to get them to level 5 and then from that group of players (or subgroup if you have a lot of players) start a long term campaign. This means predefined relationships and characters that started from level one. D&D beyond has a module/one shot called Hold Back the Dead that would be a perfect intro for this kind of West Marches campaign. 3. My barbarian child character. My group wants to keep her safe and a lot of the feed back was to find ways for the group to do this, eg neutralize the threat, put her out of harms way. The only issue with this is it will either mean the game is over (neutralize the threat) or the character leaves the game (put her out of harms way). I was thinking this morning of a third option...make her a total bad ass. This is something my players will jump at and is rich for role playing. All of the characters have things they could teach her and, given that they love role play (session 4 was 2 1/2 hours with no combat and role played exploration) they would really get excited by this. It might stretch the game mechanics a little but the rules are there to enhance the game not to bind it. Anyway those are my post session thoughts. I may add more. I would highly encourage those who are interested to attend any future events. It was just fun to hang out.

Starting Wednesday March 18th, we'll be running a West Marches style, ongoing campaign that anyone can join! We'll use the practices of our books to build an emergent, proactive game, starting with a Session -1 and creating character goals. We're expecting to run a few different games in the future, but to start, we'll be using Blades in the Dark for it's pretty easy-to-pickup rules, and its crew rules (which facilitate a rotating table). Something we've been seeing in the lab a lot is that most of the GMs here haven't actually been able to play in a proactive game (as a PC, that is). So much of this hobby is learned via experience, plus we just want to run more games, so this is our way of getting both. So how will it work? On the 18th, we'll have a Session -1. There will be polls and other events in the leadup for folks who can't make it, so everyone will help shape the variation of the Blades in the Dark setting we'll be playing in. Afterwards, we'll play each Wednesday. Signups for a game will go out two weeks before it starts for our Gold members, and one week before for the rest of the lab---seats are first come, first serve! Our tables will start at a max of five players---this may change as we learn and adjust. The games will be absolutely free of charge to make them as accessible as possible (for reference, StartPlaying games will usually be about 15--30 bucks a seat). This is what's called a "West Marches" game. For anyone who doesn't know this style, it's basically an open table campaign with an ongoing setting. Whoever can make it to a session forms the group, they set their own objectives, and they usually work as some sort of broader organization (in this case, a crew of criminals). A player could attend a dozen sessions, or they could just try once and not need to feel pressured to continue. If you're interested in more info about what this style of game is, give it a google! If you want a longer explanation, this video has a great overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGAC-gBoX9k