If your character has no reason to stay either the plothook was insufficient or you made a bad character. Both should be adressed ooc.
Create a new character that does have a reason to stick around. *Session 0 should be the creation of the story of how the group met, they should not meet in session 1.
they should not meet in session 1.
Strongly disagree. Nothing wrong with doing that, but nothing wrong with having them meet in session 1 too, as long as you have built characters who will be willing to go along with the GM’s hooks.
And even that part is flexible, depending on the nature of the hook. If the hook is “you see an ad look for rat exterminators”, then you better have a character who wants to be an adventurer and will cooperate with other would-be adventurers. If the hook is “you’re prisoners being ordered to go explore this dungeon by order of the vizier”, there’s room for slightly less cooperative PCs, as long as you PC is cooperative enough to go along with that order, even if (at first) reluctantly.
Yeah, I’m gonna back you up on that one. Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.” Every heist movie is basically required to have an “I’m putting a team together…” sequence.
Session 0 is where you lay out the expectations of the game, and your players think about either how their characters have already interacted, or how they will interact when they eventually meet. You give people an idea of what they’re getting into, you pitch the tone and the style of the game, and you help people shape characters around that.
As an example a friend of mine always pitches his games by describing who they would be directed by. I remember vividly his “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Halflings” game, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay If It Was Directed By Guy Ritchie experience. Just setting that sense of tone up front meant that we all knew to make characters who would fit the vibe. I played “Blackhand Seth, The Scummiest Elf You’ve Ever Met,” one part Brad Pitt Pikey, one part Jack Sparrow, and I had a blast.
In my most recent campaign I’m running a Shadowrun game where the group would be assembled in session 1 by a down on his luck fixer. My pitch to the players was simple; make fuck-ups. I wanted characters who were at the end of their rope, lacking in options, either so green no one would trust them or so tainted by past failures that no one wanted them. The kind of people who would take a job from a fixer who had burned every other bridge. They rose to the assignment beautifully, and by four sessions in the group has already formed some absolutely fascinating relationship dynamics. A lot of that has been shaped by their first experiences together, figuring out how to work as a team, sometimes distrusting each other, and slowly discovering reasons to care about each other.
Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.”
Oh, that reminds me of a 4th way campaigns can start (in addition to the 3 I said in a different reply) that I’ve been in before and quite enjoyed—though wouldn’t want to be overused. The MCU method. Where each player individually gets a 1 session (maybe 2 at most) solo session introducing them and getting them to the right place to start the campaign.
Doesn’t have to be a solo session. If you have the right group for it (big IF there) you can jump back and forth between the individual characters, essentially running four solo sessions in parallel. This relies heavily on your players being the kind of people who are invested in the action even when their character isn’t present, but it can be done.
That said, I think for the most part the “Solo movie” should really be a character’s backstory. This is why I don’t like D&D, or at least the D&D presumption of starting at level 1. It leaves no room for characters to have an interesting history if they’re basically at the level where the average house-cat is a threat. If I run D&D, I start people off at somewhere around level 5 - 10. Give them enough ability that they can actually have done some interesting things already. Get the solo movie out of the way before the game even starts.
Meeting people with the inclination and schedule that I enjoy the company of to make a party with is the worst part of d&d. Please don’t make me role play it, too.
It might be your least favorite part of DnD, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who enjoy meeting a new group of characters and finding out about their particular ticks and specialties.
I learn about the characters, myself included, throughout the campaign through their actions. Otherwise session one is like that time I asked a coworker about one of his tattoos and had to hear about his sister’s murder. That’s more of a session two+ thing to me.
For me, the tired trope of “strangers meet in a tavern” approach is the inevitable round of introductions that feels like that time at the start of school when everyone had to stand up to say their name and one interesting fact about them. It’s just awkward and everyone wants it to be over quickly.
Much better to just create characters together in session 0. Everyone already knows each other, their motivations, prior relationships established, etc… and just begin the campaign as if everyone is already on mission.
Everybody plays RPGs differently, but it’s funny how some people don’t get the term “roleplaying” and are constantly, relentlessly playing their real selves in the game. So you get barbarians with the sensibilities of software developers.
I’m new to my party and roleplaying in general (though I’ve consumed it as entertainment) and I’m having a slightly different issue. My character was intentionally designed to be a bit naive to match me as a player, and doesn’t have high skills in any int based stuff (at least for now) and instead has medical, nature, survival, etc.
A lot of puzzles or traps etc I can as a player try to reason through, but my character shouldn’t be able to sus out, and I feel torn between playing the character as it should be or adding ideas to solve stuff so we aren’t just sitting there twiddling our thumbs for ideas.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between factual knowledge and just cleverness. There’s no reason a bumpkin fresh off the farm can’t be curious about what makes something tick, so they look under it or break it open - and whaddya know, they find a hidden thing. It’s really up to the DM to say no, your character wouldn’t know to do that. The intelligence you show when you figure out a puzzle or a trap could make total sense as the same spark that made the naive character want to leave the farm and explore the big wide world.
Maybe your char bumbles around the room doing goofy things instead of working hard and logically to crack the puzzle and the dm can make your bumbling uncover extra clues that advance the plot.
This right here is what makes it roleplaying.
You as the player know what to do to move the story forward. Just need to figure out how the character you built would go from Point A to Point B, then roleplay doing it, even if it means they bumble their way through it like a clown.
Let the DM worry about what skills you need, if you even need them at all; the only thing the player has to do is describe their actions and their intentions.
A good DM will make sure you fail forward.
Fun fact:
The Expanse books (and eventual TV show) were started as a unique role-playing campaign where the person running it (Ty Franks) would write a prompt, the players would explain their character’s reactions. He’d then write a story section incorporating that and the players would say how they reacted and so on.
There was a core group of characters who were the “survivors” early on, but one of the players had to drop out early-ish, so in the next bit of story that character died.
That was carried into the books and TV show, which is why after the core group of characters is established, there’s a sudden, shocking death.
THANK. YOU.
Players who do this ARE BAD PLAYERS. I don’t care what it takes, you WILL find a reason to cooperate. Call it metagaming if you have to. This is a team game, you will work as a team.
Players are expected to make characters that will, for whatever reason, will work together and, for whatever reason, will take plot hooks. Without those two things the game doesn’t happen.
What if they leave the party and create a new character to join the party that fits in better? Is that good or bad?
I mean, it’s good, but it feels like an over reaction. They don’t need to make an entirely new character, they just need to think of a reason they’d cooperate. It can be a contrived reason, that’s fine, but they need to work together. Some examples,
- Highly shy character “warms up” to at least one other character and sort of talks to the group “through” that character, but you can still (as a player) face the whole table to talk as a group.
- Character who is extremely distrusting has met a character before (just tweak backstory) or finds at least one other character implicitly trust worthy. Maybe the Rogue who has been backstabbed too many times trusts the Paladin because they know they’re too honest to lie.
Edit: It can also be like “my god told me” or “I just know y’all are a good bunch” lol. Doesn’t need to be elaborate.
I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I’m getting ready to leave. I don’t know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.
No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what “my character would realistically do” instead of just playing a game.
Probably for the best. If you’d let him onboard it might have ended up like this story.
Obviously, I’m probably missing some context here, but reading the way you’ve described this, I don’t think you were at fault here. If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget “Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law”, basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That’s not a jedi, that’s an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord.
Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying “This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him,” something like that. Not just “Yo, I’m a party member, lemme in.” Real life doesn’t work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it’s so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.
Why is it always a jump to “Overly Paranoid to the point of seeing everything moving as a spook” instead of just “reasonably cautious but otherwise still level headed”?
If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
Do you forget that this is almost literally what Obi Wan and Luke did to recruit Han and Chewie? Ya know, the famous Smuggler pair? They just walked up to the pair in a bar and had a polite discussion about requesting some discreet passage aboard Han’s ship.
Last I checked, no one bitches about that part of A New Hope.
No, Obi Wan and Luke found Han through contacts Obi Wan had at Mos Eisley having lived on Tatooine for years and gone to the trouble of maintaining underworld connections knowing he was on the run from the authorities, and they didn’t just rock up and say “Yo, we’re buds now,” they employed Han and Chewie to smuggle them somewhere, that being the job of a pair of smugglers.
There’s a few ways I have approached this as a GM. I’ll go from least to most effective (and, I feel, mature).
The first is to put a shared enemy in front of the party, so that even if the characters do split up, they’re working towards the same goal. The character who has “no reason” to trust the party also has reason to recognize the effectiveness of sticking with allies in a world full of enemies. If the player wants them to go off on their own, fine, but as GM, the game stays with the party - oh, and have the player who left roll on a random injury table because they were outnumbered.
Second is to invoke the “Wolverine Approach”. Wolverine in Marvel Comics always goes on and on about not being a team player, being a bad person, being a loner, etc. - and he certainly has had his fair share of solo adventures. At the same time, there was at least one month where nearly every major Marvel title had Wolverine in it - Avengers, West Coast Avengers, X-Men, the Defenders, Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, Alpha Flight, etc… And because it was in the era where She-Hulk was part of the F4, he had a cameo there because of the WCA. Wolverine might claim to not be a team player, and he might be a pain in the rear end, but he’s always there if there’s a villain to be thwarted or a fight to be had. You have a right to have your character complain. Just stick in or near the party. I don’t care if you sleep in a different hotel or a separate camp. Be there in the important scenes.
Third, “Take it or leave it”. I’m not ashamed of myself for this one - I have told people, this is the game we’re playing. if you want to play this game, I want to have you. If you don’t want to play what we’re playing under the terms we’re all in agreement on, there’s the door, don’t let it hit you on the way out. It’s effective, but I don’t think it’s the most mature method in my arsenal because of the all-or-nothing nature.
Fourth is an open and frank discussion. Explain that the concept of the game is cooperative. Make sure you get buyin from everyone, not just the loner. Express the expectation I have of both players and characters for the game in play. Paranoia, for instance, has a very different set of expectations and goals than Shadowrun or Spirit of the Century / Dresden / Fate. I have GMed for a loner character in a Fate game who never showed up with the other players, but because the system is so narratively driven, they were helpful by setting up Aspects with free tags because the character could realistically be “doing his own thing” and still contribute. So I’ve learned to be open and clear with my goals and intentions. I don’t care if your character is going to be a pain - I care whether or not you as a player will contribute positively to everyone’s experience in a fair way.
The more we are clear about goals and intentions, and the more we can apply nuance and understanding to the situation, the better our games will be.
Generally speaking, this is something that an experienced GM can handle in session zero. An important part of session zero is establishing expectations for the style of game to be played: Things like “are the player characters friends?” “Is PvP encouraged or discouraged?” “Do I as a DM want the characters to stick together?” etc etc.
Generally when running DnD, I request of my players to design characters who:
- Have a disposition to get along well with their companions. (this can be for any reason: because they’re like that with everyone, or because they’re loyal to the group, or because they view it as useful to have some friendly scapegoats nearby or any other motivation.)
- Be the kind of person who will go on adventures and take risks. (This can be because they’re a daredevil, or because they’re desperate, or because they’re devoted to their duty, or any other motivation.)
Fundamentally, most DnD games are the story of a group of friends going on adventures together. If your DnD game is the story of a group of friends going on adventures, then it’s extremely beneficial for your players to build characters who will be friends, and who will go on adventures. Together.
My fix has always been: that’s fine! They go off on their own adventures. Now please roll a character that’s going to play the game we’re running here tonight.
I just don’t DM for people like that anymore.
Oh god I might when my kids and their friends are older though. This is why you gotta raise em right.
I started running games for my wife and her niblings, and the oldest boy is getting into that “I’m such a rebel” phase where they think they’re bad ass for taking slightly longer to do a chore than needed and say “no” the first time you ask them to do something.
He thought it was hilarious to have a character that refused to join the rest of the group, so I said “okay, you can stay at the inn if you want” and then proceeded to intentionally ignore anything he was saying or doing, leaving him out of rolls, and never addressing him.
He’s 12 and started literally crying to his mother about how we’re all being mean to him. Apparently “he had the opportunity to participate and chose not to” wasn’t a good enough response to his mother. I stand by my choice. Although my wife managed to convince me to let him “rejoin” at the next town/session.
He doesn’t pull that shit anymore though, when he’s playing he’s playing or he gets shut out again.
Genuine question to anyone reading: does that make me a bad DM? If so, suggestions on how to handle it?
Tell him "look, this game isn’t about being a Total Badass By Yourself. It’s about working with your team and overcoming challenges you couldn’t otherwise. If you wanna be a Total Badass By Yourself, there are games you can play. But if you wanna play this, you’re gonna have to work with me here. Because my time and effort is valuable, and I want to have fun just like you do.
