Would requiring all new parties/adventures/campaigns to start out themed be as a DM?

[Pika...]

Occasionally, the party will take this separation time to consider why they're adventuring with each other in the first place, and not by themselves, with only a few of the other members, or with a different party entirely. Invariably this leads to them realizing that they seemingly purposefully built their characters with absolutely no consideration for what the other players would be playing or the theme of the campaign itself and the party should probably have never been formed in the first place (and was only done so via egregious DM fiat and large amounts of purposefully induced ignorance on the parts of some players).


This recent post got me thinking. It really does not make sense.

Would requiring all newly formed parties be themed, or otherwised united in fluff and backstory by the players be a bad idea?

Perhaps at the VERY least have them work together on a bit of backstory of their adventuring careers up until then, hence explaining them "united"?


I am already in a group suffering from this issue. Everyone is just trying to go their own way, and even if a leader figure did pop up they would just shrug her/him off. I am borderline ready to quit said game. :/

I would rather avoid such issues in future games run by myself.

[Chrono22]

It depends on the playstyles of the group in question...
To make a combined and cohesive story/party, requires alot of open communication and generous amounts of compromise. Many GMs and players have a tendency to hold their cards to their chest when it comes to how they perceive the character/plot. Each player wants to own their character.. and as a result they want to own the character's destiny.

I guess the best way to go about this would be to create a set of terms that can describe a character very easily (archetypes). Once the players and GM are using the same language, they should be able to hammer out a loose structure around which to construct the narrative.

So, yeah, it can work. But most groups don't have the interest or ability to pull it off.

[Duos Greanleef]

Sounds reasonable, but also potentially very boring.
Think about it, would it be more fun to have everyone playing from the same background, envisioned differently by each PC, working toward the same goal, or have everyone start with a different background, different major personal goals, and have one almost {pretty much} major goal to work towards.
If your party has good RP abilities, I'd choose the latter over the former hands down.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

One option I've heard is going gestalt, with one side(and a bit of backstory) picked by the DM. For example, give everyone Rogue levels and you can start them in a Thieves Guild. Give them Wizard levels and they're all recent graduates of school and old friends.

It works without going Gestalt, but people are much more willing to let the DM decide fluff if they get a power boost for it.

[OracleofWuffing]

While the idea has a lot of merit, I can't even get players together to talk party synergy... The first campaign I DM'ed was Paladin-Monk-Soulknife-Fighter, for example. I can see it working in a group that meets to some definition of regularly, but when campaigns get started or changed at the last-minute or when you have to play with strangers, I can't help but think it gets a little bit uncomfortable.

[Jarawara]

In the campaign I'm currently running, I had the players make a pre-connected, themed party. It worked just fine.

In the beginning we had more time than we have nowadays. It's an online game, and we'd meet every week and play for 10 hours at a time. The players were either young, or work at home types who could control their time management, and thus spare the 10 hour stints.

So at the start of the campaign, we all got together and I started describing history, culture, campaign details, the works. We had 4 ten hour session in a row, plus over a dozen Q&A emails sent back and forth, and at the end of all that... we were finally ready to make characters.

They made spot on characters, who fit exactly to the setting, like they had grown up there themselves. One of them continues to make extra characters today, for me to use as NPC's, and each and every one of them looks and feels exactly like they had been residents of my world their whole life. The party works flawlessly together, though directions do seem to be diverging somewhat. They may someday split up and go their separate ways. (If they can first escape from hell, and prevent the rest of reality to be sucked in first.)

So yeah, with enough work, you can make a group of PC's that will fit together just fine, and fit in the setting just fine. Just don't tell your players "make characters, and try to make them as a group". Tell them all about your world, your campaign, even the initial set up and starting location, and at least the initial goal (though the eventual goal can remain hidden for now). Tell them everything you can - and only then have them make their characters. They have to know what they're getting into, in order to make characters that will fit in.

[Kylarra]

In my experience, it's best to have a plausible reason for why the group is working together.

[Godskook]

Something to be remembered is that those that bleed together have a natural tendency to stay in touch. The longer a group adventures together, the harder outside events have to work to drive them apart. The main thing is to avoid directly conflicting issues, like having an elf that is racist against humans in a party with a human.

[valadil]

Depends on the type of game and how it was handled. I've seen this sort of thing handled very badly.

About 4 years ago I started into a high level D&D game. Some of my friends were playing silly characters and I wanted to out-crazy them. I rolled up Bucky duForrest. He was a cannibalistic jungle dwarf. I even brought beef jerky as a prop! I figured that watching them tame/socialize/housebreak Bucky would be reasonably entertaining even if I was playing a totally one dimensional character.

Anyway, come game start we're told that we've been in an adventuring party together for years. Everyone knows everything about each other. No secrets. No infighting.

After the first combat I start cannibalizing. Another player objects. The GM points out that we've adventured together for years and all these conflicts were already resolved. Other player tells me to "carry on" and leaves to divide up loot. Only 6 hours into the game did we go over each others names (even though we were an established adventuring party). We didn't find out the caster was female until the second session (even though we were an established adventuring party). Needless to say, the game wasn't what I was looking for so I didn't stay long.

I'm hesitant to support any requirements that sound anything like this game. If you're actually going to write the background, awesome. If you're just going to fast forward past it, why bother playing?

Anyway, I have two alternative suggestions.

Metagame before game starts. Figure out what your conflicts will be. Discuss your character's beliefs. Find interesting ways to get them to interact. You don't need to establish history between the characters. You just need to figure out if their opposing religions will be a source of midnight backstabbing or just constant bickering. Try to work things so as to avoid the backstabbing.

The other suggestion is to burden the GM to find common links between incoming characters. When I write games I generalize a lot of NPCs until the last minute. You'll have mentor, nemesis, and priest instead of Bill, George, and Steve. When players give you their backstory, look for any common NPCs you can use. If they name the captain of the guard, stick that name on your generic captain role and give him the plot. Where this comes into play with common background is that you can merge NPCs from different players backstories, giving the PCs a common ally (or enemy). The players will have to discover it on their own for the bond to have any value.

[AslanCross]

The players should already be good friends and should be communicating a lot if the DM is going to require them to be themed to be from similar backgrounds. I have the blessing of having a group whose members are all good friends IRL, and they all have similar aesthetic tastes. As such it's pretty easy to get a themed party out of them, although I've never really required it.

[Quietus]

The other suggestion is to burden the GM to find common links between incoming characters. When I write games I generalize a lot of NPCs until the last minute. You'll have mentor, nemesis, and priest instead of Bill, George, and Steve. When players give you their backstory, look for any common NPCs you can use. If they name the captain of the guard, stick that name on your generic captain role and give him the plot. Where this comes into play with common background is that you can merge NPCs from different players backstories, giving the PCs a common ally (or enemy). The players will have to discover it on their own for the bond to have any value.

I really like this idea - particularly the generic NPC stuff. I recently had a fully fleshed out NPC who was supposed to give the party some information... a low level sorcerer whose gemcutting parents had been kidnapped. The players ignored every plot point in that city (though I didn't present them as well as I could have, to be fair), and instead headed "north" after a dragon. I ended up completely rewriting the NPC into the head of a local tribe, keeping only his race and the "kidnapped gemcutting parents" thing. WOuld've been easier to just say "Dude with kidnapped gemcutting parents", filled in Random NPC X with that role, and that would've expanded something that the players JUST left.

[Riffington]

Sounds reasonable, but also potentially very boring.
Think about it, would it be more fun to have everyone playing from the same background, envisioned differently by each PC, working toward the same goal, or have everyone start with a different background, different major personal goals, and have one almost {pretty much} major goal to work towards.
If your party has good RP abilities, I'd choose the latter over the former hands down.

I think you're trivializing the goodness of your former and overemphasizing the benefits of your latter.

I mean, "you are all people who graduated from the Sorbonne the same year and were good friends of Professor Villard" is not really the same background. You can still be a murderer who's hiding her little secret, a former boy scout who loves knitting, or a horse lover who grew up on a dairy farm. You still have different major personal goals.

In your latter case, if all you have is "you all want to overthrow the Federation"... well, why should you trust each other and hang together? You need a lot more than a common goal to make the RP work. If you work together a little pre-game you can create all kinds of little hooks and threads that make the RP so much better. It does take more time, but it's totally worth it.

[Temet Nosce]

This recent post got me thinking. It really does not make sense.

Would requiring all newly formed parties be themed, or otherwised united in fluff and backstory by the players be a bad idea?

Perhaps at the VERY least have them work together on a bit of backstory of their adventuring careers up until then, hence explaining them "united"?


I am already in a group suffering from this issue. Everyone is just trying to go their own way, and even if a leader figure did pop up they would just shrug her/him off. I am borderline ready to quit said game. :/

I would rather avoid such issues in future games run by myself.

Honestly, I've encountered this in the past and usually try to find time to talk to each player privately before the game to find out what kind of character they're making. I might not "theme" my characters, but I try to keep it to things which would reasonably work.

[Milskidasith]

In the campaign I'm currently running, I had the players make a pre-connected, themed party. It worked just fine.

In the beginning we had more time than we have nowadays. It's an online game, and we'd meet every week and play for 10 hours at a time. The players were either young, or work at home types who could control their time management, and thus spare the 10 hour stints.

So at the start of the campaign, we all got together and I started describing history, culture, campaign details, the works. We had 4 ten hour session in a row, plus over a dozen Q&A emails sent back and forth, and at the end of all that... we were finally ready to make characters.

They made spot on characters, who fit exactly to the setting, like they had grown up there themselves. One of them continues to make extra characters today, for me to use as NPC's, and each and every one of them looks and feels exactly like they had been residents of my world their whole life. The party works flawlessly together, though directions do seem to be diverging somewhat. They may someday split up and go their separate ways. (If they can first escape from hell, and prevent the rest of reality to be sucked in first.)

So yeah, with enough work, you can make a group of PC's that will fit together just fine, and fit in the setting just fine. Just don't tell your players "make characters, and try to make them as a group". Tell them all about your world, your campaign, even the initial set up and starting location, and at least the initial goal (though the eventual goal can remain hidden for now). Tell them everything you can - and only then have them make their characters. They have to know what they're getting into, in order to make characters that will fit in.

While I'm sure this worked for you, if it takes 40 hours of playing just to begin to start making cohesive characters, then I'll either not play or ask for a summary version of the background; I could study my United States History textbook twice over in forty hours, so unless there are multiple major countries you wrote a textbook on, I'm not sure how there is that much fluff. It could have taken a while to explain, I suppose, but still, that's a massive timesink to drop just to get into the world to start making characters, and there is no way you need to know that much to understand the basics of the world.

I mean, with forty hours spent into just setting up the characters, it probably would have been faster to make random PCs and then figure out a cohesive backstory during the game; sure, it might not have been "as good" but forty hours is, quite frankly, such a massive amount of time to work on character creation (especially when I can hammer out a good rough draft of a two page or so backstory in about an hour, along with the crunch) that I just can't see doing that as opposed to saying "give me a summary of the details, I'm going to go play Borderlands for three of these sessions and get cracking on my character on the fourth." Plus, again, how did you have forty hours of campaign details?

[Nai_Calus]

I'd avoid it. I get to play seldom enough, and have enough characters I want to play that I haven't gotten to, that I really don't want to be forced into making something fit something that's probably incompatible with my character concept.

[Toliudar]

I like shared/collaborative backstories. I've even shoehorned players into being part of the same religion, or the same family in one case. If you present the restrictions on the campaign up front, and the players agree to it, why wouldn't it just enrich the experience?

[Zovc]

I think you can make a coherent, realistic adventuring group even with different character archetypes. Look at groups of friends.

I have one friend who I don't mind hanging out with, just the two of us. We have a mutual friend who I wouldn't mind hanging out with, either. I much prefer hanging out with both of them at the same time, and for the most part, I would never hang out with any of their friends unless I was with one or both of them.

Looking at this, as an adventuring party, The first mentioned friend and I make an okay duo--the party becomes much more rounded, fun, and tolerable when we add friend two into the mix. The party's productivity (aka fun, IRL) doesn't suffer when any friends are added, although one member may occasionally be at odds with another if there isn't me, the first and second friends, and another one, two, or three. I imagine a lot of adventuring parties are like this, Member A tolerates B and C, he puts up with D (but doesn't really like her) simply because she has a necessary function, and does increase productivity. Members B and C are good friends with A and D and eachother. Member D's opinion of Member A, B, or C can all create interesting tension in the party (group).

Look at one of your groups of friends, preferably one you don't fit into well. (Not to say that you don't fit in: you get along, but don't do all the things they do, etc.)

[AstralFire]

This recent post got me thinking. It really does not make sense.

Would requiring all newly formed parties be themed, or otherwised united in fluff and backstory by the players be a bad idea?

Perhaps at the VERY least have them work together on a bit of backstory of their adventuring careers up until then, hence explaining them "united"?

I require this. I will have a campaign theme (and though I do not expect people to do research and study on it, I do provide materials so that they can if they so wish). Usually, but not always, I expect you to have ties to at least one of the other characters to improve cohesion.

[Kiero]

This recent post got me thinking. It really does not make sense.

Would requiring all newly formed parties be themed, or otherwised united in fluff and backstory by the players be a bad idea?

Perhaps at the VERY least have them work together on a bit of backstory of their adventuring careers up until then, hence explaining them "united"?


I am already in a group suffering from this issue. Everyone is just trying to go their own way, and even if a leader figure did pop up they would just shrug her/him off. I am borderline ready to quit said game. :/

I would rather avoid such issues in future games run by myself.

Not only is it categorically not a bad idea, often it's a very good one.

I've played in two games in succession now where the assumption was the PCs were already a functioning team, and they've worked really well as a result. Of course it probably helps that we do chargen together, as a group, everyone in the room at the same time. None of this "I've got secret stuff that only the GM knows" crap.

I really don't have time for all that immature intra-party conflict/tension nonsense.

[Loxagn]

Well, the first three members of our party were Rem the bard, Theege the warlock, and a rogue named Lanar. These three characters effectively were at a coastal city (a major trading port) when the plot kicked in and some eldritch abomination started eating the continent. Out of that town, they were the only ones to survive, and the three also pretty much have the closest comradely out of the entire group. Odd how surviving an apocalypse can forge bonds like that.

The party has expanded somewhat (we now have a chaotic evil druid, an evil ranger, and the homunculus fighter who the party found and awoke, all of whom sort of just... are there. There's a black dragonborn warlord who's just recently joined up, on account of him hearing about the party's origins and finding us. Finally, there's an Invoker/Paladin of Chzo that has a tendency to follow us around because she's mandated by her god to aid us, but she only pops up once in a while as a plot NPC.), but the idea at least in the beginning has held out; we started out as just a few people who were lucky enough to survive something that nobody should have.

[Dimers]

The players should already be good friends and should be communicating a lot if the DM is going to require them to be themed to be from similar backgrounds.

I'll second that motion. For a one-shot with strangers, for the first time you meet a playing group, for people who aren't comfortable with each other, forging backstory often fails to have a positive effect, so it ends up as a waste of time. With players who already know they want to spend time around each other, the interwoven backstory is great.

[AstralFire]

I'll second that motion. For a one-shot with strangers, for the first time you meet a playing group, for people who aren't comfortable with each other, forging backstory often fails to have a positive effect, so it ends up as a waste of time. With players who already know they want to spend time around each other, the interwoven backstory is great.

I won't. As both a player and a DM, I've found it's a great way to get people cohesive in the first place.