The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying: Guidelines and Strategies for Running Pc-Driven Narratives in 5e Adventures

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Traditional TTRPGs have for decades relied on reactive player responses in order to function. In other words, there is an evil wizard out to take over the world. The player characters are good, therefore it's their duty to go stop the wizard. Game play then follows a traditional storytelling narrative of protagonists working to return their world back to the status quo, or an improved position. Bad guy makes a move, good guys move to stop him. The problem with this style of gameplay is that players are always reacting to what's put in front of them. Their agency is almost always directed toward fixing a problem they had nothing to do with before it appeared. This makes gameplay less creative for the players, since they don't really have to do much thinking beyond solving the problem at hand. In short, it can get tiresome for all involved, dealing with the same pattern of evildoer action/heroic reaction each and every time they play. This style of gameplay also puts the onus of effort on the Game Master to create the conflicts that the players will respond to, creating materials in advance for various locations and characters that drive the narrative for the players, setting up specific story points that need to happen in order for the players to reach the climax of the tale, etc. With proactive roleplaying, Game Masters give over the narrative to the players. They imbue their characters with goals and desires, wants and needs, and then let's them make the decisions about how to achieve those things. It's no longer up to the GM to provide the entertainment. The characters choose what to do to achieve their goals, and the GM is the one reacting to their choices. Every conflict and "adventure" the character goes on is in service to their goal, rather than the typical "random bad guy of the week" adventure. The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying gives Game Masters and players all of the information they need to play their favorite 5E TTRPG in their favorite settings, while transforming their games from reactive and restrictive to proactive, unbounded, player-driven narratives.