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cloudjsh7
2014-01-05, 01:02 AM
"So you find yourself at Ye Olde Tavern Generic..."
"After receiving a royal summons from King Kingdom from Kingdominia..."

Sound familiar?
Of course it does.

After 8 years in the tabletop scene, ones starts to lose ideas.
You know what I mean: the first game day of that new campaign?

How have you gathered all of your new players in one place to start a new game? All your players have different goals, beliefs, ethics (not to mention alignments), yet you somehow need to get them in one place for no other reason than to start the freakin' game.

Thoughts? =)

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 01:10 AM
Some I've used in the last few campaigns:

"You're all related (pick an open spot on the clan tree here). One day, a boy comes running into the field yelling about strangers..."

"You're all travelling together (why?) and have come to the Tournament of Flowers (why?)..."

"You were all part of of a caravan to the city (why?) and you were separated from the rest of the caravan in a sandstorm. You come upon a ruined city in the desert..."

And, of course, "You're old friends meeting up in Solace after many years. On the way here, one of you found a dead man from one of the Plains Tribes, who had with him a strange staff..."

Responsibility is key:
1. The players have the responsibility to fit the campaign concept.
2. The players have the responsibility to make their PCs into a party.

Why should the GM be doing that? He doesn't know what the players want from their characters...

Edit: Also, "That last job went bad, and you're all in a Chinese prison..."

For more help, many plots from the list of all RPG plots ever (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/plots.htm) make great campaign openers.

Actana
2014-01-05, 04:44 AM
I've recently began adopting a more storytelling focused approach to starting campaigns and plots in general. Instead of having the players create their characters from scratch, I usually create a loose premise or two (or a dozen) for possible stories that would be interesting to tell, and then give the players a few example roles of characters in that story from which to choose to create a character from.

For example: I envisioned an Eberron game about a warforged who wakes up in an ancient tomb after being uncovered by a band of treasure hunters. Stuff happens, and the warforged sets out to search for his identity while being guided by mysterious forces.

That's the premise for one particular story, and I'd straight up tell one player to take the role of the warforged found, and then the others to create supporting characters for that story. While there would be certain "roles" in the story to fill, most characters would be quite free to customise, keeping the required aspects as minimal as possible.

This idea was in conjunction with other similar campaigns, where one player would be assigned a "main" role in a shorter character-focused game which would be linked together into a larger metaplot of an overlying campaign. The "main" character, and likewise player, would be switched out when the shorter campaigns run their course, and I'd have a list of story ideas (12 in the case of this Eberron game) to choose from (and the opportunity to create your own if you have some good idea) to ensure that the players play out characters and stories they're interested in.


Why I do this is to encourage the game to be about the players and their characters, instead of some impersonal and distant "plot" that the players may or may not care about. Because the players choose the concepts they want to play out, the players should be more motivated in the story parts, and since I've created the story concepts in the first place I'm motivated too. The idea of a "main" character is a bit problematic, but I feel as long as I'm up front about it, keep the individual campaigns fairly short and the spotlight distributed equally inside the campaigns it shouldn't go too badly.

I've yet to apply this in practice, but the players I was recruiting seemed to be interested enough in the concept. Not sure how it'd go when they'd have to create characters for each others' campaigns though, as the characters would be fairly independent between campaigns.

BWR
2014-01-05, 05:18 AM
Ones I've either played in or ran (not just D&D):


You are trapped in a dungeon.

You are captured on a boat.

You are apprentices of [the former band of heroes], trapped in a dungeon.

You are off to the Topaz Championship.

You are the first of the new generation of samurai in this newly formed Minor Clan.

You are all inhabitants in this little valley, and want to see the world.

You are all in Brussels, for whatever reason.

You meet in a tavern.

You grow up in a temple and on your 15th birthday the old monk who took care of you reveals you are the son of the rightful emperor.

You are a perfectly normal high school girl who suddenly starts seeing ghosts and has to fight an ancient evil.

You are mages, just past Gauntlet and are off to join a Covenant.

You are mages, somewhat experienced, who are off to found your own Covenant.

You are a bunch of perfectly normal people who start seeing monsters.

You are guards for the king's tax collector.

You are evil cultists living in the remote jungle.

You are part of a monastic order dedicated to keeping the peace.

You are soldiers in the army and are sent here to kill some people.

You are wandering merchants with your own ship.

You are mercenaries, part of a large company and get into lots of interesting situations.

the_david
2014-01-05, 05:57 AM
Kick in the door: Start with some action. The players will generally run toward the place where the xp and loot action is, and afterwards they will form a team to investigate any loose ends. (You might need someone to convince them, though.)

Old man Logan: They return, from whatever, and find that their village was burned to the ground/spouses and kids have been slaughtered/loot has been stolen. This leaves the players with a thirst for revenge.

Yora
2014-01-05, 06:37 AM
How have you gathered all of your new players in one place to start a new game? All your players have different goals, beliefs, ethics (not to mention alignments), yet you somehow need to get them in one place for no other reason than to start the freakin' game.
Here is the issue.

The solution is to have all players (or at least most of them) create their characters together as a group. Make it a game in which not every character can be everything, but in which the party has a certain theme.
In my current campaign, the party starts out as a group of young warriors (and a witch) from a barbarian village, who are under the command of their village leader. This still allows for a wide range of different characters and the players could have chosen from all classes and most races that exist in that setting.
Another great group I had consisted entirely of rangers, druids, and sorcerers, as well as multiclass characters including these classes. In another one, we were all members of a demon cult, being cleric/thieves, fighter/cleric, assassin, monk, and a blackguard.
Another party theme could be, that all the characters are part of a large temple. The PCs could be clerics, fighters (guards), paladins, and even cleric/thiefs or cleric/rangers and still all be members of the order.

And once you have established a theme for the campaign, then it becomes much easier to come up with adventure hooks for that specific party. "You all meet in a tavern" really only works for dungeon crawling with no real story.

An interesting read might be the chapter on character creation in Fate Core (which is a free download (http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/)). It does a very good job at outlining how the players can cooperate to create characters that have interesting and matching backgrounds.

Kol Korran
2014-01-05, 11:39 AM
Yora has it right there, It's best to have some sort of theme, usually connected to the issue of the main campaign, tying the characters motivations to it. It's usually great if the players can cooperate together in order to form a group in which people know each other. (Also much easier to handle), but in the case of players who have trouble matching up, you can also make some sort of a focus for their theme. I usually gives a short break of the nature of the campaign, and then the gist of how they meet.

The other well known method that has been mentioned in various forms is the "situation forces the PCs together" kind of start. If you do so however you need to do 2 things:
- Keep the situation relevant enough so characters are forced for logn enough to bond together.
- Have mature players who will WORK at making their characters bond.

Some examples from my groups:
- The party are all notable figures in a small outlying settlement, in which all rely on each other to survive.
- The party are all members of a special spy network, sent on a long standing mission to the country side, to seek presence of the enemy.
- (In a group I played):The characters are the survivors of an air ship crash in the wild. They first survive together, and then they got hunted down by some organization. This kept them together long enough.
- The characters are outlaws and pirates, who have heard the call of a notorious pirate seeking a crew to hunt for a great treasure! but first he tests little groups against each other, testing their mettle.
- (Current campaign, a Paizo one) The characters are all crusaders in an army against evil, who happen to be besieged and separated from the troops, relying on each other for survival against demons. (This idea kind of do both things together- common theme and forcing circumstances)

DigoDragon
2014-01-05, 11:53 AM
One time I had the players all wake up in a dungeon room. No equipment and no idea how they got there. They have to work with makeshift weapons and get out alive. They slowly piece together that a BBEG put them in this dungeon to die because of a prophesy that this group would topple the BBEG.

Works well if some of the players have established enemies in their background (the BBEG paid the enemies off to get at the PCs and drop them in this death trap). Surviving the dungeon crawl together is the optimal way of getting through and can make the team earn each other's trust.

Zavoniki
2014-01-05, 01:34 PM
Let's see:

" You are all in a Starbucks when the news comes on about a giant asteroid coming to obliterate life on Earth..." and 5 session later we were playing Star Trek.

" The mayor wants you to deliver supplies to the crazy goblin artificer at the other end of the island..." Pathfinder.

" You all get an email from a mysterious benefactor asking you to farcast to an asteroid... " Eclipse Phase

" You get a message from a PROXY saying someone or something or... Another PROXY died and his backup was deleted..." Eclipse Phase

All of these were for more plot driven games. The goal there was to get all the characters on the same plot thread and then let them lead from there. I also started a more character driven Wild Talents game that had a different plot thread:

" The god-like superheroes that rule Earth are leaving. What do you do?"

Here the plot really sprouts up around the characters and the game is driven by the characters. Generally plot games will set up an initial thread that players will have to follow while character games set up an event or situation that the characters should react too.

Craft (Cheese)
2014-01-05, 04:03 PM
You are all clerics of real-life people, in a fantasy world where nobody (except you) has heard of any of them. Each character knows everything about their object of worship as their player knows, but nothing else about the real world. The character received this information as a divine revelation that they believe to be from their "patron."

Your job is to convert as many people to your new religion as possible, by any means necessary. Whoever gets the most followers in 5 sessions wins (this can be extended or shortened by however much time you can afford).

If the campaign doesn't end with at least *one* theocratic empire dedicated to spreading the light and glory of Justin Bieber backed by an army of pre-teen uberwizards, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Coidzor
2014-01-05, 06:07 PM
I've been fond lately of having the characters' deaths staged in order to get a new batch of agents. Whether or not they even did anything worth execution in the first place...


If the campaign doesn't end with at least *one* theocratic empire dedicated to spreading the light and glory of Justin Bieber backed by an army of pre-teen uberwizards, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

I'm not sure if blame is quite the right word. :smalltongue:

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 06:11 PM
I've been fond lately of having the characters' deaths staged in order to get a new batch of agents. Whether or not they even did anything worth execution in the first place...

I'm imagining something halfway between the intro to the original Syndicate PC game and the beginning of the novel Going Postal...

Ghost Nappa
2014-01-05, 06:33 PM
Have them go into a dungeon for their own reasons, fall into a Lotus-Eater Machine (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LotusEaterMachine), where they come together as a group and then have them ripped out.

Then make them think they're playing Tomb of Horrors.

Coidzor
2014-01-05, 07:06 PM
I'm imagining something halfway between the intro to the original Syndicate PC game and the beginning of the novel Going Postal...

I'd swear I've played Syndicate, but I can't actually remember its intro. Going Postal, on the other hand, definitely is a source of inspiration for me here. :smallbiggrin:

Lakaz
2014-01-05, 07:07 PM
My personal favourite is "You all meet up in an air vent while trying to break into the town hall for various reasons"

inexorabletruth
2014-01-05, 07:09 PM
1st Campaign: Graduation day at a military school. They were to spar with their master.

2nd Campaign: Players wanted to RP meetup in a city. They never met up. The campaign was killed after 4 sessions of them just running around the city doing their own thing.

3rd Campaign: Receiving a letter from their fathers with instructions to go to war.

4th Campaign: At the entrance to a dungeon. (Everybody knows each other.)

5th Campaign: At a holy temple for a special holiday.

6th Campaign (When I started DM'ing via PbP): Receiving a summons from a Duke (HA! Still not a king!) for able-bodied adventurers.

7th Campaign: At a monastery. It was an all-monk campaign.

8th Campaign: At the entrance to a dungeon, again. (I was running like 3 campaigns at the time and admittedly, I phoned this one in.)

9th Campaign: Getting off a boat.

10th Campaign: At a party held by a Rakshasan king.

11th Campaign: Receiving their pay from a blacksmith.

12th Campaign (currently running): Anywhere they wanted as long as it was in the village. Most of them chose the tavern. One of them chose the Mayor's house.

I only included campaigns that weren't designed to be one-shots or dungeon delvers, since the starting point in those are always unoriginal, by design.

Interestingly, I've never introduced a plot hook at a tavern. Even when the players started in the tavern… or chose to head to the tavern to find a plot hook. I always felt that was a personal challenge to my DM'ing skills to find them something, anything, to do that didn't involve them overhearing a rumor at the bar.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 07:30 PM
I'd swear I've played Syndicate, but I can't actually remember its intro. Going Postal, on the other hand, definitely is a source of inspiration for me here. :smallbiggrin:

Dude is standing on a street corner. Weird future hover-car drives up, grabs him, takes him to a facility where he is put in a bizarre Vitruvian Man machine, implanted with cybernetics, covered in black rubber, programmed, and returned to the street as a trenchcoated cyber-agent. (That's from memory, possibly inaccurate but that's the gist of it...)

Exactly the above would actually make a good start for many kinds of campaigns...


My personal favourite is "You all meet up in an air vent while trying to break into the town hall for various reasons"

"Personal favorite" makes me think that you prefer to start all campaigns like this, regardless of genre, system, or who the PCs are... :smallbiggrin:

Ghost Nappa
2014-01-05, 07:33 PM
An example of subverting the bar:
Have there be a LOUD mob outside, with some magical barrier preventing anyone from getting in, the crowd is rowdy, the guards are telling everyone to calm down, the owner is having a fit, allow some time for exposition so the party can all get there...and then BOOM!

Tavern blows up with [insert name of Villain here] flying away on a [insert name of flying do-hickey here] laughing maniacally as they get away with arson and a bunch of money/booze/men/women/children/whatever the villain wants.

Have the angry villagers throw rocks at the villian as they fly away.

Kitten Champion
2014-01-05, 11:10 PM
Let me think... for Pathfinder:

In my first campaign our PCs met in an abandoned barn, a makeshift safe-house used by those fleeing from the isolationist and theocratic authoritarian government which had troops sweeping the land. They formed a tenuous relationship to escape the country, and it blossomed into a formal alliance with everyone being alone and penniless.

In my second campaign our PC's were all after the same character. Either for the bounty on her head, the information she held, or out of misplaced romantic affection. They started off with competing interests, but when they found her dead in mysterious circumstances they ended up working together for wealth, vengeance, and curiosity.

My third campaign started off with the characters being drawn together into a collective dream, an Escher-inspired dream-world dungeon they kept returning to each night and was increasingly unpleasant. Only by meeting one another physically would they find the key to release themselves from their nightly torment, and begin their true mission.

My fourth campaign's PCs were in a thieving crew which were grudgingly joined by an assassin who they happened to meet in flagrante delicto during a noble's ball. They were both exploiting the same information by a disreputable broker and got their way onto the estate pretending to be the same noble, blowing each other's operation. They ended up in a mad dash escape through the sewers. The assassin was marked to death by his order for his failure. He chose to exploit the thieves' native resources to hide himself, and the thieves were too afraid of him to say no.

My fifth campaign's PCs were aboard the same airship when it crashed into the middle of a desert. The campaign was getting out alive. They never really formed a unified team, helping the other passengers was a major contention between the survivalists/pragmatists and the idealists/honour-bound characters. This was the first campaign where PCs killed one another.

My sixth campaign's PCs were brought together by a mysterious figure who turned out to be the party wizard from the future. The characters got cryptic messages referring to things only they knew and ended up meeting in a temple during a festival, paranoid as all hell.

My seventh campaign's PCs were divine champions, of which gods in the setting each only have one of. They're sought by their respective clergy to attend a council of monarchs and hierophants to deal with an existential threat plaguing the land.

My current campaign PCs are guards in a bustling trade city on the edge of their civilization's frontier.

A little planning and some concessions to a narrative, it's not hard to avoid the tavern. Although I think role-playing the fantasy version of Cheers could be interesting.

Coidzor
2014-01-06, 12:32 AM
Dude is standing on a street corner. Weird future hover-car drives up, grabs him, takes him to a facility where he is put in a bizarre Vitruvian Man machine, implanted with cybernetics, covered in black rubber, programmed, and returned to the street as a trenchcoated cyber-agent. (That's from memory, possibly inaccurate but that's the gist of it...)

Exactly the above would actually make a good start for many kinds of campaigns...

Ah, the wonders of Youtube. :smallbiggrin: Pretty nifty, yeah.

Agreed. :smallcool:


1st Campaign: Graduation day at a military school. They were to spar with their master.

That reminds me. The opening of Final Fantasy 8(and by that I mean the actual SeeD examination) was either amazing or hit me at a very impressionable age so I view it with a whole bunch of nostalgia so it's about the same thing.

So it's one of the few things I've just wanted to steal and then butcher until it was unrecognizable in order to make my own from a video game, both the general idea of the Garden and the SeeD exam.

Although just for ****s and giggles, I kinda wanna do an "Adventurers' School"/Sigil Prep/Sigil U/Wizard School game sometime. Have 'em all meet in detention. Wait to see whether it becomes the Breakfast Club with monsters or not.


Although I think role-playing the fantasy version of Cheers could be interesting.

Agreed. :smallbiggrin:

Magesmiley
2014-01-06, 03:16 PM
The alarm bells are being rung, orcs are invading the town. What do you do?

Jay R
2014-01-06, 04:16 PM
I have occasionally introduced them by getting them each in the right place for their own separate purposes, which are pre-empted by an emergency.

One PC is leaving town, one is meeting a mistress at the town gate, one is fencing goods just outside of town, and one lives on the edge of town, so they all happen to be there when a few men attack the entourage of a coach, in an attempt to abduct a noble lady.

-----

I started a superhero campaign with the following:
To player 1: Listening to the police emergency band, you hear about a five-story building on fire.
To player 2: You see smoke rising to the west.
To player 3: You hear sirens, and a fire truck zooms past.
To player 4: At home relaxing in your apartment, it occurs to you that it certainly is getting warm in here.

-----

In my current game, they were told their characters had to grow up in a small, isolated village. Then they were all chosen to escort a food wagon to market, which was beset by goblins.

-----

Once I had a clever idea (I thought) for introducing a new player. The party's job was to meet a contact in a certain tavern. The new PC was representing a group whose contact was just murdered. he had to try to make contact for them, without knowing what they looked like.

It didn't even come close the working. The new player started by trying to pick another PC's pocket. They caught him at it and chased him out of the tavern. Having chased the person they were looking for away, 0they then tried to make contact with each remaining person in the tavern. He tried to come back three times, and they chased him out each time.

GPuzzle
2014-01-06, 06:53 PM
First Campaign Hired by the king.

Second Campaign Woke up with no weapons inside a Goblin Stronghold, in the prison, and they didn't know anything about them.

Third CampaignThrown in the middle of a war against Gnolls and Hobgoblins/Goblins/Bugbears.

Fourth CampaignTaken as slaves, boat was being raided, crashed and were later saved by the resistance (things got crazy after that, gambit pileup, including Thanatos, Xanatos and Batmab Gambits).

Fifth Campaign (current) Meetup at a port that was as secure as an airport today (checking if there are any weapons, things like that). Rogue knew Warlord, Druid knew Ranger and Bard knew Swordmage, so they weren't only "random strangers that I don't give a **** about".

inexorabletruth
2014-01-07, 07:03 AM
That reminds me. The opening of Final Fantasy 8(and by that I mean the actual SeeD examination) was either amazing or hit me at a very impressionable age so I view it with a whole bunch of nostalgia so it's about the same thing.

So it's one of the few things I've just wanted to steal and then butcher until it was unrecognizable in order to make my own from a video game, both the general idea of the Garden and the SeeD exam.

I've never played FF8, so I googled the opening. Intense, but that's not quite what happened in my campaign, even though our battle was pretty gripping. I used a Homebrew variant on a Bard as their instructor and was handing their butts to them (I only defeated someone who used obviously bad tactics, and they were are just directly charging him one-on-one like minions in a ninja fight) until the group's Druid finally came up with a plan to stop me. After she cast a few spells and shouted a few orders to the still-consious members of the group, she had my bard on the run. She was the reason they won the fight, so I gave her a wondrous item and made her squad captain. Her IRL boyfriend, playing the wizard, did not enjoy taking orders from her for the rest of the campaign, but he wasn't the brightest star in the sky and had no business bossing anyone around.

The campaign caused an amazing out-of-game revelation. She realized that she was a pretty clever person after all, got her confidence back and went back to college.

GybeMark
2014-01-07, 10:56 AM
Responsibility is key:
1. The players have the responsibility to fit the campaign concept.
2. The players have the responsibility to make their PCs into a party.


Awesome answer! A very succinct way to express what keeps a campaign "going".


Instead of having the players create their characters from scratch, I usually create a loose premise or two (or a dozen) for possible stories that would be interesting to tell, and then give the players a few example roles of characters in that story from which to choose to create a character from.


Having a partially created character (either "partial backstory" or "partial character sheet") is is especially great for getting new-to-RPG players involved. In my experience, they tend to get overwhelmed by the character creation process (I did when I first started playing...) because of too many options.

I (and a few of the people I play with) are of the "get and idea for a character in your head, and then come up with a character-sheet to represent that character" variety. Other people tend to be of the "here's my character sheet, now what kind of back story would lead to someone like this?"

"What do you mean I can be 'anybody'?" can lead to a new player not knowing where to start from a story perspective and the online character generators that have options from 101 different rules supplements can add to the confusion.

Kid Jake
2014-01-07, 11:15 AM
Generally I like to state where the campaign is starting and then ask the players why they're all there. My absolute favorite so far was a recent campaign with a half-elf sorcerer and gnome monk. When I asked what brought them together the sorcerer adlibs and shouts 'He kidnapped me!' and the gnome's player without missing a beat smacks sorcerer's player in the mouth and says 'You'll speak when spoken to.'

Dawgmoah
2014-01-07, 04:30 PM
After 8 years in the tabletop scene, ones starts to lose ideas.
You know what I mean: the first game day of that new campaign?

How have you gathered all of your new players in one place to start a new game? All your players have different goals, beliefs, ethics (not to mention alignments), yet you somehow need to get them in one place for no other reason than to start the freakin' game.

Thoughts? =)

One of the more amusing start off was the members of the party all waking up at a banquet given in their honor: and not remembering why they were there, who threw it for them, or anything in the past several months. All they knew was they had been employed to do something, and suceeded.

Finding out who had hired them and what they had done was quickly the centerpiece of the game.

Another time they were all disparate passengers of a ship. Storm came up, the ship foundered, (thankfully the heavily armored fighter could find a crate that kept him afloat), and they all landed on an unknown shore. The people quickly split into two groups: Those that wanted to stay put and hope they were rescued and those that wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill. (The players and a few assorted NPCs.)

Then there was the time when most of the party was all from the same small gnomish village high in the hill country. They were young, brash, and not so experienced as they went poking around an old ruin they had found the entrance to after a landslide ( keeping an eye on the flock of goats was suddenly forgotten about.) Inside they met two dwarves who had been held in stasis and inadvertantly set free when one of the young gnomes knocked over a shelf. That's when they heard the gnolls taking the goats above.

Main thing that can make or break any of this is the mix of players. I've had people work together through the craziest situations and those that could not agree if the sun was setting or rising.

BRC
2014-01-07, 04:34 PM
I like to make the Players do some work, start them with something like

"The Town Hall is on fire, town guards are surrounding you, their captain is demanding an explanation, and at least one of you is not wearing any pants. Work out among yourselves what happened"

It gives the Players some control over the narrative, and is a great way to help people get into their characters, and serves as a little free-form Roleplay to help people get into the mindset of working together to craft a story.

Jay R
2014-01-07, 10:27 PM
I like to make the Players do some work, start them with something like

"The Town Hall is on fire, town guards are surrounding you, their captain is demanding an explanation, and at least one of you is not wearing any pants. Work out among yourselves what happened"

It gives the Players some control over the narrative, ...

Somehow, being outside without pants in public never made me feel I had more control.

Coidzor
2014-01-08, 12:13 AM
Somehow, being outside without pants in public never made me feel I had more control.

I imagine it gives the imagination a good workout to figure out a way though. :smallbiggrin:

Yora
2014-01-08, 05:52 PM
It works of course best in story-based systems without strict skill rules and character abilities. Because you can just come up with new aspects for your characters as you go.

Lord_Gareth
2014-01-09, 10:19 AM
I started what would turn out to be my best Changeling campaign ever by trolling my players. They were all really excited to be playing and turned in, like, nine page backstories. I told them to make any character they wanted, from any location. They asked repeatedly if that was okay, and I kept assuring them that, yes, it was. So they all get their starter Lost together, wondering how it is I'll unite people from such disparate places as Detroit, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Then they wake up in separate hotel rooms in Las Vegas with no memory of how they got there, and the guy from Detroit has an incredibly high-Wyrd Gravewight crouching on his bed, sharpening her finger bones idly and staring at him with disquieting intensity before she picks him up by the front of the shirt, slams him against the wall and screams, "Don't you dare screw this up!" and goes out the window.

ElenionAncalima
2014-01-09, 10:44 AM
I agree with the people saying that the best thing to do is to throw the responsibility back to the players.

I recently started a game with two players, each playing two characters...and when it came to character creation I had two rules.

1. Both of the player's two characters had to know each other well.
2. The players had to find a way for the characters to know each other, even if the connection was only between one of each of their characters.

Once they did that, all I had to do what hook them into my adventure and we were set.