Hi, my name is Amberpup... and I'm a GM for a group that isn't very proactive.
But I can't really blame them, most of the steady game-masters in our club tend to discourage it even when they betray their players for not having it. <shrug> One of the universe's mysteries I guess.
In my DF game, I mostly throw out alot of stuff and then see what gets the players interest. Kinda your story buffet so to speak, with some real newspaper stuff thrown in for good measure. Yet they still wait on me, even if its just some favor to the story line like when I found this article about a fire at a local strip club. Since our neutral ground is a strip club, I decided have the same event take place in the game. The group of course, didn't buy the actually reason for the fire since I stuck in it the game. Didn't believe the police that one of the strippers set another stripper's undies on fire due to a argument. It had to be something more, the game was afoot!
I will admit, it was a bit of fun but it also got me concerned that I had to be careful from that point on. Any favor, any color I dropped in the game could seen as something more. Now I'm thinking of novel between time for the characters, and how I might encourage them to take over the driver's seat. So the idea of a 'group aspect' came up, since it lets the group decide what cases they be interested in instead of just me asking over and over... and over, and not getting much back. Sure, I support 'lazy' but I do hope they at least spend some time thinking about the game and their characters.
So I guess my question is, have you tried a "group aspect" for DFRPG?
And what other trick do you use for players who only think about the game when at the table?