I use AI a lot for RPGs, in my case DnD 5e. I’m confident some of you hate AI and for good reasons. Some may be unaware. We may know people who let it replace their own creativity. I brainstorm with it. For example, we had Session -1 last week. It my first time facilitating it and I’m sure it needs inprovement. We developed factions. Well…we developed a ton of ideas for factions. I will use one as an example. The players feel done, so I want to organize their faction ideas into something cohesive and then ask them to edit it (we need one more short Session -1) So I said to AI, “Now let’s create factions. I’ll give you the notes from Session -1 and then let’s discuss the faction. Discuss! I don’t need you to create a faction for me.” Then I gave it these notes: The world is a little bit like Harry Potter, with some people that know about magic and most people do not. - This faction wants everyone to know about magic, wants to expose magic and make it public. They want power and to control it - They are hunting the party. Opposed to the magic group and the cleric group that dislikes use of magic not sanctioned by the gods. They are working behind the scenes — working with the assassin’s guild. It’s a network of cells, not centralized AI asked about their motivation, what they thought was wrong with the world, and what their methods were. Also, why are they hunting the party? Finally, it asked how united or decentralize the cells are. I used voice-to-text to give it a long answer in response to everything it provided. 1. It clearly didn’t understand my notes because my notes are out of context. So I explained them. 2. It asked a lot of really good questions and made some suggestion suggestions. 3. I disagreed with a lot of the suggestions, liked some of them, but the best part was that it launched my own creativity. I know all the other background for this world and the probing questions and ideas allowed me to really think about what the players wanted.

We are unbelievably excited for the launch of the second book in the Game Master's Handbook series, and follow-up to the Proactive Roleplaying book: The Game Master's Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design! This book walks GMs through planning and executing full campaigns, from a full Session -1 system to kick things off to finishing every arc in a satisfying conclusion. We are so, so, so proud and grateful to share this with you, and we can't wait to hear what folks think! You can find it on Amazon (link below) or with all major book retailers, so check what's available near you! We can't wait for you to read it! We'll have more news for you soon, so keep an eye out! Thank you all again for being a part of the journey, and we'll be chatting with you a ton in the coming days. There's an invitation to this lab in the book this time, so we're expecting a few new friends in the coming weeks. We can't possibly convey to you all how grateful we are for the welcoming, helpful, and kindhearted people here, and we trust that vibe will continue as we meet new folks. Talk to you soon! Tristan https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Handbook-Collaborative-Campaign-Design/dp/1964487048

Big news everyone! Jonah and I have been hard at work, and it's finally time: the next book in the Game Master's Handbook series is almost here! You can take a look here. The Game Master's Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design is the follow up to our Proactive Roleplaying Book, with lots of the same core philosophies but covering new challenges and topics. We're super proud of this one, and we think we've taken all the lessons we learned from the Proactive Handbook and made something really special for this one. If the first book was about creating player-driven narratives, this is about creating collaborative campaigns: how to discover a story with your friends together, not tell them one you've already written yourself. We've worked super hard to make this concept as approachable as possible, even for GMs that don't enjoy using improvisation at the table, and I'm pretty confident we've succeeded. While I'm very proud of our first book, it was definitely a learning experience, and I think those lessons were put to good use---I genuinely believe every single chapter in this book has something useful for a GM's table (and you don't need to have read the Proactive book to enjoy this one---they cover different topics!) The incomparable Jeff Ashworth, creator of the original "Game Master's Book of ____" series, of which our handbooks are cousins, continued to consult with us on this entry, providing invaluable feedback along with Phil Sexton and Tim Baker. Will Earl (of DnD Shorts fame) is writing the foreward, and Luke Eidenschink returns with his fantastic illustrations. We could probably write about this book for a very, very long time, so we're going to try to spare all of you from that by hosting a *live Q&A here in the lab Tuesday, April 8th, at 8:30 PM EST.* We'll post more details soon, and for those who can't make it, we'll be collecting some questions beforehand and recording the session to post in the lab, so don't worry!

Hola Masters! I’m still working on the very first proactive campaign and I have a question maybe you can all help me? When a player sets a goal, let’s say a short one. And the step/steps he is going to take to complete it, is it always right? Example: My players sets the goal of killing the Kobold King, asking around he is told by an NPC that it is hidden in this cavern. May the NPC been lying? Is it better that the players fulfill their goals using exactly the steps they came up with to do so? All advice will be appreciated! Gracias!

I have been using Notion off and on for several years to keep up with my GM notes, session prep, etc. Partly based on Sly Flourish's Lazy DM templates. It has been very handy to have all of this in one place, but sometimes it can be over-complicated. I have more recently been using Obsidian to do this same thing as I also use Obsidian in my daily life for work and personal projects. Again, I have just transmongrified the Lazy GM templates from Notion to work in Obsidian. Everything was going great until I ran across this little book about Proactive Roleplaying that has upended all of my thought processes about how I both prep and run my games. I was wondering if: - anyone here has experience with either of these systems in terms of Proactive Roleplaying. Would love to hear your usage on either. (Please no "X is better than Y" discussions. I deal with that enough already and have come to determine that each system works for each person for different reasons, and that is ok.) - for either one of these, how would you set up goal tracking, faction tracking, session planning, etc. I have some ideas, but we are far better as a hive mind, right? Looking forward to hearing from you. Jay