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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mrrockitt" data-source="post: 7568777" data-attributes="member: 6879847">Hi all.Although I'm thinking of this for D&D 5e role-playing currently it could easily apply to any party-based games so I thought I'd post it here.Not having DM'd for about 15 years until late last year, I'm relatively new/out of date about modern role-playing and DM'ing techniques. I recently listened to a 'What would the smart party do?' podcast and it gave me an idea that I would like some opinions on. But first, a little background:I am DM'ing for several parties currently, involving brand new players, experienced players and others who have played a bit but are very quiet. I also have the slight difficulty that I use the Lost Lands setting by Frog God Games for these adventures (which I love!).Obviously we have the usual issues such as new players not being used to role-playing games and other players not being familiar with the setting and having little or no knowledge of the history, geography and personalities of the Lost Lands.Most of the issues I have now overcome or 'ironed-out' over the last year and a half. For example, I continually communicate out and populate the Lost Lands world with the help of the wonderful World Anvil (<a href="https://www.worldanvil.com" target="_blank">https://www.worldanvil.com</a>) and snippets from campaign books but there is one thing I'd appreciate a little advice with please...As mentioned earlier, we have some players who say very little and find it very difficult to engage with their characters and the other player's characters. One of the parties I DM for are younger players and we have had various players joining and leaving along the way which doesn't help with the immersion. Now, I appreciate this is not a new issue in role-playing games, some of us find it easier than others to open up and act in character, this is fine but I'd like to help my players with this as much as I can.The Smart Party podcast (I think it was the 'Dying in the First Ten Minutes' one), was talking about giving the player's characters in a new adventure some background info about other characters in the game.For example:Character A knows a fact about the background of character C; character B heard a dark rumour about the people of the village from which character A originated; character D might have heard that character C saved several children from a hideous monster and is a hero back home. So, I'm looking for rumours/gossip/story hooks/plot points to give them something to get them started and encourage interaction and conversation. Obviously all characters can have some background history in most role-playing games but the other characters don't necessarily know about this at the beginning of their journey together, may never need to know it or it might in fact be a secret that will never get out in game. Often characters might have come from all over the game world and just meet up in the ubiquitous tavern and off they go! This is a perfectly acceptable way to start adventures but it would be nice sometimes to have a bit more 'flesh on the bone' than that!What I want to do is let characters in the game know certain background facts about their fellow characters so they will form opinions early on and hopefully this will help to encourage in-party discussion/interaction. By doing this I'm trying to engender opinions about other characters, positive or negative, but also to give potential quest hints, pointers on places to travel and create a little tension or at least points for conversation between players. It might prompt a player to remember a pertinent fact when they arrive in a certain village or meet a certain NPC. These should not be game-changing moments necessarily but just interesting facts or fiction that might lead to conversation, conflict, quests, stories, journeys, etc, etc.So, basically I'm looking for any advice on how to do this best and how other DM's generally encourage conversation between characters in their games? I should say, I'm not looking for rumours about NPC's as there is plenty of that in most adventures but particularly how best to introduce information between the characters themselves to encourage player and character interaction.Hope that all makes sense!Thanks all <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> </blockquote>

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