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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 9285731" data-attributes="member: 9053">The most important advice I can give is to talk with your players about what your campaign is going to be before you get started and make sure they buy in on what you want to do. For different DMs this can involve varying amounts of player creativity like building some of the kingdoms or helping to create the setting, or it can not. The key is to get your players to be okay with what the game is going to be. That way you shouldn't have a problem with them not wanting to engage with the game, which is the death knell of a game.Two examples: it's been a while now but when I ran Curse of Strahd, I told the group (who were familiar with it) that the group would be sucked into Bavovia and have to get out somehow. Likely, that would involve defeating Strahd. There would also be a big setpiece dinner up at the castle at some point which would involve the famous "Strahd plays on the organ" as they arrived. I let them know that there would be a bunch of different locations that they could travel to, and each location would have problems and mysteries they could solve. I also told them this was going to be a terrible environment where bad things would happen. The game went great, and one of the players talks about how delicious the Dream Pasteries were years later.Right now I'm running Abomination Vaults. It's a megadungeon adventure, but I let the group know that there would be plots connecting different characters they'd meet from the nearby town and mysteries they would have to solve. But in the end, most of the adventure would be in the Vaults. They'd have to make characters who wanted to solve the problems and defeat the big bad. So far, the group has gotten along well and are trying to solve problems for the different characters they've met. They're looking for a missing brewer, for instance, and have just found out what happened to the last of the rogues who foolishly snuck into the dungeon. The group has ideas for what they want to do next and it isn't "not go back to the dungeon." I like to think that's because I'm a good GM, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that I told them upfront what the game was about.That's my single biggest piece of advice I can give. If your players don't want to engage with your game, it's likely because you didn't get their buy-in when you started.</blockquote>

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