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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 4266629" data-attributes="member: 50322">In Media Res may work for certain kinds of players; mine would resent it.  Know your players!  All else comes from that.In our group, the DM tells the players the gist of the situation and they make characters to suit.  "You are all from the same small (under 800 people) town.  A situation will arise right around harvest time and you will be the volunteers who deal with it."  "You are all on a ship headed from Point X to Point Y."  "You will be part of a colony to settle a new land discovered in the west.  Your base sociey is similar to feudal England."  "You will form the confidential troubleshooting staff of a wealthy Roman-type senator."  "You are ordinary villagers and the campaign will start on the day your world ends in disaster."This leaves us a lot of autonomy in motivation and history, but ensures that we all have motivations that are compatible with the campaign set-up and with functioning as the kind of team that the DM envisions.  In the senatorial campaign, for instance, we had three people who hired on solely as gainful employment, the senator's impoverished niece, and the ambitious son of one of the senator's old family retainers.  The employees had different ultimate motives and different ways of interpreting their jobs than the characters with the family connections, but these motivations pointed us all in the same direction, most of the time.The players are going to take control away from you anyway; begin as you mean to go on and let them do the heavy lifting from the start.</blockquote>

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