How do your PC's meet (in campaign)?

[Lamoni]

I was just thinking how I would start my first campaign as a DM (I have played for a while as a PC). Should I...

* have the players decide on their own how they get together
* make up some story where they were all summoned to a place from different areas (like how the fellowship got together in LOTR)
* give all the players amnesia so they have no clue why they are together, but give them background as the game goes on.
* ignore why they might be adventuring together and start the campaign in a bar.

How do you usually do it in your campaigns? My first campaign was started with the last option I gave. It wasn't too bad since we fleshed out our characters and their history as we went on, but starting that way doesn't really lead into any sort of a plot.

I am leaning towards having them summoned from different areas... but that is mainly because I have no other ideas. (And I still don't know how I would go about summoning them and for what purpose) I just want the story to be fairly believable and for there to be some reason why the PC's are adventuring together. You don't always see a dwarf, an elf, and a half-dragon growing up together as close friends.

 

[DragonLancer]

I prefer to have the characters know one another before the game starts. Just makes it easier.

 

[Lamoni]

I prefer to have the characters know one another before the game starts. Just makes it easier.

Do you set up how they know each other as a DM? Or do you leave it up to the players to figure that out.

If you leave it up to the players, how does your typical first session start with a group of newly created PC's?

Do you ignore the background until later sessions? Or do you say, being old friends, you were having a reunion in Karl's home when you heard a screaming outside followed by the stampede of hooves. I'm just curious about how to start the first session.

 

[DragonLancer]

The characters write up a brief character background, which I will use as hooks later in the campaign, but I try to use that to help bring them together. Ultimately though, I decide how things have worked out prior to the game.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

In my campaign, I let everyone work out their own background, but I told them that they had to have a reason to be in a certain city at the start of the campaign. I then had them all in the same tavern (cliche, I know) and they met when a drunken sailor started hitting a little aggressively on one of the female PCs. A couple of them came to help out, and a general brawl broke out landing them in jail. None of the PCs had enough money to post bail, so they took a job to work it off.

 

[Mac Callum]

Character bios written before first gaming session. Bio should explain why they're the class they are, how they got their equipment (if it's anything out of the ordinary), and how they know the other PCs.

For the most part the writing of bios becomes a team effort so they can mesh their characters and explain how they know each other. Helps them get in character too, because they know themselves and their companions.

It also goes a long way to making sure we get stuff done the first session.

 

[KenM]

I'm trying to get away from the "You all are in a tarven when....." game starts. Lets face it, how many strangers you have just meet in a bar that you would trust on a potental life threating situation?
One person that I know stats us all as "standing milltia" for the local kingdom, then sends us out to an outlaing town to deal with they're problems. IMO it works good, it gives everyone a reason to trust each other and work together.

 

[ForceUser]

Every campaign & group handles it differently. Often our characters meet each other in the first session of a new campaign, though sometimes we link backgrounds. Once I started the PCs off by being from the same small village, and another time by being chosen as agents for a powerful patron.

 

[Thanee]

Last campaign I stated (PbP), I just had them all travelling with a merchant towards their destination (pretty much in medias res), not knowing each other yet. They only had the same goal in common and would introduce each other during the short journey, before the adventure actually begins in the town they were all heading to for various reasons.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

* have the players decide on their own how they get together

I'd say that in nearly every game we play now, this is the way we go. It ends up working out really well for us.

It's sort of like what Mac Callum says above, except we don't necessarily write bios for everyone. It's more of a "hey, in the next few weeks I want to start this game, let's schedule some time to all sit down and talk about it" kind of thing.

Generally we'll devote at least one full gaming session to just talking about what the setting is going to be, what kind of stuff the GM wants to do in it, what kinds of things the players want to do, and so on. Then we bat around some character concepts, an overall party concept, work out fun things like how different characters know each other, and run it all past the GM to make sure there aren't any objections. Usually there's a part in there where the people who are particularly good with the system sit with the people who aren't and answer questions about character creation or point out important things that might otherwise be missed.

The process continues via conversations during the week or through e-mail, and at some point before the game begins everyone has a pretty good idea of what everyone else is going to be playing. That way, on the day that we're actually going to start playing, we're all ready to go; we've all got characters, complete with motives and personalities and friends and enemies, plus character sheets for them, and all the GM has to do is start running the actual game.


What's funny is that we do this even in games where the basic concept is that the characters don't know each other initially (like "you're all escaped prisoners on a Leviathan transport" or "you're all superpowered criminals being offered pardons if you participate in a black ops suicide squad"). It's just that instead of talking about how characters met in their past, we work on making characters that have common interests and reasons to want to stick close to the others. Sometimes players will even make agreements about things that their characters will do together later on in the game before we're even done creating the characters.

I guess you don't have much incentive to stop collaborating during character generation once you decide that gaming is more fun when you don't have to work so hard to keep the party together.

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we have 5 regular players, so doing this lets more people get to actually play
ryan