this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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If your character has no reason to stay either the plothook was insufficient or you made a bad character. Both should be adressed ooc.
Create a new character that does have a reason to stick around. *Session 0 should be the creation of the story of how the group met, they should not meet in session 1.
Strongly disagree. Nothing wrong with doing that, but nothing wrong with having them meet in session 1 too, as long as you have built characters who will be willing to go along with the GM's hooks.
And even that part is flexible, depending on the nature of the hook. If the hook is "you see an ad look for rat exterminators", then you better have a character who wants to be an adventurer and will cooperate with other would-be adventurers. If the hook is "you're prisoners being ordered to go explore this dungeon by order of the vizier", there's room for slightly less cooperative PCs, as long as you PC is cooperative enough to go along with that order, even if (at first) reluctantly.
Yeah, I'm gonna back you up on that one. Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what's right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn't. Think about how many movies literally have "Assembling the team" as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on "We need to put a party together." Every heist movie is basically required to have an "I'm putting a team together..." sequence.
Session 0 is where you lay out the expectations of the game, and your players think about either how their characters have already interacted, or how they will interact when they eventually meet. You give people an idea of what they're getting into, you pitch the tone and the style of the game, and you help people shape characters around that.
As an example a friend of mine always pitches his games by describing who they would be directed by. I remember vividly his "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Halflings" game, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay If It Was Directed By Guy Ritchie experience. Just setting that sense of tone up front meant that we all knew to make characters who would fit the vibe. I played "Blackhand Seth, The Scummiest Elf You've Ever Met," one part Brad Pitt Pikey, one part Jack Sparrow, and I had a blast.
In my most recent campaign I'm running a Shadowrun game where the group would be assembled in session 1 by a down on his luck fixer. My pitch to the players was simple; make fuck-ups. I wanted characters who were at the end of their rope, lacking in options, either so green no one would trust them or so tainted by past failures that no one wanted them. The kind of people who would take a job from a fixer who had burned every other bridge. They rose to the assignment beautifully, and by four sessions in the group has already formed some absolutely fascinating relationship dynamics. A lot of that has been shaped by their first experiences together, figuring out how to work as a team, sometimes distrusting each other, and slowly discovering reasons to care about each other.
Oh, that reminds me of a 4th way campaigns can start (in addition to the 3 I said in a different reply) that I've been in before and quite enjoyed—though wouldn't want to be overused. The MCU method. Where each player individually gets a 1 session (maybe 2 at most) solo session introducing them and getting them to the right place to start the campaign.
Doesn't have to be a solo session. If you have the right group for it (big IF there) you can jump back and forth between the individual characters, essentially running four solo sessions in parallel. This relies heavily on your players being the kind of people who are invested in the action even when their character isn't present, but it can be done.
That said, I think for the most part the "Solo movie" should really be a character's backstory. This is why I don't like D&D, or at least the D&D presumption of starting at level 1. It leaves no room for characters to have an interesting history if they're basically at the level where the average house-cat is a threat. If I run D&D, I start people off at somewhere around level 5 - 10. Give them enough ability that they can actually have done some interesting things already. Get the solo movie out of the way before the game even starts.