"You all meet in a tavern..." How to start a campaign

We all know that "You all meet in a tavern" is one of the oldest, most iconic, and laziest ways to start a campaign with a new group of characters. In my preparation for a new Shadowrun 4E campaign, I've been trying to think of a significant, fun way to bring these characters together. I've got some pretty good ideas, but I was wondering what my fellow tropers thought about it all.

What are your best (and worst) beginnings to a campaign?

"You all meet at a wine tasting."

"You all meet in a tavern...then you wake up in the same cell in prison the next day."

Best way to start? They all already know each other and are already on an adventure. Have them write backstories that give them a shared history. Note that this only works if the players are up for it, and has to be decided early on. Some systems, such as FATE, even have this built into the character creation process.

Maybe they don't want shared backstories. Perhaps they're all freelance whatevers. In that case, the freebie is that someone already hired all of them for a job and they're either already on it or are just meeting for the briefing. The "someone" could even be one of the party members if the players are up for it.

Another one is shared adversary: in the backstory, they all got screwed over by the same guy (or organization) and now need to get revenge, their life back, etc. This can start as shared history (above) or with "you all wake up in a dungeon to the sound of some poor bugger being tortured". One problem with the latter is that it requires all of the players to buy into the mission for the party to remain cohesive. If half of them don't give a damn after they escape (and want to go whoring in Majortown), while the other half bite on the plot hook (and thus want to end up in Evilforest), there's no reason for the party to stick together.

Of course, if you're playing with the sort of folks whose characters are only part of the group because they all have a big PC sign over their heads, it doesn't really matter how you start so long as it involves the sorts of things the players like to do (combat, deep roleplaying, etc.).

edited 15th Aug '11 3:48:57 PM by Ironeye

Often, characters might have similar backgrounds, races, habits, or even places of origin. Many times players are quite fine with starting out knowing somebody else in the party. That tends to help immensely to bridge things and bring the party together.

Having a powerful, charismatic character (An NPC that's going to stick around with the party works well) bridge them together works well, too.

As to where in particular, the location itself doesn't matter. What matters is the reason why this is such a common trope (indeed, I tend to start at least half of my campaigns like that): namely, it allows for social conflict and contest, easily establishing the pecking order of the group — as we are human, we have to get that out of the way pretty quickly, even in regards to our characters — and often, physical conflict, allowing characters to show off their cool skills and "get used" to their characters before a real fight comes their way. Besides, having an external force provide a conflict often forces the characters to bond together to defend themselves. The last, and quite important element, is that a tavern is usually fairly confined yet open, allowing a reason for characters to be forced to interact.

Thus, a tavern is simply convenient because one is expected to be unrestricted by nominal social norms and a bar brawl can break out. And nobody can get out easily.

That said, there are plenty of other places where this approach can work, as long as the elements of conflict (but not over-the-top conflict, unless you're playing Exalted, in which case you may be perfectly justified starting a campaign inside an erupting volcano).

So: taverns, bars, riots, insurrections, public speeches, gatherings, jail cells, on board of a ship/plane/bus/train that is traveling, hell, even inside of an ancient tomb would work. As long as the three elements are preserved, really, any place can be improvised for the meeting point.

edited 15th Aug '11 3:53:56 PM by Korochun

I think the best intro to a campaign I've ever had was (predictably, considering the guy's DM skills) with Dusty.

He had a six-person group, and made every person think they were playing a solo game. For four weeks he had them all coming to his house on different days, until a plot thread converged.

It was awesome.

Just fun or memorable too? Because the latter is the biggest problem with character introductions in a campaign. No matter how elaborate the meeting is, it's often "you all meet in a tavern" in fancy clothing.

Collaborating on a common or semi-common character background can work but the most important thing to remember is: Do it at the table. Don't give them homework, don't trust for them to talk with each other to figure something out. If you allow them to do it at home, it's not in the game. It's homework, bureaucracy, something you have to do to get the game started and then forget after a month.

The most important things I think is a strong player participation and keeping it a part of the game, not making it a chore. For ad-hoc adventures or "free form" campaigns, I tend to use In Medias Res; in a Shadowrun game I would start them as a team in the middle of a run going wrong, and give them very few bullet points about the run itself, enough to figure out the objective and what they're up against, not more. Then I'd say "during the course of this session, establish through role play how you got into this situation" and watch it unfold, basically through improv.

In a long-term campaign I like to start the characters off as young teenagers or kids getting together by chance in a hostile environment or dangerous situation, trying to survive and getting back to safety. This can take many forms but the concept is essentially to throw weak characters into danger, forcing them to work together to survive and come out on top, without anyone else they can rely on. This will forge a bond between the characters before the actual campaign begins and keeps it in the game, especially if you let them start with a very simple template of stats and letting the character evolve to the starting level through the adventure by their own actions, Morrowind-style. Basically a played-out background and character creation process.

Ways I've used:

-Whilst on the way to the tavern, you hear a scream from an alley. Being a conscientious sort, you investigate. Other people also investigate. Twenty levels of adventure follow!

-You are all pre-agricultural humans in the first human settlement in history. You've known each other since childhood. A mysterious sword falls out of the sky. Fourteen levels of adventure follow!

-Three of you meet in a fletcher's. You hear about some missing people. You end up bailing a goblin out of prison and recruiting a mage you meet while investigating the kidnapping. Six levels of adventure follow! (Only six levels because it's an E6 campaign.)

You all meet in a car crash outside a remote village.

I was rather happy with my intro to a Mage the Awakening game. One character was a Russian mob guy, the other a Dark Angel expy who had just awakened (and was still in training with her mentor), the last a Cowboy Cop.

So the russian dude was having is morning coffee in his neighbourhood, when he sees a building a street or so across is emitting smoke, he decide to go check it out (he wants people from the neighbourhood to see him as the sort of dude who takes care of his community). The cop guy was in the neighbourhood on patrol and is sent by despatch to investigate and help organise things. The Dark Angel wannabe's mentor is a EMT doctor and takes her on rounds to train her in her gift (she's a Moros, specialised in Death)... and he happens to be sent to help with casualties. They all bump into each other on the scene, since they sort of know each other to see, and get thrown into an action scene straight away (the mentor is their superior and tells them to be useful and go save people from the building using their Mage Sight, before the whole place turns into a blaze).

The trick was that I told the players beforehand that they had to meet with someone later that day about Mage business, making them believe this scene was just a little warm up to get them rolling dice and have their character meet up. In reality, they witnessed a man dying of his burns who came back two scenes later as their main antagonist (a pyromaniac ghost bent on revenge). The meeting was the red herring, used to introduce NPCs for their next adventure that I had already lined up.

It all worked like a charm :)

edited 16th Aug '11 10:21:10 AM by fibojoly

What you do not do is plan for the players to meet up at an early stage of the first mission. They will take forever to cover the first five minutes.

As a GM, I try to have a reason why the characters are together already prepared, so that the PCs go start from character creation already prepared. 99% of the time, this has worked well. Just as a few examples:

• A Fallout game, where the PCs were all Vault security, and within the first ~20 minutes of gameplay had to respond to an emergency at the Vault entrance.
• An Aberrant game, the PCs were all being hired by the same company. I ran the same campaign twice, with 8 players the first time and 5 the second; one person decided to make up a character who (so he said) would not accept the job as presented, despite the fact I had been perfectly clear before chargen of what they would be doing. So his PC ended up as a minor villain later in the campaign.
• The Final Fantasy game I'm running now, where all of the PCs were on-site for a monster attack, and (by their own actions) got drafted as backup to the soldiers on-site.

My first time playing D&D, our incredibly competent and experienced DM made us all meet in a castle prison. We were woken up when the castle was attacked by multiple Tarrasques that could fly and had breath attacks - that really left an impression. The way it went, we helped each other escape our chains and we saw a crack in the ground, which I took as our escape route. My paladin ended up pummeling the ground with his bare hands, and when he did, the floor collapsed. We jumped into the hole, into a convenient pond of Soft Water.

After that, it turned out that we had fallen into a dungeon, as we were informed by an NPC, a fellow prisoner. I would continue, but the whole tarrasque thing was probably one of the most memorable things of that campaign, right up there with our party wizard being dumb enough to insult Boccob, and his subsequent demise. He ended up being unmade. His sudden non-existence was felt by everyone in the party.

Really, that says it all.

Unless it's fairly obvious as to why and how the characters get together I have them all write a backstory. Then I tweak all of them as well as the adventure storyline to bring them together. That usually involves creating mutual or related Mc Guffins.

You're all already dead and being summoned by the Valkyrie equivalent of this setting.

''"You all are spread about a well-sized town far from your own homes. It is currently in the process of being ransacked by a bandit army. You all being heroes of some sort are seperatley but quickly recognized as the most competent individuals that happen to be on their side and in different parts of town nearby citizens rally around you until you each gather a small peasant army. You and your armies all meet simultaneously in the central town square, surrounded by enemies and with scared citizens rellying upon your leadership to survive.

"Go."

I started my Dont Rest Your Head game with the four protagonists separate, then sort of gently railroaded them into each other. ^_^;

You all meet in a brothel.

The one or two times I ever got to play tabletop RPG's, the guy who ran them always devoted the first session to a series of events that brought the characters together one by one in a reasonably likely manner.

edited 23rd Aug '11 2:36:57 PM by scythemantis

Not a game starter, but we had a game session after a PC died in which an NPC's ghost asked us to deliver his sword to an old friend, who happenned to be entertaining a PC with a passion for justice.

"You are all falling to your doom from 7 kilometers up."

...Proably works best in a supers campagin were they can acutally survive that.

I once had a campaign start with each PC being called to a specific place by a detective looking for backup.

The arc ended with the detective dying.

True story.

One Warhammer adventure began with the characters spending the last week or two on a single ship, and out of necessity getting together.

Well, since our party is mostly made up of sociopaths who only wish to spend the night killing goblins in ridiculous manners, such as dual wielding doors (we take a very loose approach with rules), our DM usually just states that we're all mercenaries hired for a job. Since I actually enjoy role playing, I typically try to do a sort of quasi-Alcoholics Anonymous type thing ("Hello, my name is Jaise. I am a level four Magus from the isle of blah blah") for our characters to explain who they are, and what type of personality they have. Crude, but it's really the only way to get the other players to role play at all. (Not to say pure escapism is a bad thing. But come on, a little acting can't hurt)

I prefer the classic: You all got hired by the same guy/guild.

edited 6th Sep '11 11:02:54 AM by stevebat