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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 2861446" data-attributes="member: 5328">Well, I often ask players not to generate individual characters separately, but to get together and design a team. Or else I specify that they are to generate characters who all happen to be such-and-such.In my SF games, I often ask that the players generate a team of investigtors in the Imperial Justice Department (sort of like the FBI), or a mission team for the Imperial Secret Service, or field researchers etc. on an Imperial Navy survey frigate.In campaigns inspired by film noir I sometimes ask that they generate characters who make up a small firm of private investigators in San Francisco in the '20s, '30s, or '50s.In conventional fantasy campaigns I sometimes ask the players to generate characters who make up a half-file of the local militia, or who are all members of the military retinue of a specified NPC official, or who constitute a dining-club of gentlemen who became friends while on military service. I have on occasion asked that all the PCs be students of the same martial arts instructor. Once I asked them to generate characters who were all children of the wives of the same polygamous noble. Another time I asked them all to generate demigods who were sons of the same volcano-god. These are all variations on the theme of playing characters who have a pre-existing link and pre-existing connections.In an urban fantasy campaign I ran once I asked the players to each generate a character who was immune from age and able to recover completely from any injury, and who had been born in some historical culture at its height (Periclean Athens, late republican or early Imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, Tang China, Happaran or Gupta India, etc.) and who had survived ever since. That done, I asked them each to make up an omen that his character would interpret to meant that he ought to be at Delphi on the Autumnal equinox.On another occasion I asked the players to generate characters who all happen to be riding up the right bank of the Rhône one cold and windy day in late autumn 1122, with no really pressing reason to be anywhere in particular at any particular time, who fall in to ride together for company and mutual protection. And on another, characters who had some sort of connection to the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John, who either escaped or came too late for the fall of Acre, and who met in Limmasol on St John's Day, 1291. On yet another, I asked them all to generte professional military consultants who had come to a recruiting seminar for a nascent mercenary company.Once I had the players generate their characters, then started the campaign in media res with the character having all been captured by evil monsters and finding themselves in the same cell.These are examples of characters brought together by chance, and whom I undertook as GM to sweep up together with a campaign hook and forge into party.But then, it has been a very long time since I did the classic 'adventurers' thing or the string of unconnected adventures (except in PI or detective campaigns, where the PCs had to take the clients or investigate the cases that came their way in teh course of their work).</blockquote>

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