PCs who don't seem to want to meet

[Lanefan]

Most groups seem to operate on the premise that if a player shows up to the table, their PC will be allowed to join the party (nobody auditions or interviews a PC and sends them packing).

It happens here. Sometimes it takes a session or two before the main party find out their new PC recruit doesn't fit in, but at some point one of these things often happens:
- they kill the new recruit
- they wait for the next dangerous situation then hang the recruit out to dry so something else can kill it
- one or more established characters leaves the party
- the recruit is accepted anyway

That said, the last two times I've started a campaign worked out pretty well. In one I had the PCs all show up to a recruiting meeting for a Famous Adventuring Company - all the attendees were sorted into parties and sent out on what were supposed to be suicide missions. In the other two of the players came up with the idea of coming in with a pre-existing team of two characters: a Cavalier and his press-agent Bard (they quickly became jointly known as the Bardalier); these two noisily rolled their way up-country while in each village telling some story that they were going adventuring, and by the time they got anywhere useful they'd rounded up enough other interested characters that adventuring was actually possible.

Lan-"I think I've been mentioned in this thread but I can't find it, so I'm confused"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

Aha! Found it!

The real puzzle - which departs from a lot of this fiction - is the continue loyalty of the PCs to one another even when the mutual reliance is no longer necessary. (At least in many games. Of posters on this board, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] at least seems to play a game where the "betrayal" trope of these stories of desperate comradeship is also played out.)

One of the reasons I prefer single-class characters is that it kinda builds in some of that mutual interdependence.

But yeah, 'round here the SOP is to keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and don't be surprised if they are one and the same.

I take a different view, here, namely, that the GM should prepare scenarios, including the initial scenarios, in light of the PCs that the players have built. (Or, conversely, that the GM should help the players to build PCs that will fit into the adventure that s/he wants to run.)

To echo what some others have said, there's no way I'd want to wait until after roll-up to decide what to run. Hell, I thought the first night of my current campaign would be an all-evening roll-up session: they were done and in the field by 9:30 p.m. (and had lost their first PC by 11!). Conversely, I told 'em to roll up whatever they wanted to play; if they had a glaring hole in their lineup I could always lob in an NPC.

The only house rule I put on for initial roll-up was "given where you'll be starting, all initial PCs must be Human; other races will become available later as they are encountered".

Lanefan