I’ve been working on a homebrew campaign setting and campaign for about 4-5 months now. The group is set to have its session 0 in late January. The campaign setting seems fine, just some short gazetteers on nations, cities, leader NPC’s, etc. As for the campaign I may be overdoing it, over planning, and frankly I think it’s set up for reactive gaming. I finished the book Collaborative Campaign Design a couple of weeks ago and I just started Proactive Roleplaying. I’m only one chapter in and I think I’ve gone way overboard on the campaign. I have created an entire outline for the campaign already. I started with the BBEG, made 4 lieutenants, one per tier-arc, and worked backwards to make this campaign outline. Now I haven’t planned every little detail. My plan was to give the players “missions” that they could choose from. However, I still think this is reactive gaming. The overall arc of the campaign is that a new leader took over a nation and has become a tyrant, attempting to control magic users, remove all influences of races other than human, etc. I based all this on the Earth Civil War from the 90’s Sci-fi show, Babylon 5. The players already know some of this as I gave them the following as the campaign pitch: The first campaign takes place in the Free Concord, a nation founded on liberty and open debate, now buckling under the rule of a new High Chancellor. You’ll begin the story as fugitives, pulled into a growing resistance as cities fracture, laws tighten, and magic itself comes under suspicion. This is a campaign focused on political intrigue, moral gray areas, and meaningful choices. It’s about deciding what freedom is worth as the costs continue to rise. So, they are expecting that. I already have the first two short adventures created. Should I just scrap all this work I’ve done and wait until session 0 to get the character’s goals? I’m sure I could probably work their goals into what I’ve already created somehow. As I read chapter 1 of Proactive Roleplaying, I thought to myself that I should just scrap it. Explain the campaign setting to the players at session 0, then let them decide where in the world they want to play, instead of forcing the Free Concord Civil War on them. What to do?

Hello all, Thanks for developing a community specifically for those of us who are hoping to improve our DM skills. I'm excited to try more of a proactive and collaborative approach with my players. I think if nothing else, it'll make me a better DM. I'm a pretty narrative focused DM, in that on the GNS scale, I'm more heavily into the Narrativism than the Gamifying and Simulation. I really feel that RPGs are a form of storytelling that has a lot of advantages that other storytelling media don't. That there is a game built into the storytelling medium makes it even better. I know that this isn't for everyone, and everyone wants something different from the games they play. But with that in mind, I've lately started studying a lot about how to make my games better and more memorable for my players. Coming across the Gamemaster's Handbook for Proactive RP and the Collaborative Campaign guides was great. My favorite parts of writing adventures are the parts that direclty relate to the character arcs that the players are hoping for. While I love writing the plot and worldbuilding as a whole, the satisfying part and the part that the players are the most invested in are the parts of the world and story that directly effect their characters. On the 6th of next month, I'm going to have a session 0 for an upcoming campaign. I'll be using a lot of the guidelines set forth in the Proactive RP and Collaborative Campaign books, with my own personal twist on it. I find that if you give the players absolute freedom to do anything they want in a game, then they will often do nothing. In my experience, you have to give them a seed of an idea, something to work with first, then they will go further with that than I usually would. Sitting down and asking my group "what kind of story do we want to tell? What kind of game?" would get very few answers. But if I give them a basic milleiu and setting and perhaps some themes, they will go very far with them. For my upcoming (D&D5e2024) game, I've told them that this will be taking place in a city that is occupied by an invading force. I have the name of the city (Chordfall), some of the basic geography of it (in some mountains surrounded by watchtowers) and why the city is there (sits over a series of mines that have a valuable magical resource called Echo-Iron). That is all I know about the city at this point.

I pulled together a group of story focused players to try an emergent campaign (collaborative+proactive). I am going to use this thread to share periodic updates on how it is going and what is working. Meetings will be sparse this fall and then weekly after the new year. It is five players from my in-person games who had to move out of town.

I want to learn about ways you make combat interesting and reward tactical creativity!

I stumbled across this guys channel this week and have been really impressed so far. https://www.youtube.com/@rpgphd/playlists So far, the depth and actionable detail has been very stimulating and challenging to absorb. I feel like I need to be taking notes. It is grounded in narrative theory and cognitive psychology (including references) and focuses on why problems occur and how to apply the underlying psychological principles within TTRPGs. Definately not a 'light read', but feels particularly empowering for my proactive game. This video on speeding up combat, or this one on this one on making NPCs feel alive might be good places to start. I am really surprised his videos don't have more likes.