unusual ways of getting a party together

[kirinke]

unusual ways of getting a party together.
or awww. not the old tavern routine!

my personal favorite is when the original party or parties gets massacared by a greater foe, leaving only a few members who make it to the local house of healing. It's like.
Party A: what happened to you?
Party B: Dragon with a toothache.

Party B: What happened to you?
Party A: the idiot gnome fiddled with a ceiling collaspe trap. Oh yeh. then there was those blasted kobolds....

 

[Breakstone]

Siamese quadruplets?

 

[Gnarlo]

Once started the group out as customers in a bordello just outside of town that came under attack by a group of goblins. Allowed me a good reason to have them all be strangers in the same place joining together to fight, in addition to giving them improvised weapons and no armor

 

[Hypersmurf]

Or there's the Robin of Sherwood route - they all break out of the same prison cell...

-Hyp.

 

[Mimdalf]

hmmm, just an idea

Well, here goes my first post, I'm new to this board and I came to this thread to express ideas and I love "brainstorming". I have years and years of DnD experience, but I nolonger have the time to play Well, so what we have is the opening to a great campaign lots of material for down the road, but how do we connect these players? The opening game can be the most dramatic start to a successful campaign one the players can remember fondly, or it can be quickly thrown together just to get the game going. You could have an entire scene ready and written to post on a board or sent to the players by email where you set the scene i.e. late evening, and end to a large celebration. The streets still filled with common folk, when suddenly screams erupt and a dark figure dashes through the crowd, a horrid figure with the stench of the grave. The figure clutches a small wailing bundle and darts around you. You set the scene and have the players ready with a few paragraphs placing themselves in the scene and the events that led them to that moment. Play begins with action an event that bystanders witness and say "Wow, you work well together", or "I've been looking for individuals such as yourselves..." Just an Idea

 

[heldenhammer]

I have played with more-or-less the same group of people for years now. We hate trying to come up with an in-game justification for why we're all together. These days, any game we run starts with the premise of "You all know each other" and we go from there.

There was a Warhammer FRP game I played in once where the stats we all came up with were so similar that we decided that all the PCs were brothers.

 

[Micar Sin]

well, I had a campaign where one of the party members drifted into a port city on a barrel of pickled herring after her ship was attacked by goblin pirates. The party also included a barbarian who was rescued from the gallows and was thus beholden to a third party member who was an agent of the city..yet another member had been press ganged form the city guard

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Our current campaign originally started with the characters all being residents of the same geographic region, all called to the main town to perform their annual militia training. They all ended up assigned to the same squad under an experienced militia corporal. During a goblin raid, the squad leader was incapacitated, allowing the PCs to heroically save the day, starting their reputation as local defenders.

Incorporating new PCs since then has been harder; the newcomers were never as tightly integrated as the original group of PCs. There's something to be said for growing up with each other from 1st level.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Incorporating new PCs since then has been harder; the newcomers were never as tightly integrated as the original group of PCs. There's something to be said for growing up with each other from 1st level.

Even harder, of course, is introducing a new PC in the middle of a dungeon crawl.

The last time it came up, I just couldn't stand to have them held prisoner, with their gear in a convenient box in the next room. But I didn't want to have the player sitting there for a session or two waiting for the right moment to have someone show up.

I ended up taking the simplest route of all. "That NPC Gnome Wizard you brought along from town to help out? He's really a PC Halfling Wizard. That guy."

Accompanied with appropriate Jedi-Mind-Trick hand gestures, it worked fine.

-Hyp.

 

[Duncan Haldane]

Probably my favourite method of starting a group together was something I did about 10 years ago.

I came up with a story that linked the PCs together when they were young, and then sent them off for training.

There were four characters. I wrote up a story showing how they knew each other, and then the players chose which of the four they wanted to play.

I ran each of them through a solo session, integrating their ideas for what the characters were beyond my basic story outline, and then had them get together (the three that had been sent off had promised that if possible, they would meet together 5 years later - I guess I pinched that a little from Dragonlance).

It worked really well. But like someone else said of their experience, it was had to introduce other PCs later, because these ones had such a tight background.

Duncan