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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 4474766" data-attributes="member: 56189">I've tried a lot of different tacts over the years but lately I've come to several key conclusions that are influencing my current methodology.Mainly, I find that forcing any kind of character relationships never really works and always seems, well, forced. Often players just don't imagine other powerful characters in their own character's back stories. PC's conflict with other PC's image. So when you go in and say, "Oh, btw, how do you know each other?" it becomes an after-thought that is almost always pretty weak.Instead, what I'm doing is saying to all the players that their characters have to be essentially good adventurers. They can have dark pasts, be moody emos, or even have a penchant for doing nasty things to bad people, but fundamentally, at their character's core, they have to be heroes. There has to be something internally consistent about the character that makes them want to get out and change the world and make it a better place.With this as a primary, driving motivation for the character, instead of the generally selfish, lone-wolf stereotypes I find are way too common, as a DM I can use that for a lot of plot-hooks, playing upon the decisions between good and evil, and rewarding good choices and punishing evil choices.And that plays into how the group meets. It becomes a more organic process They may meet at first and hate each other and bug each other up the wall, but they have to stick together to reach mutual goals, and eventually they begrudgingly respect each other. That to me is the best way to go about it, because it's far more natural.As an example, the start of my next campaign will have the PC's all doing their own thing in a busy port city known for its lax policing and mercenary opportunities. They will all be within shouting distance of a young boy, dressed in ceremonial plate armour and wielding a rather shiny longsword. He is going to loudly proclaim the arrest of a very burly, gruff looking man, who has a bunch of friends. The boy is obviously in over his head and about to get his butt handed to him, neatly chopped into convenient bite-sized chunks. The boy realises this too late and calls out that he's willing to share the bounty for the person's arrest.Now, previous groups where I've just said, "Create whatever character you want," they would've probably ignored this and just kept going about whatever they were doing. Either that, or you'd get the, "Oh, ok, this is the plot-hook guys, let's help him out," kind of behaviour. But by saying from the get-go that PC's have to have some sort of driving ambition to do the right thing, even if they do it in all the wrong ways, or rail against authority, or whatever little 'dark' quirks people seem to like giving their characters, at least they have it in-built to *want* to help this poor sod.At least, that's the theory. We'll see how it plays out in a couple of days time <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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