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.

Stumbled across another youtuber. His This Question Made My D&D Chracter 10x Better feels like proactive roleplaying advice for a player stuck in a non-proactive game. This core question "What do I want from the other characters at this table, and what stands in the way of getting it?" along with the concept of making it portable if you are creating a character in isolation is a compelling idea that I think can move into a proactive structure as part of my background/bio template. https://youtu.be/k02rtl0SGOM?si=s4EYaPcz2ySkuSXE

I was reading and re-reading some excellent threads by @James Willetts and @Eric Person about their campaigns. They posted pretty regularly about how the game was going, what they were learning, how they were prepping... interesting stuff. I love those threads (and even though I don't always comment, I do always read them), so I made a category just for campaign notes/chronicles/summaries. Those big, long-running threads go there. So if you're running a game right now please tell us about it! And if you like reading about the games other tables are playing, check out that category. You can change your settings for a particular post so you are notified when it updates (you want to "follow" the post), so you can read and follow along even if you don't want to comment. I want to read more stories!

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?

Since I started running proactive games, and especially with some collaborative worldbuilding, my games tend to be very fast paced. There’s always something going on, and my players are always sprinting forward as fast as they can. I’ve had a few groups say they want to turn down the speed a bit and have some lower stakes sessions, which they always call beach episodes lol, some time to just chill, talk to people, shop, engage in some tomfoolery, downtime, etc. I highly recommend incorporating that, especially if your players mention it. At first, it really went against my instincts—as a GM, I tend to prep by adding as much tension, raised stakes, and drama as I can cram in my notes, and I prep by specific encounter using a PC v NPC goal structure. So the more free form, laidback stuff made me nervous that it would be boring for my players—I felt like I had so little prepared! But it’s always resulted in a great time. My players will have the opportunity to do stuff they never would otherwise, and the Freeform format makes it so they really steer the story themselves. I’ll do very little and relax, and they’ll talk amongst themselves, form more goals, make allies and enemies, etc. anyone else had some good seasons this way? How did you prep for it?