Over the years, I’ve sought out and heard or read a lot of advice for writers, as well as for tabletop gaming.  Most of the best advice is less about telling you how to do something you’ve never thought of and more about making you consciously think about the thing you’ve already been doing, or trying to do, instinctually.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are often specifics and details you may never have thought of, but the general advice is often more about clarifying and purposefully considering things that we all kinda know already.  That’s the case with The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying, too.

As with other advice books I’ve read, you could make the argument that this could have just been a blog post, or a series of blog posts.  I don’t mean that to disparage the book or the authors.  I think this is a handy book and there are some real gems held inside.  However, it also sort of front loads the best stuff, so much so that the most valuable stuff, the bit that made me think, “oh, yeah; that’s a great way of getting my players to be more proactive and engaged that I’m already kinda doing by accident, but now have the language to do intentionally,” was in the Introduction. 

That said, the rest of the book does have helpful stuff in it.  There’s more practical advice on how to actually implement things, as well as pitfalls and variations.  I especially like that, while D&D is always the elephant in the room, authors Jonah & Tristan Fishel are very good about making it clear that much of this works for other games, and their examples often feature other games.  That’s a nice change of pace from a lot of similar stuff I’ve seen.

As with any advice, not everything in this book is going to work for everyone at every table in every game.  However, reading advice like this can help you improve your skills, even if you don’t adopt every aspect of it.  There are certainly things that I’ll be looking to put into some of my future games, though there are other aspects that likely wouldn’t work for me.  It was still nice to read about them and think about them.  Like using random charts to help break yourself out of your own mental cage, seeing games from someone else’s perspective can help you understand your own game style better.  So, yes.  I’d recommend checking this out.

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