Replace Session Zero?! (Ep.196)

Professor Dungeonmaster shows how to replace session zero with something better. The first episode of the Veiled Society campaign!

"Fury of the Dragon's Breath" by Peter Crowley

[BobWorldBuilder]

Honored to be mentioned in this video, and even happier that you mentioned Bardy McFly 🦅 Thanks, Professor! …and I only just got “no harm, no fowl.” Haha

[scullywags]

“I create conflicts, but I don’t need to know how the players figure their way out of the conflicts…that is their department.” That’s some graduate level DM knowledge right there.

[matthewburton]

I love how all the DM youtubers reference each other and plug their content. The DM and D&D community, from my experience, has been healthy with kind people even if there are differences. I’m glad we can all enjoy this game and our experiences with it in such a great way!

[deepqantas]

Pre-roll ability scores. Hide them around the room for players to find.

[yazb]

With playing time so precious with a group of working adults, I have moved to doing session zero over the course of discord chats, brief phone calls and texts...some people need more guidance then others and especially with a mixed group of skill levels/experience it saves time for those needing less guidance.

[felipeuseche]

When you are obsessed with this game, every social encounter is a session zero.

[MrRadicalDuck]

We played a classic 5e campaign where I had a short 1 or 2 hour session with each player to flesh out back story, and why they were in the town where all the shenanigans started. As a result, every player seems very motivated for their own reasons, and have plenty of cards in their sleeves and secrets that they haven't shared. It's the best campaign I've run so far having only been a DM for 3 years, but if your players are up for it, more narrative driven solo sessions for backstories worked wonders for me. It also allowed the players to have actual world based knowledge for a lot of stuff, rather than having to ask me if they know where someplace is. They all took notes, so they actually physically know exactly where they're from and what they were up to before the story took place.

[lindybeige]

Love the player secrets idea. Personally, I never have a session zero. I start the game as soon as I possibly can. Character generation needs to be very quick.

[nemooh]

This is gold. I love seeing you (and Runehammer... and Kelsey) just roll dice and take some random result then somehow make it an interesting story.

[AlbertoRodriguez-zbiu]

Conflict generator...yep that's me!
The backup characters leveling up along with the main character is a nice idea too. 👍

[DarkVeghetta]

For the Curse of Strahd campaign I'm playing in, my DM ran me through a one-on-one session zero - it was perhaps the best session I've ever had in D&D.

Setting up the character and rolling the stats was done both at the start, but also as we played (feasible due to no actual combat happening, as the session was pure collaborative storytelling and RP).

By the end of the session, I had a fully stated character with a rich backstory, personal goals, allies, and a custom hook into the campaign.

[davidlake]

Professor strikes again. One of the best session zero rundowns I’ve ever heard. You dance through this like you’re going over your syllabus.

[josephpilkus]

Well done! As a 40-yr D&D player, I find your ideas, musings, and thoughts to be absolutely in sync with my own. Great stuff, and I plan on becoming a Patreon backer soon

[sirguy]

Great lecture from PDM- really enjoy including the DM as a player in the group

[kennethallore]

Even though we primarily run different systems (I bow to the blood soaked altar of WFRP), your videos have immensely improved my games. My hat off to you, sir

[daveshif]

For every 1 person complaining about a premier, there’s 10 people who had greater engagement with the video and is proven to help channels grow. Not every video needs premier ofc, but I fully support the use of premier. Like… let this man get his engagements damn. The negativity just shows that the ppl complaining have no idea how much effort goes into these kinds of videos

[farshaddailami]

doing my bit for the algorithm ... I watched this with a lot of interest. I just started a new campaign last Saturday, following many of the principles PDM talked about. I've been wanting to use Five Torches Deep (FTD) to do a bit of "palette cleanse" from regular 5E (we finished a 5 year running campaign just recently, before that we were playing AD&D for about 4 years).
I used a couple of things from DCC in addition to FTD: character funnel, background occupations, limited money (a few copper and silver); basically using zero-level characters. Including me reading the quick background blurb (about 2 minutes), we were off and playing in less than 30 minutes. It was refreshing; my players didn't keep searching their sheets for "how to do stuff". They simply described what they did and where appropriate I gave them a DC (default 11, per FTD). There was tension in the story; there was character death (out of 12 PCs, 6 survived), there was mystery and intrigue. But most importantly, my players wanted to come back and keep playing. We have agreed on a 4-5 session story arc, after that we'll see ...

[LongRest]

I absolutely love this channel. I've found that I'm pretty often disagree with Professor's opinions on gaming... and that's why I keep coming back. Every time I'm getting stuck with some roleplaying problem or found myself to absorbed in some boring modern convention I go to this channel — Professor will provide his own well thought opinion which almost always helps me to look at the problem from a different angle. And then I just shamelessly still what works for me.

[paulofrota]

This video is gold. This is where you are at your best, PDM! New campaign! YAY

[gebatron]

I love the idea of creating archetypes specifically for the campaign. D&D is a very specific flavour of fantasy, it should be tweaked for every campaign to match the tone! The character questions prompts were also appropriately themed, very cool!