The gist of what's below: our new RPG, how to get it, and why we made it. This month, instead of our usual Proactive Packet for Gold members, we're releasing a manuscript for our Proactive RPG, The Ordained: a fast-paced, storytelling RPG meant to be run in short campaigns. I'm hoping it creates about as much encouragement as possible for proactive playstyles, with less lecturing and books to read. Those are fun (at least for Jonah and I) but actually playing the game is more fun. The game implements most of the major principles of our books and merges them into a hexcrawl, sandbox-style game with lots of storytelling elements. PCs literally get their hands into the narrative, engaging in collaborative worldbuilding in the fiction by respooling threads of fate as best they can. It's also a punchy 40 pages (counting covers, maps, etc) so it's a pretty quick read to get to the table. How do you get it? It's in the Classroom tab under the Proactive Packets tab, which Gold members have access to. It's just an initial manuscript now (not even a playtesting manuscript) so it's up for our Gold members. When we have a finished draft, I'll run some closed playtests. Once it's through layout and art, it'll be up through DriveThruRPG. Until then, it'll stay in the Classroom tab for our Gold members---while it's a complete game, it's not a finished product, so I don't really want to represent our work with it on DriveThruRPG or something. This is sort of an experiment with marrying proactive principles into game mechanics (something many games already do!) in a controlled environment: it's short and punchy, builds a lot on some other pretty player-driven games, and has a lot of step-by-step setup for the game that uses proactive principles without necessarily giving a powerpoint on them. That's because my other motivation is easier onboarding for our players. Jonah and I's biggest regret about the first book is that we devoted very little space to actually getting players on board with, and indulging in, the principles of a proactive roleplaying game (a pretty big oversight since the game style is, well, player driven). This game doesn't outline those principles in the same way, because in order to create characters and use them effectively, you'll have to follow them (although there is a few snippets of lecture, as condensed as I could get them). We have other onboarding ideas for PARP, like live play and new written projects, but this is the one I got done first.

Tonight at 7:00 PM ET, we'll have our weekly happy hour! Feel free to drop in---we'll chat about our games, pitch ideas, and trade tricks for running! You can join by just clicking the live event link at the top of the feed at 7:00. See you there!

Hey everyone. I just wanted to plug the group chats that are happening twice a week now. I'm in the Friday one right now and Alex is leading a great discussion on how to have inter character (not inter player) conflict as a way to bring intensity to a game. On Wednesday we got to reminise a little about old school TTPRGs. Long story short there is a wealth of experience in this group. Come, learn, teach and have learn how you can improve your games.

Hello all, since I've been in the process of moving and starting a new job, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to run our weekly game here. For the time being, I'd still like to do some community events, so I'm going to start holding an evening Happy Hour (much like Jonah's Coffee Hour) at 7:00 PM ET on Wednesdays! Even though I don't have a weekly game to prep right now, I have some GenCon prep to do, some freelance work for a few systems, and some personal projects for future campaigns that I'd love to work on and talk shop with folks about. I also have an endless pile of grey shame in unpainted minis that I want to get to. Come grab a beverage of choice and talk about planned and ongoing games! Excited to see you there.

How do you use the passive abilities in D&D: passive perception, passive investigation and passive insight? I know passive perception are things that a character automatically (or passively) notices whenever they enter a situation/encounter with no roll needed e.g. a player with a passive perception 13 will notice that an NPC appears to be out of breath, has some welts that haven't yet turned into bruises, is in shock, and is missing the purse that usually hangs from his belt. Ok that's all well and good. Other examples could be perceiving things in a room that look out of place, seeing signs of travel through a location. But how do you use the other passive abilities. A quick look in the PBH and DMG didn't really come up with a great answer. So this is what I came up with. Passive investigation is what a character automatically notices about what is happened in the past. With the NPC example I gave before a player with the requisite passive investigation will take that information and deduce that the NPC was probably just beaten and robbed and managed to escape and depending on what the players know about the NPC and the characters passive investigation the player might even know who did it. The point is they can take what they see and already know and deduce what has happened in the PAST. Some other uses could be finding hidden doors and traps, determining if anyone had been this way before and how many. Passive insight on the other hand focuses on the future. A character with a high enough passive insight will know that the NPC is likely to do next whether it be to run, hide, get his own weapons and rob someone else, find his own gang and take revenge or call the city guard. Passive insight is the ability to deduce what is going to happen NEXT. Other examples could be knowing that if a trap door is opened a firebolt will shoot out or that the group that came this way before left things behind so they will probably be coming back or vice. There are some strengths if this approach that springs to mind