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Game Master's Laboratory
259 members • Free
183 contributions to Game Master's Laboratory
14d •
How to get players to stay bought in with proactive roleplay?
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?
1 like • 1d
What a lot of gems in here! Echoing what Jesse and Jonah said, and it took me a few months to even grasp the idea of a proactive debrief every session. I’m keen on Stars and Wishes, and for some reason the goal discussion eluded me for a while. I was too busy trying to force the concept down folks to ask, which makes me not much different than the DM who laments that “my” players aren’t invested in my world. Annnnd I 100% have found that some players (not to mention groups) may not be interested in any, all, or certain parts of the proactive roleplaying mode. I also love what Eric said about it not being an either/or. My latest expression at work as we integrate software with a bunch of features has been, “It’s a valve, not a switch,” which is to say we can add aspects of the PARP style to the degree that it entertains the table. Season to taste, if you will. Keep it up, gang. Oh, and Matthew, just in case no one’s said it before: It is perfectly okay to play in other people’s groups, and run for other people. You may need to find more players to appreciate you and help you appreciate the ones you already have. There’s a feed out here in this forum about how to find other players. Some of us live in gaming deserts, and even still, sometimes it’s worth a try. What Justin Alexander says about practice and running games also holds true here: Just go out and do it.
2d •
Table set up from session 1.
I started DMing my first campaign yesterday. I wanted to share this shot of my set up because I think it's epic and augers good things about how this will go.
1 like • 1d
@Eric Person : That is a hot tip! My buddies at Fear the Boot play board games when someone’s missing.
12d •
Risk Aversion
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.
1 like • 2d
Has anyone seen a correlation between risk aversion and the time it takes to make a new character?
0 likes • 1d
YESSSSS!!! I am also satisfied when I can die a semi-glorious death and slap something new together. My Tuesday group plays a lot of five- or so-game arcs, so I will almost always push the shiny red button. 🔴
3d •
Daggerheart Trilogy
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!
0 likes • 3d
THE ETHER FRONTIER (every other Friday night at Tucson Mall) Concept, Aim, Tone, and Safety will go here when they’re established and refined.
1 like • 3d
What’s firm / decided - The Event: a meteor cataclysm shattered the old world; many people fled underground. Now the surface is barely safe again. - Power shift: underworld ancestries (dwarves/goblins/etc.) became the advantaged ruling class during the long underground era; tallfolk became “guilty until proven innocent” in some places. - Landscape: the impact zone is The Desolation (dead sand/glass/ruin), with rampant wilderness pressing right up to the scar. Travel between settlements still needs escorts. - Magic vibe: magic is tied to the Ancients (unknown even to me for now), whose remains can be refined into power/magic items. A secondary source of magic has been discovered by draining essence from bards via a special chair (think Dark Crystal meets Spelljammer meets The Golden Throne). - Party: strong bonds already (ID-10T clank guardian; Harry Bigtoes seraph/exile who saved a tallfolk; Finnick info-broker rogue, half goblin/half Infernus). We’re starting with a caravan escort toward one of the few big cities. I’m pulling from Oregon Trail as to “What could possibly go wrong?” - The Blooming Lily: an organization who is fearful and also sowing dissent. What I’m considering / not locked yet - The big city’s tone: grim and bookish (stories consumed privately vs performed), heavy on libraries/reading rooms; universal sign language makes “quiet culture” plausible. - Antagonists: bard-hunters / essence harvesters. - Wasteland travelers with a hollow bone hand-chime (Reaver-ish frontier corrupted folks meets Belgoi) - A shadow court of sorcerers influencing governments via “prophetic dreams” (herbs/crystals as the conduit). Illusionist and puppeteer versions of the Wizards of Thay. - Deeper layer: The meteor may have sunk far and is being held aloft by containment magic; the extraction economy might be a “necessary evil” to keep it from reaching the core and waking what’s below. Event-watch mages may be physically altered by long exposure. - Frontier horror seed (creepy/macabre tone(: a “Growing Road” — routes people have traveled for years slowly get longer / bend toward the scar. - The Blooming Lily is a larger network of independent cells of traveling carnivals, musicians and storytellers sowing dissent and running from the bard hunters. My first move is to leave graffiti around the landscape. Have y’all ever seen a flame lily? It’s wild!
5d •
Player Responsibility in Moving Scenes
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.
1 like • 3d
YES! Such a great idea. Ken Hite talks about using an index card that says, “Scene” to let the players know they’ve found all the clues (GUMSHOE). And super kudos to using Stars and Wishes. It’s an amazing tool.
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@james-willetts-2216
He/Him. Big time RPGer, sound engineer by trade, improv theater novice, cat lover, father of two, always looking to improve my GMing and PCing. ☺️
Active 1d ago
Joined Aug 10, 2024
Tucson
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