Engaging Your Players

If your Players aren’t as engaged in your Campaign as you’d like, consider trying some of these suggestions to make your game sessions seem like you critted your Performance check.

Make Their Choices Matter

Every active choice that a Player made on their Character Sheet is something they imagined their Character doing.

Make every one of those choices matter!

When you are prepping for a session, go through each Player’s Character and choose some small choice that they made and make it matter in the upcoming session. Make that Player feel like a genius for making that choice.

In the session, when the opportunity you setup for them arises, don’t call attention to it or to the Player you crafted it for.

For the Player to enjoy this, they need to come up with the idea on their own. So, you are just presenting them with the opportunity.

They made the choice when they were making their Character, and they imagined some scenario when they made that choice.

So, if the opportunity that you are presenting rhymes with their imagined scenario, then they will remember their choice and excitedly bring it up.

“I can use my rope!!”

Even better if you can craft scenarios that could benefit from choices made by two or more Players at a time. Then they will also be collaborating and cooperating and all feeling helpful and like geniuses and heroes.

Examples of small choices:

  • ability scores (even the ones that they chose to set low could be made into a benefit in some scenario)
  • inventories (if they chose to have a rope, a lantern, a pile of rations, give them scenarios where they NEED to have those things)
  • spell lists
  • skills
  • powers
  • background
  • race
  • alignment
  • types of weapons (blunt vs piercing, ranged vs close, metal vs wood)
  • types of armor
  • fighting styles
  • … any choice they actively made on their Character!

Cater to Tastes

One of the best things about playing a TTRPG is that the game can be tailored to what the Players like. It’s not like a video game where the story or setting is fixed and only has a small range of variation.

Find out what each Player likes, and then make sure to include some aspect of that in each session. Create a checklist for yourself of each Player and their likes, and as you prep for a session, check to make sure you’ve hit each of their personal happy places.

A couple questions you can send to your Players to help you find out what a Player likes …

1) What makes your character go adventuring, instead of staying home?
Examples: https://www.obsidianportal.com/resources/why-characters-go-adventuring

2) What parts of playing TTRPGs do you like the most?
Examples: https://www.obsidianportal.com/resources/preferred-parts-of-a-ttrpg

Bounties

Sometimes it helps to dangle a little treat in their faces to get them interested.

Bounties is a wiki page automatically added to new Campaigns that offers Players tasks that they can complete in the Campaign to earn in-game rewards.

See the Bounties help page for further details.

Use the Stick … But Not Really

This one is an anti-suggestion: don’t punish or threaten the Players for not being engaged in the Campaign. That will only push them further away, and could lead to them skipping game sessions entirely.

However, you can reframe what might seem like a punishment into a reward.

For example:

  • Instead of penalizing a Player by reducing their Character’s health if they don’t update their stats before the next game session, reward the Players who do update their Characters’ sheets in advance with a 10% health bonus.
  • Then, adjust the opponents to be 10% more challenging so that those who didn’t update still face a natural consequence without being directly punished.

Reminders and Checklists

Sometimes all someone needs to get something done is a reminder, and a checklist to remove some of the brain work needed.

A couple days after each session, send your Players an email, and note the things you want them to do in the Campaign between sessions.

Gaming Wisdom of the Ancients: Character Prep to Maximize Session Fun is a checklist of some of the most important things.

In Ascendant Campaigns, that checklist is automatically sent in an email a couple days after a Calendar Event to all Players that were RSVP’d as “Going”. So, if you’re using Calendar Events, this is already being done for you.

Grease the Path Down the Hill

The idea of Reminders and Checklists is a version of this, but this is the more general idea of making what you want the Players to do easier for them to do.

Essentially, lower the bar on how much effort it takes a Player to do something that you want them to do.

Examples:

  • If you want them to keep their Character updated in the Campaign, so you have all of the stats and stuff in one place to make your session prep easier, then one thing you could do is enter all the Character data for them the first time. Then they would only need to make updates to keep it updated.
  • If you want them to write Adventure Logs, so you know what they were paying attention to and what they were enjoying, then tell them they can just make bullet point lists of what happened in the last session.
  • Or write parts of the Adventure Log yourself and ask them to tell you what they remember from a specific scene, and then incorporate that into what you wrote.
  • You could also offer them an informal template with questions to answer. Like for a given scene, “Where did this happen? Who was there? What did they do? Were there any longer-term consequences?”
  • You could write something that has errors or blank spots and ask the Player that would most know or most care what should be there to Edit it and fix it.
  • You could have a “last time on” part at the beginning of the session, and have them verbally say what they remember from the last session, and fill out the Adventure Log with what they remember.

Other Ideas?

If you’ve got other ideas of how to engage Players in a Campaign, feel free to send them to [email protected]. We’d love to hear them!