How do you get your 1st level PCs together?

[dreaded_beast]

You are about to start a new game/campaign where everyone is 1st level.

Do they start of knowing each other, role-play their first inital meetings, start off in front of the dungeon as an adventuring party, etc. ?

Out of curiousity, how do you do it?

 

[Crothian]

I don't, the players do. It is up to them to figure out how they know each other and why they adventure together.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

I find it helps to have all the characters in a familiar setting, but not knowing each other.

I like to use taverns.

I usually have an enigmatic older gentleman, often an arcanist, hire the disparate PC's to complete an arbitrary task.

This is usually sufficient for the PC's in question to decide to go camping together for the rest of their violence-filled lives.

 

[hero4hire]

They all meet in a bar of course...J/K

It varies with me every campaign....I've had everything from the PCs growing up together, to waking up on a slave ship...

 

[Breakstone]

In this last campaign, each character was somehow related to a member of the Spire Council (the government in my campaign). They were invited as guests to a dinner. Then the host, one of the councilmembers, murdered the rest of the Council, and in their escape the characters fell into a dungeon.

By the time they got out of the dungeon, they knew each other pretty well. Plus, being the only witnesses to such a horrid crime banded them together.

It worked out pretty well.

 

[TemplarSaint]

I have only run two campaigns. In the first, all players were a corporate security team. They ran one mission and then their company was bought out and they were fired. In my second campaign, they were all members of the town militia. Once the first adventure was complete, they had enough gold to buy themselves out of the militia.

My next campaign will be similar. They must have a sponsor in order to carry any weapon larger than a dagger, so they will begin the game as new recruits for a border lord, hoping to earn his sponsorship. Bad things will happen one night and if they don't all die, they will have a chance to be sponsored by a grateful town council, which will offer them all the flexibility they need.
Whatever forces them together for one adventure works for me.

 

[hero4hire]

In this last campaign, each character was somehow related to a member of the Spire Council

One of my favorite Plot-hooks was that all the PCs were the sons or daughters of members of a famous but long retired band of adventurers...One-by-one all of thier parents started getting murdered, naturally they all congregated to find out what/why/who.

 

[Percivellian]

I've learned that it's best to leave this up to the PCs as much as possible. They become more excited about it if they do it, and consequently are more into the game. I tried setting up a specific sort of dynamic by creating some common NPCs that each PC knew, and even though they were supposed to be lifelong friends with some of them, they had no compunctions in hating them, or abandoning them at the drop of a hat.

As a player, I kind of dislike the metagaming that goes on if the PCs don't have some connection ahead of time, but it's glossed over for the sake of gameplay. A good start to a campaign for me, would be one where the PCs get together in session one without any meta-gaming or strict character creation rules. Hard to do, but so nice when it happens.

I'm fond of taverns when starting, but that might be because our DM is so fond of blowing them up, or damaging something nearby in some way to start things off with a bang, and we still never know what it's going to be like.

 

[Sagiro]

Like this



-Sagiro

 

[Jdvn1]

I do it in different ways, depending on the game. A tavern sometimes works, sometimes there's a benefactor. I get players who make characters that don't always want to adventure, though. Next game, I'm going to present them with problems and if they choose to follow one or more of them, the game will start. Or I'll set them up in a bad situation and they choose to make their own adventure.