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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7928570" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think there's a lot to be said for asking the players to tell you why their PCs are where they are, and/or what they hope to be doing.The strongest version of this (that I know, at least) is the "kicker": a player-authored event that is part of PC-gen, and which the GM is obliged to make central to play, that makes an evocative or thematically-significant choice necessary for the player who authored it. I used this technique to start a 4e Dark Sun game. Here's how it went:The main constraint I imposed was that each kicker somehow had to locate the PC within Tyr in the context of the Sorcerer-King having been overthrown. The reason for this constraint was (i) I wanted to be able to use the 4e campaign books, and (ii) D&D relies pretty heavily on group play, and so I didn't want the PCs to be too separated spatially or temporally. The player of the barbarian came up with something first. Paraphrasing slightly, it went like this: I was about to cut his head of in the arena, to the adulation of the crowd, when the announcement came that the Sorcerer-King was dead, and they all looked away. Notice how this also answered the question that another player had asked, namely, how long since the Sorcerer-King's overthrow: it's just happened! The other gladiator - whose name is "Twenty-nine", that being his number on the inventory of slaves owned by his master - had been mulling over something about his master having been killed, and so we settled on the following: I came back from the slave's privies, ready to receive my master's admonition to do a good job before I went out into the arena. But when I got back to the pen my master was dead. So I took the purse with 14 gp from his belt. (The 14 gp was the character's change after spending his starting money on gear.) Discussion of PC backgrounds and the like had already established that the eladrin PC was an envoy from The Lands Within The Wind, aiming to link up with the Veiled Alliance and thereby to take steps to save his homeland from the consequences of defiling. So his kicker was: My veiled alliance contact is killed in front of me as we are about to meet (A lot of death accompanying the revolution!)In our Cthulhu Dark sessions we haven't used kickers as such. But in our first session I asked each of the players to explain what their PC was doing - we had a report, a longshoreman and a law firm secretary. The reporter's player decided that he was investigating rumours of financial irregularity in a prominent shipping company. The secretary's player decided that she had been sent out to collect some important documents - from a manager at the docks, naturally! And while the reporter was snooping around at the docks I got the longshoreman's player to introduce his character - he started narrating his side of an argument with an employer about danger money given that two men had already disappeared while working on a particular vessel. (Or something along those lines - it's been a little while.)Because Cthulhu Dark doesn't particularly depend upon party play, it was enough for the players to somewhat co-locate their PCs and I then worked with what they gave me to weave their various storylines together. They did end up cooperating towards the end of the scenario, as increasingly shocking events through them together. Which had a good feel for a Cthulhu game.Anyway, if this sort of thing can be done in 4e D&D and in Cthulhu Dark, I don't see why it couldn't be done in 5e D&D also.</blockquote>

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