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Game Master's Laboratory

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107 contributions to Game Master's Laboratory
Introduction
Hello, my name is Jonathan. I’m from Denmark and relatively new to both being a player and a Game Master and I'm hooked. I’ve been a Game Master for my 11-year-old son and a couple of his friends for about a year. I’ve also been playing in a group with other adults for a year, where we take turns being the Game Master, and now it’s my turn. In both groups, we use D&D 5e. In this context, I’ve become very interested in proactive role-playing and think it makes a lot of sense to give the players more responsibility for the story. That’s why I’m here—to exchange ideas and seek advice. We’ve just had our Session 0, where we created character goals, and all the players are on board and excited for the next part of the adventure. Now I’ve started preparing factions, NPC goals, and the first possible encounters. I'm considering using proactive role-playing for my son's group as well. I might modify it a bit so they can engage with it. Does anyone else have experience using it with children? Looking forward to being part of this forum. And thank you for a great book and introduction to proactive role-playing.
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New comment 15h ago
1 like • 2d
Hey Jonathan, great to have you! Some of my earliest experiments with proactive play was with some children I ran a game for, and it went super well. Depending on their age, some kids are in that sweet spot where their imagination is at maximum overdrive at all times and they’re just idea machines constantly, the more invested they get the more they want to set their own goals, especially if they’re new to D&D and haven’t fallen into that veteran player “I show up to experience the story” mindset. Excited to hear how your game goes!
0 likes • 1d
@Jonathan Svendsen Lilliendal for sure! Let us know how it goes if you do!
What was the best Campaign you never finished?
I was curious what was the best campaign you never finished? Why was it great? Maybe the combats were engaging and cinematic? The world building was excellent, and you felt like you were really part of it. The role-play could have been dynamic, and fun. What was the reason it stopped? And most importantly what would you need to see the resolution? A final boss fight, or a more narrative focused ending to the story? For me I really loved a sequel campaign where a player slide into the dms chair and my character got to see the fallout of the decisions made in the first story arc. I was also the only recurring character, so it was interesting to go from a Teen Hero, to a defacto Team Leader. It was a splinter group and one player, who the current and previous dm (now a player) just was really hard to schedule around. I think I might broach the subject once we the DM isn't running a campaign to see if we can at least do a little wrap up arc. This was inspired by Jonah's post last week (How many campaigns have you played in/run that actually finished?) , (https://www.skool.com/game-masters-laboratory/how-many-campaigns-have-you-played-inrun-that-actually-finished )
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New comment 14h ago
0 likes • 2d
In high school I ran a game for our D&D club—it was fun (if a little loud and chaotic) and we started a game one year we couldn’t finish just because the year ended and most of my players left, lots of mind flayers and horrors from beyond the veil and what have you, and I really had a blast. It was a shame we couldn’t wrap it up, but we got pretty close so I’m not toooo broken up about it.
Introduction
Hi there! I'm Jack! Currently, I'm preparing to write my first adventure (System Agnostic since One D&D isn't fully out yet, but we'll see how it goes writing it without a system in mind. I spend most of my time doing work for my current semester of college, so I'm going to do the actual adventure during the winter break.
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New comment 15h ago
1 like • 3d
Welcome, great to have you here!
Special Powers for Players
Hey everyone! I'm running my first real campaign and on my second session. I had the idea to (later) give my players some sort of special power due to the way the story's unfolding. I was hoping to do something based on wild magic since these powers come from a godlike sorcerer (like giving them a one time use of a wild magic surge specific to each character) but I'm honestly not sure what to do. This might be a bit ambitious of me for my first game too haha. Any ideas from you all? And have you ever done something like this before? I'm open to just about anything long as I can make it fit.
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New comment 3d ago
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A lot of the fun of the game comes from coming up with cool ideas like this! If you’re concerned about power balance, my suggestion is to reflavor magic items abilities as innate powers, and then you can anticipate the power scaling a little easier. For this, I’d recommend taking a look at the Wand of Wonder. If you want smth more predictable, you can always give your players something small, simple, and random that triggers on a nat 20 or 1 or smth, whether wild magic or otherwise.
How many campaigns have you played in/run that actually finished?
That is, how many TTRPG campaigns that you were a part of reached a conclusion where you'd say the fiction of the game was finished? Story told, done, complete, etc? Instead of fizzling out (due to scheduling conflicts, loss of interest, moving on to a new game, etc). I'm trying to figure out if my experience is typical or not. I've played in or run 20+ campaigns since I got into TTRPGs about 20 years ago, but I've only ever "finished" 3 campaigns. One-shots don't count! I mean something that was meant to be episodic and take a long time to unfold. (I made this a post instead of a poll because I'm interested in specifics if you have them!)
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New comment 2d ago
5 likes • 6d
I've run 3 campaigns that were more than a year that actually got conclusions, and going on two years in the one I'm currently running. I've wrapped up lots of shorter (1--4 month) games, and I've been in a player in a ton of those that finished, and a few yearlong ones. I honestly think that because I only started *really* playing regularly when covid hit, it let us play way more consistently and get used to virtual play. My group also plays even when we're missing people, as long as we have more than half, which I didn't always do. That's added dozens of sessions that would've been lost before
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Tristan Fishel
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293points to level up
@tristan-fishel-9232
He/Him. Co-Author of the Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying, GM, TTRPG enthusiast, half of the Quest Brothers. Wiser than Jonah Fishel.

Active 13h ago
Joined Aug 6, 2024
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