Ideas for starting a new group of gamers together

[NewJeffCT]

I guess I got lucky with my last gaming group. I had everybody create their characters in advance, and then they all showed up in my basement and I said, "you're on road, looking for the daughter of a merchant who has recently been kidnapped.." (I then went on to give a brief background on the merchant and a description of the kidnapped young woman and the clues that had led them on the road to the small town where they were now headed...)

Then, I jumped right into a combat encounter, and never looked back. The group of strangers gelled into a good gaming group and we gamed together for almost 5 years.

Right now, I'm leaning towards having a new group create characters in advance as well. However, I'm not sure if lightning can strike in the same way by me just throwing the group of strangers into a combat encounter to start a game.

What are some other ideas besides, "you're in a tavern..."

I like the beginning of Curse of the Crimson Throne (all wronged by the same person, then drawn together by an NPC who was also wronged by him...) but it might not work with a group of strangers, and I was not planning a city adventure to start.

 

[Dandu]

"On the eighth day of the eight month, the caravan you are traveling in finds itself stranded in the wilderness due to a fierce rainstorm..."

 

[darjr]

I recently ran a game where the players were from a small town that was on the losing side of a recent large battle. The other side began to loot the town and things went from there.

It was a DCC game and a 0 level adventure.

 

[Quickleaf]

Glad to hear you've got a group coming together sounds like your perseverance paid off?

I've always preferred to let players come up with how their PCs are connected. Though if they're not biting you could pull out the Fiasco-style relationship chart (Fiasco-Style Relationships) and let 'em roll.

I like the beginning of Curse of the Crimson Throne (all wronged by the same person, then drawn together by an NPC who was also wronged by him...) but it might not work with a group of strangers, and I was not planning a city adventure to start.

What?? That sounds like the *perfect* way to introduce a top down hook for the players to work together!! Right up there with "you've been framed for a crime you didn't commit" and "shipwrecked together on a hostile island."

 

[NewJeffCT]

What?? That sounds like the *perfect* way to introduce a top down hook for the players to work together!! Right up there with "you've been framed for a crime you didn't commit" and "shipwrecked together on a hostile island."

Sometimes, sarcasm is hard to judge in the internets...

 

[Neonchameleon]

What?? That sounds like the *perfect* way to introduce a top down hook for the players to work together!! Right up there with "you've been framed for a crime you didn't commit" and "shipwrecked together on a hostile island."

I'm trying to remember which game or column it is which has the hook "You've all been wronged separately. Before the game tell me how he wronged your PC" - and you base the bad guy on someone who's committed that handful of wrongs.

Beginning

 

[Gilladian]

Generally, I insist that my players create characters who have a good strong reason for both being where they are and for wanting to go adventuring.

When I know what those reasons are, I write my "hooks" for the first 2-3 possible adventures. For example, in my last campaign, the 4 PCs were:

An elf wizard who wants power. He's in the village because he's heard lots about the nearby dungeon. He planned to go there and acquire power. Eventually, he got caught up in discovering the fate of a quarto of famous mages.

A human fighter whose mentor was nearly slain by bandits. She needs money to care for him and get him home. Her secondary mission is to fulfill the commission they had undertaken (to discover info hidden in the dungeon), before returning home (many hundreds of miles away).

A human paladin - he wanted to discover whether there really was an evil dragon in the lowest levels of the dungeon, and slay it. And kill evil all the way down...

A human cleric - a trickster, all he wanted was to cause trouble; gaining power by going dungeoneering gave him the ability to do more tricksy stuff. And wealth. To him, the party was no more than a good cover.

Their first mission in town was to find out where the dungeon was, and how to get there. Orcs in the woods!

 

[Quickleaf]

Sometimes, sarcasm is hard to judge in the internets...

A bit tongue in cheek, but otherwise sincere. Personally I agree with [MENTION=2093]Gilladian[/MENTION] to let the players determine what they're interested in. However, in a situation with a passive/reactive party (or other group dynamics requiring a stronger DM lead), being obvious and strongly leading about the group's hook can actually improve everyone's play experience.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I don't usually do more than instruct my PCs to come up with a reason why they're in a specific place when they meet up with the other PCs. But from time to time I'll try something different.

My favorite alternative was a campaign I called "Dead Men" (started at paragon level). As part of their character creation, they had to write their PC's death scene. That was the last thing they remembered. They awoke, resurrected, by an Elven nation desperate for their help.

The deaths could be anything, and they might have been dead for weeks or decades. I did my best to work their backgrounds into the ongoing story of the campaign once we got going. One PC had died experimenting with autoerotic asphyxiation, which sounds like the player was not really jumping into the theme of the game as well as we might like -- and he wasn't -- but he did play in character enough to spend the rest of the campaign hoping to recover his locked chest of porn)

In our most recent campaign, we're playing Paizo's Second Darkness AP, which puts the PCs in a casino for whatever reason at the start -- that works, too. My Pirates game (Savage Worlds) the PCs are all passengers or crew on a Dutch merchant sloop (which is a thinly veiled homage to Firefly, just for the fun of it).

Anything goes, really. But it often helps if your structure gives the PCs the freedom to make what ever characters they want to play.

-rg

 

[Ryujin]

I recently ran a game where the players were from a small town that was on the losing side of a recent large battle. The other side began to loot the town and things went from there.

It was a DCC game and a 0 level adventure.

I did something similar, by starting the group in a small walled border town. Orcs got past the guards and started cutting down the townies and looting the town.

Only two of the players' characters knew each other; the Cleric, who was an acolyte in the local church and the Paladin, who was the church guard/proctor. The rest were individuals who were looking to make their fortunes, who had happened to come into town over the previous few days.

Having them come into the fight from different angles, ultimately supporting each other in battle, made for a reasonable and effective way to build party loyalty.