In a recent coffee hour I talked about an obsevation that the 'engagement questions' I have been using to help move people into the headspace of the game sometimes have a secondary effect of getting players talking about goals without it feeling like a corproate performance evalaution on SMART goals. I thought a quick thread to share suggestions could be helpful. Looking for start of session questions to get players talking about their characters and their goals... 1. What is your heart telling you that you need to do? How about your brain? How about your gut? And which do you normally listen to? 2. Do you feel more seen after the confrontation in the rotunda? How does that change things for you? 3. What would keep you from accepting a position in the inner city? [i didn't think discussion would go there, but it did] 4. ??

Hi, I’m John. I’m an inexperienced DM who played a few ttrpgs as a teenager, and has since grown up, had kids, got them interested in DnD, watched them find their own rpg groups. I’ve only ever run a few home brewed one-shots for 5e. I’m interested in collaborative campaign design, so I followed the book recommendation here. I’ve played 5e, 5.5e, WFRP, Gurps, Dragon Warriors, Call of Cthulhu, and Daggerheart. I’m keen to try out Nimble, Vagabond, shadowdark, and probably a bunch more.

First: Play the game in front of you, with the people at your table. Second: Respect your players' agency. Third: Be generous with information Fourth: Prep situations, not plots Fifth: Invite randomness, intentionally. Sixth: Make choices meaningful. Seventh: Love your players Always gold advice.

We did Stars and Wishes at the end of the last session. One of the players shared that he enjoys that "the world is on a clock" and how that adds tension, meaningful choices, and a planning element to the game. The settings has a dangerous eldrich storm roll through every 5-9 days. They need to time their expeditions and projects around these storms. Sometimes the storms leave new problems for them to solve. Sometimes when they are out, something goes wrong, and they are worried about getting back in time. At the moment, this is a need to gather resources several days from shelter. What I wanted to share is that this world clock is powerfully synergistic with the proactive structure. The decisions of what goals to pursue next turn into a planning not just on sequence of the goals, but on how much time is left and how confident they are in their estimate of the next storm [see code]. It is creating both a player and story need to understand the storm so they can accurately predict time for the next storm. It is creating a motivation to use the hexploration rules to speed travel and make it more predictable. The player's comment was that it is so much more than wanting to get back to town for a ball two weeks away. Context: The storm is a cuthulu-ian eldrich being trapped in between planes. The time between storms and the duration of the storms is a tap-code spelling out messages. When the broke the code they had "_are yo" [Who are you?] They had a lot of confidence the next storm was a u [8 days, 10 hours]. Right now they only have "Re_" and have a lot of uncertainty of what is next. It also created a goal of getting access to records from the academy of prior storms.

Hey folks, tonight is our happy hour! You can find the details near the top of the lab, including the link to join. Excited to chat with you all! I'm fresh off of Gencon with lots of new RPG ideas to chat about. Excited to swap tips and tricks with everyone about how to run our games!