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

It's funny, but I've seldom used the "you all meet in a tavern" thing when storytelling. My usual M.O. is to connect the players gradually, through preludes. This results in more plausible reasons as to why these people are working together.

Also, I have been known to give extra points to players who do this work for me and make characters who know each other already (siblings, lovers, friends, co-workers, etc.), though only if I think the players aren't going to abuse it...for example, OOC couples who always want to play IC couples.

EDIT: An example...I was running a Cyberpunk 2020 chronicle in high school. I had a Rockergirl, a Media, two Nomads and a Corporate. I'd told the players in advance that the chronicle would center around the music industry, so the guy playing the Corporate was working in that industry. The Rockergirl's record label assigned him as her new manager...who went looking for security, and first on the list just happened to be the two Nomads (they were brothers who'd lost their pack). The Media was assigned to write a piece on this hot new talent.

So, they were all in the same place at the same time when the action started; a crazed assassin busted in the door and tried to kill them all...which led to them wanting to figure out what was what before they all died.

edited 1st Oct '11 11:24:24 AM by drunkscriblerian

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I often used the "all hired by the same guy" tech, but more recently I've used the "You're all part of an international experiment on how adventurers function in a neutral environment" trick.

"All hired by the same guy" is better than "you all meet in a bar", because it gives the players A: a plausible reason to work together and B: motivation to stay together when the inevitable party strife comes along.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Now you've given me evil ideas for a Big Bad when I eventually get another campaign going.

Vampire.

Sociologist.

I actually just started a campaign that way last night. Strictly speaking, it was "you are all hired by one of a group of three people who are cooperating on a quest", but it was effectively the same thing.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

I've done the old "You all meet in a tavern" a few times. It was light and fun. Other times, I'll build it into the campaign pitch (You are all X and your job is to Y).

If, in some fit of insanity, I wound up as a GM (I won't say whose part the insanity would have to be on ), I'd probably go for something dramatic- for example, a Shadowrun game would be "You are all on Flight 504 out of Honolulu. Three of your four engines just exploded in balls of flame. You are the only ones who can save this plane. What do you do?" It'd also work (with some tweaking) for an Eberron game, or, well, pretty much any 'verse that has mass air transit.

"You all wake up on a floating stone in the Elemental Plane of Air, with a portal to a forest you've never seen before shimmering in front of you. Each of you has a note taunting you on your inability to escape in your pockets/packs."

Something like that, anyway.

If it works in your plot, having everyone be forcefully summoned to the same location as the introduction sequence was a little more interesting than your standard being hired by the same guy. Then the story usually proceeds with the players trying to find out why they were summoned.

Location varies, but its an interesting way to start a hack and slash type adventure by summoning the heroes into the bottom of a dungeon. Not only is their goal to get out, but to find why they were summoned in the first place.

"You all were jumped by these random people, had a black bag put over your head, and were dragged somewhere. You are now all in the same cell/room/basement and have no idea where you are."

My plan for the D&D game I'm going to be putting together over the summer.

If what I say doesn't make sense, please refer to my name. Dyslexics of the world, UNTIE! http://orkinet.lefora.com/

I actually saw a plausible use of You All Meet in a Cell:

"Each of you independently evades the High Church of Bahamut for quite some time after the revolution, being wanted for several unique reasons, until the Avengers find you. Congratulations, heretics, you're all stuck in an ultra-high security cell waiting to get executed."

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

"You all meet at murder crime scene in a dildo factory." Its Unknown Armies and it made sense because the Big Bad was a pornomancer that wanted to stop others enjoying sex too.

I wonder if you could start with combat right off the bat. As in, "you're all in the middle of the market square, surrounded by goblins", or something.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

"You are all teleported to a sewer".

She's not very polite, but our new employer in my Black Crusade campaign sure knows how to get your attention.

I've never done it myself, but you can start In Medias Res. (Godof Awesome's now defunct Exalted freeform game did exactly that - we opened in midcombat. It probably works better in a real life game where said combat takes less than three weeks. So, not Exalted then.)

edited 9th Nov '11 10:39:04 AM by CountDorku

Once started a campaign with all of the characters tied together and in transit to a slave auction. The first line of business? Break free and kill their captors without having any of their starting equipment. Hilarity ensued

Life sucks, get a helmet

For my first and currently only campaign,I combined You All Meet in a Cell with a bit of shared history: They were a new adventuring party, fresh from their first quest. Having delivered the trinket they were sent for, they rested in an inn... and woke up in a mansion surrounded by an impenetrable forcefield. There was an old note to someone called Ulrich,warning of a bargain the townsfolk had made.

Then I poured on the creepy.

edited 24th Nov '11 3:45:59 AM by AckSed

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

My Dungeon Fantasy campaign had them all getting drunk in town and waking up on the first floor of the dungeon. When two other players joined they were disguising themselves as dead bodies from a monster attack.

edited 25th Nov '11 12:07:07 AM by rumetzen

Shadowrun has a great built-in mechanic for why the players are on an adventure. Why those specific runners were brought together is up to the GM and players. For my campaign, I made one of the players a low-level street soldier in the Jersey Syndicate crime family. He knows the rest of the runners through various channels and was asked to bring them together by his superior, a Syndicate fixer/Johnson. At this point in the campaign he's gained significant respect within the family, and the non-made runners are seen as his permanent crew of associates.

The Mafia employment also makes it easy to insert allied NP Cs as backup or specialists in case the players lack a certain necessary skill. None of them can hack or break into electronic security for shit.

One of my players had his wife join us for a run, and when they waffled on her character origin and how she knows everybody, I said "She's your ex-girlfriend from Chicago."

"But my ex-girlfriend from Chicago is another character with a different name, man!" Imagine a whiny Jeff Bridges as The Dude voice.

"Too bad, now Micca's character replaces that one. Moving on."

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.

You missed the opportunity to say "Let me finish, she's your ex girlfriend from Chicago's mother."

Shouldn't have complained.

"You all meet in an inn" is the best starting to run with first timers, everyone gets a laugh out of the cliche and it starts plenty of conversations and a tutorial on skill checks (someone will try and seduce the bar wench).

I have also started a game at level 5 where all the players were traveling on cart they won in a unspecified background event, half the fun of that game was getting the weirdest bunch of characters the group has come up with and figuring out how they all came together. *

Other good starts are, "You all meet on a boat traveling to new/lost lands" which has the benefit of a logical reason why no one has any knowledge of the world, very good for improv games, and "baddies are attacking, you all have to work together to survive" although in one start a ranger killed a PC warlock assuming he was one of the evil kobolds.

In my campaign, a lot of The X Files esque murders and generally weird stuff starts happening, and so the governor, realizing that he has a whole ghetto full of adventurers, announces a call to arms to fix the problem. The characters meet when they are assigned to each other after answering the call.

edited 19th Dec '11 4:21:21 PM by Crusader1025

The rest is still unwritten...

Consider this stolen.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Unless the story or the players demand it, I usually start my game by asking how X or Y characters know each other, even if they were old schoolmates a decade ago and haven't met up since. Then I give them an excuse to work together.

Once I started a campaign with every PC being part of a family.

WOOF!

All the characters have destroyed a major city. Each.

With that kind of notoriety, they'll find each other very quickly.

Will they have a collective bounty of $$6,000,000,000 on their heads?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw