“You enter a tavern. There is an old man in the corner who beckons to your group. He seems to be holding a map of some kind…”
The first half of the first session usually sucks, I’ve found.
The whole “why is your group together, how do they know each other, why is any given member willing to share with any other member, why is any given member willing to take an arrow for any other member” kind of questions are, let’s face it, just hanging there. If there’s a half-elf ranger and a dwarven cleric and a halfling rogue, it’s not like you can say “we’re all cousins” and take care of that issue that way. So I’m going to go through some of the best takes I’ve seen on party establishment and hope that all of you have some even better ones for me to lift from.
A fun one is to get everybody’s characters in front of them, point to one at random, and then say “roll initiative”. Start the story in a hallway in a dungeon/tower and have a goblin swinging at their heads. What’s the relationship between the cleric and rogue? Well, the rogue just backstabbed the goblin trying to hit the cleric. What more do you need? Let the group fight together and let the group establish their dynamics *THERE* and, if time permits, allow them to explain how they got to where they did. By the time they get to the second level, everybody will know everything they pretty much care to know.
Dragonlance actually had a fairly sweet variant on this theme. The opening setting was that everybody was returning to some pre-agreed upon place at some pre-agreed upon time. When they left, they were barely level 1 making their way into the world… and now they’re coming back as level 3! It involves some light handwaving, of course, but the fundamental assumption is that everybody already cares enough about everybody else to keep their word and show up for the pre-agreed upon meeting. That, right there, is most of the battle.
Now, there’s a *VERY* good one that I happened to stumble across for a one-shot campaign which was to give everybody a basic template for a character and have them sprinkle their own skills and stats in addition to those basic ones… for example: I had everybody in my one-shot be a fresh graduate from the police academy. This mean that they all had, at least, average physical stats, average mental stats, and average combat stats. (And they had a few points to pump into whatever they wanted in order to specialize.) This works *AWESOME* for a one-shot campaign… but if you’re asking players to devote more than one or two Saturday nights to a game, it’s not fair to force them to play a character they wouldn’t otherwise have come up with (and certainly not fair to force them to play something as bland as “a fresh police recruit”).
A somewhat related technique is to start everybody at level 0 and tell them “you are all slaves chained to each other”. Have everybody escape without being a fighter or mage or cleric or whatever (as DM you will have to be extra lenient with the dice rolls (if you have any at all, of course)) and, after everybody is outside of the camp with the necessary tools to undo the chains… *THEN* let them pick their classes and start them off as level 1. Everybody knows everybody because everybody saved everybody else’s life. What more do you need?
Well… you may want to write your own character. This bring us to the Harry Dresden game where the game has you sit down on the first night and has everybody work together to create the city and the various dynamics that existed and only after the city was established did the players start talking about their own characters. Once we get to the second session, one of the things that each character had to do was explain his or her relationship to *TWO* other characters. Maybe everybody doesn’t know everybody but everybody knows a guy who knows a guy. Establish that you are friends with the two folks you know (and why wouldn’t you do that?), and you have enough groundwork to explain why you’re all in the Mystery Machine.
Of course, this is really only essential for games that incorporate moderate (but not heavy) storytelling… the games I’ve played that incorporate heavy storytelling have all had pre-game interviews with the DM. Who is your character? What does he do? When did he become a vampire? (Seriously, if everybody has been a member of the same club in the same city for the last 30 years (or more), it’s safe to say that everybody has an established relationship.) This makes me want to wonder about the whole “everybody always has to start as a level 1 character, every time” trope that I have only rarely seen abandoned…
In any case, what tricks do you use for your first session?
It can be difficult to come up with good senerios that bring the players together. As long as you are in an accomodating group, this is not a difficult task. The players know they need their characters to work together, so they find reasons to do it. The GM just sets the stage. Some typical ways I have seen and/or done this are:
1- The Tavern
2- All part of an organisation
3- In jail together
4- Joined in some kind of school
5- Part of the same familly/clan
6- The Lifeboat (Horrible event throws group together)
Dresden had one of the most ellegant ways of doing this, letting the characters to jointly build their backgrounds that involved each other.
Most important question about some of those scenarios is “Why do we stay together?”
Should there be a real life situation putting myself, Alice, Bob and Carol in a dangerous haunted house for a full night what is the reason we should stay together once we receive our inheritances from good old Uncle Mortimer? We’d just go our separate ways and end up with different adventures in our lives. Should we happen to constantly run into each other then it’s a bit awkward and may lead to accusations of railroading.
Zak has you covered.
Wow, that is a very good list. I like.
“Of course, this is really only essential for games that incorporate moderate (but not heavy) storytelling… ”
…which some players insist on calling “railroading”.
Oh, the distinction I see between the two is that moderate storytelling is far more likely to be railroaded than heavy storytelling.
A typical session of D&D, for example, moves a party through a dungeon… compare to a typical session of Vampire where the Storyteller could well ask “what are your plans?” and, if amenable, s/he’ll let you go through them (throwing an occasional wrench).
Heavy storytelling, I find, has very little railroading. Let the players tell *THEIR* story.
It’s the moderate storytelling that requires pushes.
I usually have everyone tell me what they want to play well prior to the first meeting. Characters are created over email.
Since player groups typically have some sort of connection to each other (my sister and nephew, my old college buddy, two ex-coworkers), I weave up a backstory that links everyone together along the same lines, giving them common details and then little bits of storyarc that they can share, or not, with other members of the party as they wish. It can look something like this:
Megan, you wanted to be a half-elf druid, and Liam wants to be a warrior of some sort, so we made him an elf, and you’re his half-sister. The two of you are traveling together because you’re looking for a white oak tree as part of your quest, and there aren’t any in your home forest. You’ll need to travel to Durgen Woods to find one.
While traveling across the continent, you rescued Greg (whom you both know out-of-game), a wizard who was held captive by some bandits who had cut down a elder rawnwood tree for firewood. His possessions were all lost, but he suggested that if you could escort him to Harlith, he could pay you for your trouble at the Guildhouse. It’s taken you two weeks to get there, during which you’ve gotten to know each other pretty well (they’re all Neutral Good, so this was easy), and he’s decided to go with you to your forest as he’s heard also that you can find several rare components there.
The local guildmaster suggested you check with the factor of House Penthedes regarding the next outbound caravan to Sgnardun, which is a gnome/human trading post that is in the foothills just south of Durgen Woods. The factor hired you as supplemental guards, at a decent wage, half-payable now and half-payable upon arrival at Sgnardun.
Chris and Phil, you two are members of the current guards troop. Chris (the thief) has found out that his ex-partner has decided to rat him out regarding some jobs that they performed together a couple of months ago, and finds it powerfully convenient to find an excuse to leave town for a while. Phil (the cleric) has known Chris since they were neighborhood kids together and has decided to travel with you.
There will be two minor skirmishes on the way to Sgnardun to give the players a chance to feel each other out in the teamwork scenario, and when they get there they’ll be released from their contracts with some coin in their purse and naturally the guard captain, who they’ve all come to like, will invite them all to his favorite bar for a drink over how well they fought in skirmish #2. There, Something Will Occur that introduces the First Arc of the Story…
So have the characters play through the prequel?
Depends. Actually, player availability is part of the ingredients for the cauldron of brewing the plot. If a couple people are available on an initial proposed start date, and someone else isn’t, I take that into account when deciding where to actually kick off. In the above example, if I had two players who couldn’t start until June but Meg, Liam, and Greg could all meet up some Saturday in May, I might run the first chunk of the backstory as a mini-adventure.
Traveller has a connections system which works like this. Since there’s an in-game bonus for forming a connection with another character (free skill point!) it gives everyone a good reason to figure out how their character knows 1 or 2 others. Which is really important for Traveller since the players are all going into business together (and taking out over 100m credits of debt) and therefore a degree of trust is called for that a group of penniless vagabond with no legal ties don’t need to have.
Bribery!
I like this one.
In the opening session of one campaign, I asked the following of each player:
“Why did a cult of demon worshipers pick you to be their sacrifice?”
I got answers ranging from “because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time” to “because I investigate cult activity for a living, and stumbled across this one”–a nice variety of backgrounds without the need to spend half of the session introducing everybody to everybody else.
Most of my games see the players working for some kind of organization, which gives them a clear reason to be together. My current game of choice, Warhammer FRP 3e, has an interesting mechanic by which the party itself has a class. So you might be “a gang of thugs”, “oathbound”, “swords for higher”, or in the case of my group, “brash young fools”.
That’s not a bad method if your storyline is dominated by that central narrative.
For “organization” games, you can’t beat special ops or spy RPGs.
Oh, that’s an awesome first session. Is everybody level one or level zero?
Tangent: does everyone need to be within the same delta of “level N”?
Depends on the game.
D&D, I would say “yes” because monsters do X damage. I wouldn’t want a difference of more than 1 level before level 8 and more than 2 after that… if only because of the stuff that is likely to be fun for the higher levels to fight against is likely to not be hittable for characters two levels below that.
When it comes to more story-based games… hey. That’s probably up to the DM. Just make sure that the higher-level guys aren’t taking advantage of the lower ones.
http://ryanmacklin.com/mythender-files/MythenderCharacterCreation.pdf
The guy behind the Dresden Files is doing another game. He posted the chargen for his new game Mythenders. Free, legit, etc.