New party: tavern or backstory?

[Primitive Screwhead]

100% concur with Klaus...

That being said, one of my most successful campaigns started with everyone as strangers in a tavern/inn at a crossroads. Everyone had a reason why they were traveling through the area and some had good reasons to distrust the others.

Then, as the sun rose in the morning I had two armies charge into the valley where the tavern was located... leaving the PCs to decide to run away to the safety of a mountain cave they had spotted the night before. Inside the cave was a portal to another place.. and the invading armies 'encouraged' them to step through.
This put the PCs in a strange land where no-one spoke the language and on a mission to find a way back 'home'. The land? Deserts of Desolation!


So.. tavern or already know? it depends on which kind of story you are telling. Generally I stick to the 'everyone knows at least one of the others and has a reason to stick with the group', simply to avoid conflict and wasting sessions on the group arguing with itself.

Rarely I will do the tavern meeting of strangers and have even done a 'fallen paladin' quest where the main character had to take a bunch of scum and villany from the local jail on a quest to recover a banner for the church.. thereby regaining his status as a paladin.
That game had the highlight of the Thief and Assassin choosing, for in character reasons, to manhandle the 1 hp and incoherent paladin over to the banner and reclaim his power as a paladin.

I love to have players bring character backgrounds. As mentioned up thread they tend to lend to plot hooks.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For my Midwood campaign, I required everyone to know each other and have grown up together in the same lightly detailed village. It's provided good glue for a six-year campaign.

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

I generally discuss with the group what they prefer. Do they want to know each other? Are they related or friendly? Are they colleagues or work in the same organization?

If most everyone is along the lines of "lemme alone, I wanna be my own guy" then I let that go. But I will ask (read: insist) that everyone create a "foreground" reason of why they would be pursuing whatever it is that they are pursuing. Generally I try to work behind the scenes to develop my campaign to relate to these disparate items somehow, or nudge the players into a cooperative position. It isn't always easy, and if it is too difficult, generally the players (I've played in dozens of groups) are pretty agreeable to trying to work with me as the GM to get the party together.

For what it is worth, I generally don't like meta-game railroading to force the party together unless it makes sense in the context of the story and those specific characters. But, playing with an old group of friends is very different from a con session or a group of relatively new acquaintances.

 

[Crothian]

Backstory, always. Even when they just meet at a Tavern there is a backstory.

 

[Smoss]

I've tried a little of everything over the years. For my newest setting, I instead made an intro adventure. All I want from a character is a short "why they are at this place". The adventure does the rest - whether PCs know each other or not.

A homage to "Jacob's Well" from Ye Olde Days, the adventure works well to get people working together to survive...

Smoss
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Check out my new serial fiction series "Enzi's Irregulars" at:
The Silver Tower Chronicles

 

[Quickleaf]

Backstory, always. Even when they just meet at a Tavern there is a backstory.

Five orphaned adventurers seeking gold & glory happen into a tavern owned/run by a grizzled retired Dwarven mercenary. After picking pockets, hitting on the servers, and getting into a bar brawl, they are approached by a dark cloaked figure who hires them to seek out a fabulous treasure trapped in a deep dank dungeon.

It practically writes itself

Not that any of us ENWorlders have started campaigns this way.....

 

[the Jester]

Usually, if we start a group of pcs off I will have everyone establish a link to one other pc. When new pcs enter at higher levels, they usually are encountered mid-adventure and rarely have a prior link to the rest of the party.

 

[Elf Witch]

I no longer can stand the you meet in a tavern kind of introduction. It leads to to many inner party conflicts and questions of why is this group is together and why should they stay together.

So I ask my players to come up with a reason why they are together sometimes that is because of a shared background they are related or from the same town. Sometimes it is because they share the same goals.

In my current campaign no one knew each other except for two of the original players were friends. The rest were brought together after a dream where Bahmut asked for their service and they accepted and woke with a magical ring that lead them to each other.

The only think I asked was give me a reason why Bahmut would ask you to serve him.

All my players do backgrounds it is just something that they enjoy and I enjoy pulling from them. Maybe because of that there are more issues if they don't have a common goal or know each other.

For me I try and always find reasons to work with the party but sometimes it is very hard to come up with a good reason to stay which is why I as a player dislike the whole tavern thing.

The only time I have ever seen it work well was in what was supposed to be a short campaign and we were all the survivors of a zombie Apocalypse that worked well and inner party conflict was expected. And the game itself was not supposed to run more than a few months.

 

[Grogg of the North]

One of my favorites that we did as a group was that we spent the first session tossing ideas around for how we knew each other. We eventually decided on that we were all in the circus together.

Otherwise, as a DM I've used everything from meeting at a fair, traveling together in a caravan, being summoned by the local nobility.

 

[Pennanngalan]

Backstory, always. Even when they just meet at a Tavern there is a backstory.

I agree. Backstory adds a little depth to the characters and provides opportunities for DM exploitation. As to how the PCs know each other (if they do), this can eat some play time but is worth it in the long run.