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<blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 3043394" data-attributes="member: 9053">You're certainly right: there is a huge variation on how people run their games, and I wasn't trying to say that this &quot;start each session with a bang&quot; method was the preferred way (heck, it isn't the way that I do things, so how good can it be&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).The thing is, it is a highly successful way to start off the evening for an episodic campaign. If last week's session left the group having dinner with the king, the next session certainly can start with the group being attacked on the roadway, it's just a question of how they got there: did they accept the king's proposal for the job? Did they reject it and upset him? Did they listen to it and then decide to do something entirely different? A skilled GM can manipulate things to get the players to the point of the action while still giving them the ability to choose their own fate.In one of the biggest and longest running campaigns I ever GMed, I started the game off with a funeral for the king, and told everyone that they had all become acquainted with him in the last year, and had become somewhat close over that time. I then asked them to make up a story about something that he said, or some annecdote they remembered from the campaign.The game then jumped a year into the past, and one of the objectives became to introduce the particular saying or phrase at some point. I gave them a great deal of dramatic license to work with and we had a great time with it.That was my first experience with these sort of GMing techniques. It was something that was difficult to pull off, but the results were worth it. Now I don't exactly do this with every campaign...--Steve</blockquote>

[QUOTE="SteveC, post: 3043394, member: 9053"] You're certainly right: there is a huge variation on how people run their games, and I wasn't trying to say that this "start each session with a bang" method was the preferred way (heck, it isn't the way that I do things, so how good can it be ;) ). The thing is, it is a highly successful way to start off the evening for an episodic campaign. If last week's session left the group having dinner with the king, the next session certainly can start with the group being attacked on the roadway, it's just a question of how they got there: did they accept the king's proposal for the job? Did they reject it and upset him? Did they listen to it and then decide to do something entirely different? A skilled GM can manipulate things to get the players to the point of the action while still giving them the ability to choose their own fate. In one of the biggest and longest running campaigns I ever GMed, I started the game off with a funeral for the king, and told everyone that they had all become acquainted with him in the last year, and had become somewhat close over that time. I then asked them to make up a story about something that he said, or some annecdote they remembered from the campaign. The game then jumped a year into the past, and one of the objectives became to introduce the particular saying or phrase at some point. I gave them a great deal of dramatic license to work with and we had a great time with it. That was my first experience with these sort of GMing techniques. It was something that was difficult to pull off, but the results were worth it. Now I don't exactly do this with every campaign... --Steve [/QUOTE]

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