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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 6393346" data-attributes="member: 6779">So, I have a group of passive players. Like, really passive players. Like it's reached the point where I said "Here are three jobs up on the board at the adventurer's guild. Pick one for next week please." And they all just stared at me. It's not unlike trying to run a game for Bartleby the Scrivener.They've always been on the passive side, but it has reached the point of brokenness. Not just accepting it when I start a session with "You're in this situation and here's how you got here," they are effectively refusing to play any other way. I don't know how this has come to pass, if it's something I've done or some personality change as people have aged, or what. But I can't keep running games this way, and I don't particularly want to. If I'm going to be just narrating a "choose your own adventure" book to the table, what do I need the other players for? Game prep has taken over my life, setting up scenes and coming up with storylines to run the group through, to be rewarded with "Eh, that was pretty good" at the end.So I'm trying to come up with ways to fix this. I don't expect to be able to just drop the group in the middle of a sandbox game and revitalize the table, but I am going to start working to wean the group off this unhealthy dependence to the rails, before I lose my interest in running the game entirely and it falls apart.An important detail, this is a steady group that's been around a long time, so the go-to answers of "find another group" or "kill them and take their stuff" are not really applicable here. What I'm looking for are ways to encouraging the existing group into a more proactive mode of play. I know they won't all go for it– at least one of them is diffident nearly to the point of social anxiety, and so I don't expect him to grab the reins and go. But the rest of them have played in a more active mode before, and I'd like to find ways to reinforce and bring that about again.Any suggestions? I've started by switching to a more location-based scenario design ("Here are the NPCs, here are the dungeons/wilderness locales, and what happens happens...") and putting a few obvious hooks out, but I fear this is going to lead to at least one session of them staring at me with decision paralysis. Having someone burst in with a machine gun, as Chandler would advocate, just puts me right back to being all aboard Plot Railroad, so it's something I'd rather avoid.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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