D&D 5E How the party gets formed.

[ArtaSoral]

[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] o how I wish I could do that, but my players would go nuts as they really Max/min their stuff with the starting money according to PHB (I'm beginning to suspect I may be giving my players to much power)

 

[Mort]

Alright so another advice request from an inconsistent DM. I'm starting a fresh campaign (lvl 3) with my players, some from my old camp and some new guys (8 players). One of the things i can predict is that the players are gonna want taken care of is how their characters meet. I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to make this happen smoothly. I don't really want to play through an encounter with each one of them on how they got to a place, that would take way too long and bore everyone else and it feels a little contrived to just say "and you guys are all there." Is there a known way of dealing with this?

First have a session 0 (as already suggested) where the group can generate characters together and work out how they know each other. . This is basically a get together, live or online depending on how you play where everyone rolls up their characters, establishes their concepts etc. - tends to solve a lot of issues.

Next, I usually have my group pick a theme, last 2 were:

1. Employees of Morgrave University (in Eberron) who all knew each other and as such were very easy to coral into adventure.

2. Knights of the Silver Flame - the players were all in service to the Silver Flame and took their early prompting from there.

My current campaign we deviated - Had a session 0 where some of the group knew each other some didn't. I started the group In medias res - Set the scene in the Green Dragon Inn (in Greyhawk) and then had them right in the middle of a massive crisis (Iuz was waking and causing massive havoc and destruction as his huge form was mindlessly walking through and destroying large swaths of the city) - the group was thrown together reacting to the situation.

The main point is - have the group start together or get them together immediately - this has always worked best for myself and others I have gamed with.

 

[mellored]

[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] o how I wish I could do that, but my players would go nuts as they really Max/min their stuff with the starting money according to PHB (I'm beginning to suspect I may be giving my players to much power)

Let them.
Then add some traps, cliffs, waterfalls, fortified defenses, rivers of lava, rope bridges, mazes of mirrors, trees, etc... All positition to favor the monsters.

DM's have more power, no matter how min/maxed the player is.

 

[ArtaSoral]

Goram I really should have asked you guys this Q way earlier, this session 0 sounds perfect but I already helped them make individual characters *sigh*. This is super frustrating as one of the problems I've had with these guys is party friction.

 

[Louis Jivanni]

What kind of party friction exactly?

 

[ArtaSoral]

they tend to both distrust and dislike each other (characters, only a little bit players.) They seem to almost look for reasons for conflict: different religions, hiding equipment/treasure, the standard "my character is super edgelord" etc. I can see how this looks and yea im probably doing something (or many things) wrong to foster such behavior.

 

[Mort]

Goram I really should have asked you guys this Q way earlier, this session 0 sounds perfect but I already helped them make individual characters *sigh*. This is super frustrating as one of the problems I've had with these guys is party friction.

What kind of party friction? Are the group bickering? Are the players finding that their characters are stepping on each other's toes (too similar builds/concepts)?

A thing I do that might help: Let the players change around their characters - minimal questions asked - for a period of time. Since you're starting at 3rd level, tell the group until 5th level (or some other arbitrary number I tend to pick 2 levels from starting) you can change around any aspect of your character you wish. Want to rearrange stats, go ahead. Have a feat already and want to change it - go ahead. Heck, do you think your character is better as an elf? sure no problem.

The key is, be flexible until the group develops a good level of cohesion.

 

[Mort]

they tend to both distrust and dislike each other (characters, only a little bit players.) They seem to almost look for reasons for conflict: different religions, hiding equipment/treasure, the standard "my character is super edgelord" etc. I can see how this looks and yea im probably doing something (or many things) wrong to foster such behavior.

Honestly, I'd just tell the players that they need to find reasons that the group would work together and that this artificial friction/distrust will not be fun for anyone. You can always find an in character motivation for something, best to establish that these motivations should be for the betterment of the players/fun of the party.

Mechanically, I'd make good use of the inspiration mechanic. When the players have their characters cooperate - start handing out inspiration to the characters working together. A bit of a mechanical advantage tends to motivate players quickly!

 

[Quickleaf]

Alright so another advice request from an inconsistent DM. I'm starting a fresh campaign (lvl 3) with my players, some from my old camp and some new guys (8 players). One of the things i can predict is that the players are gonna want taken care of is how their characters meet. I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to make this happen smoothly. I don't really want to play through an encounter with each one of them on how they got to a place, that would take way too long and bore everyone else and it feels a little contrived to just say "and you guys are all there." Is there a known way of dealing with this?

Appreciate the recommendations, the first one might work but with the other two I just know they're going to give me a hard time; "I wouldn't get caught" or "my character wouldn't be known to the king"

Goram I really should have asked you guys this Q way earlier, this session 0 sounds perfect but I already helped them make individual characters *sigh*. This is super frustrating as one of the problems I've had with these guys is party friction.

they tend to both distrust and dislike each other (characters, only a little bit players.) They seem to almost look for reasons for conflict: different religions, hiding equipment/treasure, the standard "my character is super edgelord" etc. I can see how this looks and yea im probably doing something (or many things) wrong to foster such behavior.

Well, D&D is usually a cooperative game... but it sounds like they might be wanting a competitive game? If you're unsure, ASK them: "Do you enjoy a game with a lot of inter-party conflict and friction?" There are ways to do that with D&D, and there are also dozens if not hundreds of others games built on that premise.

If most of them don't enjoy inter-party conflict, but it seems to happen regardless, that's indicative of (a) a problem/instigating player, (b) inter-player issues, and/or (c) the DM not framing scenes to give the players sufficient motivation.

Personally, I prefer the "lazy DM" approach; I would ask the players point blank: "How do your characters know and trust one another? How did you become a party? You tell me."

If they're not used to developing such narrative, you can have them roll on a random relationship table. Basically, each player rolls twice so their PC has a connection to 2 other PCs in the party; I made one a while ago, but can't seem to find it - you should be able to Google it, there are many versions on the web.

 

[Louis Jivanni]

Aaah gotcha, I first say I agree with Mort & Quickleaf. I mainly asked because we just started a game (only two sessions so far with me and my coworkers) and we kinda have that issue.

tl;dr Our greedy chaotic neutral fighter is giving the party some worry and just obtained the Deck of Many Things... luckily he cant read the engravings yet but I'm not sure he cares.. he's used to playing solo rpgs, but we're all still having fun

I'm playing a neutral good milktoast noble cleric of pelor (give me a break i haven't played a real campaign since 3.5 and i miss Jozan lol), another is a chaotic good racist elf ranger (against full/half orcs and dwarves), and lastly our chaotic neutral (sigh) fighter who likes to kill, threaten and use fire a lot (magic initiate)... we still aren't friends and we've started the lost mines campaign...oh yea we have an npc rogue too..he's well.. roguish.. ((we started at lvl 1))

Funny enough, we were resting after the first battle which started off rough because the fighter ran off the caravan to grab some arrows from a caravan in the distance and was ambushed by 4 goblins + a boss goblin.. I healed him with healing word after killing one of the gobs just to find out he could heal himself with second wind lol i also had to heal myself after being brought down to 1 hp by the boss.....

Anyway we began to rest from the fight and were awoken to loud noises coming from the ransacked caravan we found... turns out it was an ogre eating the dead horses of the caravan. The fighter attacked the ogre immediately and we followed suite to keep him from dying since we never recovered from the first fight and i had 0 heals. We eventually got him down super low (luckily it crit failed) and it began to beg for it's life in common but the fighter wanted to kill him anyway and I rolled to see if I could hear the conversation. Rolled a 19 (woot woot) and instantly yelled for the fighter to spare him, which he reluctantly complied to. I then used a medicine check to remove the arrows from him safely and patch up his wounds. I felt bad because when he pleaded for his life he stated he was just hungry and wanted food to take back to his troupe. I mean we attacked it first without warning so it made sense and I received inspiration for changing the course of the story and doing something cool while the others were just going to mindlessly kill it.

Too long of a story made shorter, he took me and the fighter (i went to watch him because he kept threatening the ogre like the whole time) to his conclave gave us a bag of a few treasures they've collected over some time and while I went to purify the horse meat and their drinking well, the fighter pocketed some magic items from the bag.. Funny enough, I used detect magic earlier on the boss goblin, which I mistakenly thought took an hour to cast as a ritual, so I guess he thought I wouldn't use it again on these items and not see that he was concealing some lol.. but we'll see what happens tomorrow...