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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7020096" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've started or tried to start a lot of campaigns in my time, and I've learned that the #1 rule is 'Go Big or Go Home'.There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting in medias res, and there is nothing at all wrong with asking the players to build connections to your world, but...You cannot rely on the players to tell the story.  Your primary job as a GM is to be the "secret keeper", in that you know things about the world that they don't.  The "secret keeper" hat is in many ways as important than your "referee" hat, and every bit as important as your "chorus" hat and your "antagonist" hat.  As a GM you are always making it up as you go, but as the GM you also (at the same time) need to have a pretty good idea about the main story threads you'll be offering up to the players.   It's vastly more important for the players to tell you why they are there, and why they are with the other players, than it is for them to tell you anything about the plot.  As a general rule, there is a wall of separation between you and the PC's, and between the players and NPC's.  You never try to play the PC's or never force the PC's to be anything the players don't want them to be, and the players never try to play the NPC's or force the NPC's to be anything you don't want them to be.  That's how you share the story.  And it's your job to make it an equal sharing by making the story be about the PC's - the story's protagonists.  But the players are also your audience, and as with any audience of a story they don't want the story spoiled before it is time.So good questions won't be about the NPC's.  Good questions will ask about the PC's.  Tell them what they know about the NPC's, and then ask them about their connections.  If the person being held is a PC's 'True Love', that's fine and if you can work with that, run with that.  It's ok for player answers about themselves to create new vistas of your world.   If a player says, "I'm a part of a secret order of good aligned assassins, and I was sent to kill the man holding the person hostage", you can run with that and try to imagine how that would work, who its patron is, why its tolerated (or not tolerated), what the rules of the organization might be and so forth.  But don't let the players create new vistas about the NPC's by asking them who the NPC's are or what they want or what they are trying to achieve, because that spoils the story.  Discovering the twists and secrets of the NPC's is at least half the fun.As for "Go Big or Go Home", the pacing of the first part of the story should be fast, and it should open up a major conflict.  I've got to the point that I basically open with a disaster of massive scale.  The current campaign opened with in first 5 minutes real time, a 20' high tidal wave sweeping into a city while the players were standing on the docks.  Opening the game with an asteroid blasting away a good portion of the landscape, or an great wrym red dragon burning the city the players are in to the ground and turning them into refugees would be fine.   Don't open the game with hunting rats in the basement, at least not in the first few sessions, unless you are planning to deliberately subvert that trope in a huge way.</blockquote>

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