Bringing PCs together when starting a new campaign

[Lanefan]

The idea:
Players will each get to pick a set of 4 townspeople, each set is of people is based of a single character class. For example Bob picks Cleric and gets 4 premade minions, Aurora the local high priest, Ben the priest, John the monk, Will the altar boy.

[...]

When the rebellion is over each player will get to pick 1 of his/hers 4 minions to become a PC and hopefully by then the players will have a fleshed out lvl 1 character.

And 3 more characters waiting in the wings for when the first one dies. This is brilliant! (well, brilliant until you realize you're DMing a 32-member party for the first proto-adventure; that might be a bit daunting, I wish you well with it)

My last two long campaigns have started as follows:

- A famous old adventuring Company, not heard from in ages, is holding an open recruitment meeting. The rookie PCs for whatever reason (determined ahead of time by you and the player) each attend the meeting; and the actual campaign begins at the meeting's start. There's lots more aspiring adventurers there; the recruiting Company throws a few out as undesireable, divides the rest up into parties (with all the PCs in the same one, obviously), gives each group a mission, and sends them out into the field. When I used this, the whole thing was a sham to kill off aspiring adventurers before they developed into anything, and most of the missions were pretty much assisted suicide...except the PCs' one, which was a more ordinary adventure though not at all what they'd been led to expect by their recruiters.

- A Bard roams the country hailing the virtues of his friend and companion Cavalier, and brags about all the Orcs this brave Knight is going to kill in the mountains. Each for his-her own reasons, various other PCs accrete to these two as they roam the countryside; and all eventually wind up in said mountains where adventure awaits...

Lan-"starting a campaign's the easy part; keeping it going after ten years, not so much"-efan

 

[MichaelSomething]

I´m in the very very early planning stage of a new campaign.

I didn't want my players to make chracters in advance rather I want them slowly flesh out a lvl 1 character during the first session of play, therefore they will start out playing 4 minions each.

The setting:
The PCs will begin in a small town plagued by failing crops high taxes and a cruel and unforgiving lord, civil war is just around the corner in the kingdom. The townspeople is just about ready to take up arms against the local lord.

The idea:
Players will each get to pick a set of 4 townspeople, each set is of people is based of a single character class. For example Bob picks Cleric and gets 4 premade minions, Aurora the local high priest, Ben the priest, John the monk, Will the altar boy. Together the PCs will have 32 minions to bring about the rebellion and overthrow the tyrannical lord.

I have yet to flesh out the secific rules to make this work. But here are some general ideas.

Every minion vill have some relation/connection to other minions. Every minion will have an objective which when fullfilled will earn the player "heropoints". Every minion starts with 1 hero point.

Heropoints can be used to "save" the minion from death and when the rebellion is over any heropoints the player have left or have earned can be used to enhance the players character allowing them to get better stats/saves/additional feat/ etc.

Using skills under certain situations during the first adventure will make that skill trained for the character.

When the rebellion is over each player will get to pick 1 of his/hers 4 minions to become a PC and hopefully by then the players will have a fleshed out lvl 1 character.

As you can see I have yet to nail down the specifics so its abit fuzzy still.

That's more or less how the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG does it...

As for the OP, have you considered going, "Welcome to the final round of <insert name of tournament here>. It will be a <number equal to number of party members> way battle royal; last man standing wins! In this corner is <insert name and description of PC>, and (repeat first part of sentence untill all PC are introduced>. Ready? FIGHT!

 

[Tzi]

In my first campaign, I had them all in the same city, but sleeping in different areas when the city fell under siege. They awoke to canon fire and muskets going off and ended up on the same cart as people fled the city to escaping the advancing armies.

Another is simply ask the PC to write backstories that simply involve already knowing one another.