First session how we got together ideas

[scurv]

please list your Idea's on how to get that first session started with groups of people that would normally not associate with each other and have such different backgrounds that it makes you WTF. Not that I fault people for wanting to play special snowflakes. But sometimes it is a bit of a chore to weld together 3 or 4 of them. Also list your reasons why you do what you do.


1-Ship wreck that motley-crew of soon to be adventures on an island.

2-Have them all wake up together in a wizards abandoned lab. This one works well to get paligeeks to depend on a rogue with skills when they discover they are trapped on the inside of a well trapped fortress. It is also a fun twist for my inhouse rules on wizards!!!

3- All crap!, we all just caught the lingering death and immune to our spells plague and need to get x to cure our self's. This is fun to do with players with alot of ADHD, it keeps them on task

4- You all wake up in a room and do not know who you are. I kinda view this as a chance to RP char generation...and I view it as a case of the DM is having fun at the players expense, so let them deal with it. BTW I use this one alot with the wizards labyrinth if I end up doing unexpected DMing

5- Hand the players single class char sheets and tell them to cope. I tend to do this if there are to many munchkin builds being used recently and I wish to deal with something other then a party of Mary-Sues

6- You all had a prophetic dream. This one can make just getting the party together an adventure onto it self!

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Two things I've done.

One: group character creation. When the players make their characters together, it's much easier for them to tie into one another, and for you to guide them and suggest tie-ins. When I did this with a Burning Wheel campaign, I easily found a way to tie everyone into the first scene.

Two: the relationship method, duly stolen from Fiasco. Seat the players around the table, and then have them come up with some relationship with the character of the player to their left, and the character of the player to their right. Ranging from "old war buddies" to "scam artist who took over the business", this has done a great job of bringing together disparate characters.

What it boils down to is this: get the players to buy into the game from the start. It's much easier, much less of a headache, and far more interesting (I find) to work out the integrations as you're building characters into the setting.

[lt_murgen]

One way I have done it in the past:

Get all players to decide how they ended up in a fairly large city in the realms. I was running a greyhawk campaign, so that was easy. Next, I decided that a wealthy merchant wanted to hire some folks to do some bandit hunting (aka insert adventure thread here). The merchant hosted over a dozen potential candidates, including the characters. It was their chance to impress him. At the end of the evening, he pulls the characters into a private room and offers all of them the job. All or nothing.

[Lentrax]

We had an Exalted group that started out as mortals once. We were all soldiers in the same Dragon of Lookshy troops. It gave us a common background and goals, and made for a great WTF moment when I gambled my soldiers freedom (including the other players' characters) in single combat against a Lunar Exalt. Not that I had much of a choice. Lookshy doesn't surrender. Ever.

[Kiero]

One: group character creation. When the players make their characters together, it's much easier for them to tie into one another, and for you to guide them and suggest tie-ins. When I did this with a Burning Wheel campaign, I easily found a way to tie everyone into the first scene.

[snip]

What it boils down to is this: get the players to buy into the game from the start. It's much easier, much less of a headache, and far more interesting (I find) to work out the integrations as you're building characters into the setting.

This. Forget all this pointless conceit of trying to get them together in the first session, do it before.

[Xefas]

Another take on tying the characters together through group character creation - from the Dresden Files.

You start off as fairly experienced people, and each character has had three "Books" worth of adventures before play. You name and detail your first Book, which has none of the other PCs in it - your origin story perhaps, or just something very iconic for who you are. Then, you pick one of the other PCs to "guest star" in your second book, name and detail it, and describe how they participated in the story. In your third book, you pick a different PC, and do the same. Each book gives you a mechanical Aspect to use during play.

So, after everyone has done this, every character has been the protagonist in three stories, and been the guest star in a few others, and everyone is connected and has backstory with one another. You can, of course, have flashbacks later, to flesh them out more.

I think this would be a pretty cool idea to apply to a superhero RPG, like ICONS. You have your own comic book line (Batman #1 and so on), and get some aspects from that, and then a bunch of crossovers (Batman vs The Punisher!, Batman/Hellboy Team Up Spectacular!), and then, the game itself starts, and you're at Justice League #1, or whatever.

[scurv]

I am not sure I follow you on the

This. Forget all this pointless conceit of trying to get them together in the first session, do it before.

I do not mean to sound like a dolt, But I would like you to expand on this slighty please

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I am not sure I follow you on the

I do not mean to sound like a dolt, But I would like you to expand on this slighty please

If I parse correctly, the meaning is roughly thus...

...trying to bring the already-created characters together in the first session of actual gameplay is a fruitless endeavor. It's far better to get the players together so that they can mesh an initial group together beforehand.

I would only add that I find it perfectly cool to consider "the first session" to consist of nothing but joint character creation, where everyone's making characters together and working their backstories together. Either that, or at least get everyone together and discuss how their concepts can fit together.

Personally, I find that the more character creation is done in tandem, the better, because you keep finding neat little details.

[Kiero]

If I parse correctly, the meaning is roughly thus...

...trying to bring the already-created characters together in the first session of actual gameplay is a fruitless endeavor. It's far better to get the players together so that they can mesh an initial group together beforehand.

I would only add that I find it perfectly cool to consider "the first session" to consist of nothing but joint character creation, where everyone's making characters together and working their backstories together. Either that, or at least get everyone together and discuss how their concepts can fit together.

Personally, I find that the more character creation is done in tandem, the better, because you keep finding neat little details.

Precisely this, and I agree entirely that a first session spent generating characters and ensuring everyone is on the same page is not a waste of time.

You save yourself sessions of headaches (or worse still, a broken game) for the sake of investing one session in engaging in meta-discussion.

By contrast those "let's get the characters to meet and thrash out why they want to work together IC" sessions I consider to be make-work and a waste of everyone's time. We all know why we're sitting at a table together and what we intend to do, cut to the chase.

[Man on Fire]

There is one very nice idea from one handbook for gms I once read. It goes like this - you describe the following scene:

You start in an inn, pretty normal and average one, with people drinking and having good time.Then a number of mysterious strangers, all dressed in red cloaks and with masks on their faces enters it. And without a word they start murdering everybody. One person immiediately jumps through the window and tries to run away, but the trangers chase after him. After few moments of chase they catch up to him and murder him in cold blood. Then they search his belonging and take one object from it - some kind of statue it seems.

And you finish the describtion with those words:
"You take down your masks. Last thing every one of you remember is falling asleep last night. Now you are standing in front of people you never seen, and with who you just killed several innocent guys. What you do?"


And one more thing
I'm not really sold to the whole idea of preparing character history and interactions beforehand togther - you see, you never really know how these interactions my look like until the game starts. You and other player may decide to do two characters who are best friends forever but it may turn out that your gameplay styles are so different it just doesnt work and your character just clicks way better with somebody else's creation.

[scurv]

I can respect the openness of making chars together. But I am somewhat a fan of everyone individually has a sit-down/discussion with the DM to make theirs. I do not find anything wrong with having a group sit down from day zero with the players to decide how everyone came together, And if it was the house rule of the DM I would do it. But it is not quite my taste. I kinda like some tension of the players not knowing explicitly what each other is playing, or who has what agenda.
I guess I just enjoy the pointless stuff is all.

[Riverdance]

Slavery. They've all been enslaved and have to find their stuff (or somebody else's) and get out alive. After that the best way to keep them together would be to have the surrounding area be so hostile that they have little choice but to stick together.

[Kiero]

I can respect the openness of making chars together. But I am somewhat a fan of everyone individually has a sit-down/discussion with the DM to make theirs. I do not find anything wrong with having a group sit down from day zero with the players to decide how everyone came together, And if it was the house rule of the DM I would do it. But it is not quite my taste. I kinda like some tension of the players not knowing explicitly what each other is playing, or who has what agenda.
I guess I just enjoy the pointless stuff is all.

This is not a "house rule", it's got nothing to do with what's printed in any book. It's about a group's chosen forms of operation, how they usually do things. It's social contract if you will, something completely independent of choice of game.

Everyone sitting down individually with the GM sounds like the poor GM repeating themselves a lot. I'd much prefer to do that briefing once, and have everyone sharing all the ideas.

I have never seen anything positive or game-enhancing arriving from "secrets" one player has from the rest of the group, or worse still a conspiracy between player and GM. I have, on the other hand, seen resentment and ill-will, as well as potentially game-breaking things emerge later on because someone wildly misconstrued how a reveal would be received.

At best "secrets" never actually get revealed, making them a waste of time even coming up with them. At worse they derail the game and poison collaboration and openness.

[Serpentine]

The campaign the campaign I was running shot off from started out in Montgomery Snake's Elevated Academy for Adventurers. Most of the characters were friends, acquaintances, or had classes together, and we were put into groups to assist one another on our "final tests". I can't remember whether the first adventure was the Final Final Test, or the First Job, but either way we were all assigned to it as a group by the school.

Like others, I like to encourage my players to come up with at least one or two relationships before they get started - the more different and incompatible the characters, the more interesting the backstories are likely to be.
As an example, two characters I played with were: Nuturion, the Chaotic Good Rogue/Thief Acrobat sylvan elf, all sparkles and knives and charm and sticky fingers who was raised in the forests by his fellow elves; and Garadel (not the correct spelling), Lawful Good elven Cleric of Pelor, raised by humans to be monastic, devout, and incredibly serious. These two - according to their backstories - met when Nuturion was wandering down a dark and lonesome forest path. He was beset by a shambling zombie horde and, finding his usual combat method of targeting squishy areas useless against them, thought his time had come. Luckily for him, a Cleric just happened to be wandering by at just the right moment to save him. They've been best friends (and Nuturion's been terrified of undead) ever since, even though Garadel disapproves of Nuturion's sticky fingers and Nuturion finds Garadel stuffy.

[Jay R]

I prefer one of two methods. Either let the players decide how they met and decided to travel together, or the plot hook explicitly brings them together.

I played in a recent game in which we started on board a ship that sank. The PCs were the only survivors that made it to a nearby land.


I ran one game that started with the PCs all apprentices, acolytes or squires to several high-level NPCs who had been a party decades before.

They were coming together for a final mission, to return a set of interconnected artifacts they all had. To defend the artifacts, the NPCs were all destroyed, and the PCs were left with the mission.

[scurv]

This is not a "house rule", it's got nothing to do with what's printed in any book. It's about a group's chosen forms of operation, how they usually do things. It's social contract if you will, something completely independent of choice of game.

Everyone sitting down individually with the GM sounds like the poor GM repeating themselves a lot. I'd much prefer to do that briefing once, and have everyone sharing all the ideas.

I have never seen anything positive or game-enhancing arriving from "secrets" one player has from the rest of the group, or worse still a conspiracy between player and GM. I have, on the other hand, seen resentment and ill-will, as well as potentially game-breaking things emerge later on because someone wildly misconstrued how a reveal would be received.

At best "secrets" never actually get revealed, making them a waste of time even coming up with them. At worse they derail the game and poison collaboration and openness.

We tend to use out secrets from the start...But I suspect we will have to agree to disagree, My system has worked for me for the better part of 15 years, As I suspect yours as worked for you for as long. At this point I suspect we are of different world views on this subject and do not know enough of the nuances of how the other handles their campaigns to make a decision in anything other than an emotional reaction sort of way.

[Kane0]

Each character is already a sonewhat accomplished adventurer with a few quests/adventures under their belts and have attracted the attention of a single moderately powerful employer, proposing a job for them all to take. They find they each fill two important requiremts:
1: they show potential
2: they are expendable
These reasons may vary