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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Melba Toast" data-source="post: 5607782" data-attributes="member: 80591">I favour starting out in a small, isolated village.As an old skool DM, I begin with the assumption that 1st level characters are amateurish, naive & immature. The small village represents the limits of their worldly knowledge and the extend of their comfort zone. From a storytelling perspective, it follows the path laid out in The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell. At the outset of the game the characters have reached a stage in their personal development where they must venture out beyond the safe and familiar world and into the unknown world. They must learn and grow, fail and succeed, make friends and enemies.From a game management perspective, it gives the DM time to flesh out the world and the players time to familiarize themselves with the world in small chunks. The DM need only flesh out a smattering of characters and places in the small village and populate the nearby environs. On the other hand, starting the PCs out in a city, where they are loose to do and acquire virtually anything they could imagine, means having to prepare multitudes of characters, places, laws & politics, organisations, plots, subplots, religions, histories. The players will be so busy trying to figure out up from down that they won't have time to develop their characters. As well, parties are more likely to splinter off in different directions to facilitate multiple objectives. They can change their objectives on a single thought. Actions have larger repercussions. As in reality, the pace of life is intensified in cities.It's better to make 'the big city' an exciting and exotic destination for the party, a place that lures them in and scares them away. I admit that starting out in a small village risks being cliché, but I find DMs are more concerned with 'originality' than their players are. Players like to start out in familiar situations because it provides clarity. They can let their characters emerge. Anyway, that's just me.</blockquote>

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