Intro: hello from Toronto! :-) · Game Master's Laboratory

Intro: hello from Toronto! :-)

Hey everyone,

Happy to discover this space as I've been running the PARP structure exclusively for 4 campaigns now over the past 2.5-ish(?) years, with lots of trial and error because I was coming from a very GM driven game and mindset that is D&D.

The reason I first discovered the book was because I wanted to find a name for the style of game where my players kept pushing certain things that weren't part of the story -- it was interesting to them -- and I started leaning into the uncomfortable idea of letting go off the reigns to discover what following their interest session to session was like. And so a GM from the Toronto DND discord community recommended me this book as the structure that would benefit me. It was such an eye opening experience to consume the book and understand why as a player I felt like a character put on someone else's journey when playing in the traditional way of D&D campaigns that I was part of.

Because my circle was all D&D folks who exclusively run "reactive" games or consume media like Critical Roll and Dimension 20, it was pretty much the gold standard that the GM drives the plot, the story, yadda yadda, players react and we RP. So when I tried sharing the concepts from the book with my circle it would lead to debates and folks dismissing the PARP style.

Over the past years of trying to run PARP structured, I slowly tried to implement things from the book -- as I took my time reading it -- over 40 sessions of 3 campaigns with different sets of people, and it was really hard to get everyone on board and have them be diligent of goal making and in the proper way.

BUT, i'm happy to say that my 4th and current table with PARP is with an amazing group of folks who are sticking to the asks -- it did take a lot of above table check-ins to ensure that. The RP and story has been better than anything that I could have created solo in the lone tower that I often found myself in traditional GMing. It feels like we are co-writing a drama together, and i'm genuinely appreciative that I get be surprised as a GM as I *discover* the story through PCs goals and factions goals.

Which systems you like to play/run

We currently play Daggerheart

A bit about the games you're running right now

We run a tableless game with this as the "table" vision statement:

"A fiction-first, collaborative, player driven framework, where cinematic PC-to-PC and PC-to-NPC drama takes center stage using improv theatre techniques."

Thank you both for writing this amazing resource!

I've been trying to share it as much as a possible with the Toronto D&D community, and have even run some free basic workshops in passing in hopes that more ppl pick up the PARP structure and book for their future games. And since the workshops, we have a little group where us GMs can check-in on each other as we run these types of games.

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Intro: hello from Toronto! :-)