Following my previous blogpost on my personal experiences with tabletop roleplaying games, Agency, Ego, and Enjoyment: Rethinking My TTRPGs and Myself, I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine about what specifically I find is fun in this hobby.
That conversation helped me realize that the true essence of tabletop roleplaying isn’t found in the rules, mechanics, or even the stories we write. What truly defines the hobby is the shared act of collaborative storytelling.
Boredom, Disinterest, and Conflict
When a game loses engagement, it doesn’t have to happen suddenly. Sometimes it’s a slow process: a few distracted moments here and there, lukewarm responses to plot hooks, a growing sense of disconnection. Everyone quietly becomes aware that something feels off, but no one mentions it.
As a Game Master, one of the fears I’ve always had is that my players aren’t enjoying what I’ve prepared. That fear often led to frustration: frustration at myself for not writing a better session, frustration at my players for not engaging the way I expected, and finally frustration at the game itself for not “working.”
This tension always has two sides:
- The GM, who has poured time into creating a world and story.
- The players, who have invested emotionally in their characters.
When a player’s personal story doesn’t feel relevant, or when a GM’s setup doesn’t get the intended response, those investments stop aligning and collaborative storytelling begins to break down.
The story becomes reactive instead of co-created.
The GM responds to players’ disinterest by tightening control. The players, sensing that control, engage less. It becomes a cycle that ends in boredom and burnout.
The Reactive Story Problem
A reactive story is one where only one side, usually the GM, moves the plot forward. Players react to the prewritten content but don’t meaningfully change it. It feels less like a conversation and more like watching someone else’s story unfold.
I’ve realized that the more my games became reactive, the more disconnected I felt from the people I was playing with. In those moments we weren’t telling a story together; I was telling my story, and the others were just actors in it.
Effects of Engagement
When players and GMs are truly collaborating, you can feel the creative energy flowing through everyone at the table. It’s in the pauses between dialogue, the sudden shift when someone introduces a new twist that just clicks, and everyone leans closer.
Engagement creates:
- Shared Ownership. The world belongs to everyone at the table. Players feel free to contribute, and GMs feel supported rather than drained.
- Emergent Storytelling. The best moments often come from improvisation and shared emotion rather than preparation.
- Emotional Payoff. When everyone helps build the story, the emotional beats hit harder. The triumphs and losses feel earned.
- Trust. Players trust that their ideas will be respected. GMs trust that players will take the story seriously.
When players are engaged, my workload as a GM actually decreases. I prep less because I know my players will fill in the gaps. I am not Atlas carrying the world on my back; we’re all holding it up together.
A concept I recently came across is Proactive Fun, from The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying by Jonah and Tristan Fishel. It focuses on encouraging players to take initiative in setting personal goals for their characters to pursue and complete. These can be short-term goals (“I want to get out of jail”) or long-term goals (“I want to break the curse plaguing my family line”), but they are always meaningful and energizing for the player.
As a GM, this information is invaluable. It shows what players truly want for their characters and provides natural stepping stones for future prep. Proactive Fun shifts storytelling from being reactive to genuinely collaborative.
Leveraging This in Your Games
So how do you build this kind of engagement intentionally?
1. Introduce Proactive Goals
Borrowing from the Proactive Roleplaying framework, encourage each player to define three personal goals for their character: short-term, mid-term, and long-term. These can evolve over time. Then, as the GM, build your sessions around opportunities for those goals to intersect with each other, with the world, or with the campaign’s larger themes.
This changes your prep from “designing a story” to “setting the stage” for players to tell their stories through action.
2. Build Characters into the World
Don’t just place player characters inside your plot. Let their goals, relationships, and fears shape the world around them. Their choices should matter. You should be the characters biggest fan.
3. Focus on “Play,” Not “Performance”
You don’t need cinematic perfection. Collaborative storytelling thrives on curiosity and openness, not polish.
Closing Thoughts
When players have clear goals and the agency to pursue them, they stop being passengers in your story and start being co-authors. Looking back on my earlier reflections about ego and agency, I realize that collaborative storytelling balances both.
When everyone at the table becomes proactive, the story no longer belongs to any one person. It belongs to all of us.
That’s where the fun really lives.