GREAT GM: 6 Tips On How To Start Your Roleplaying Campaign - Game Master Dungeon Master Tips

6 Tips On How To Start Your Roleplaying Campaign

I use questions and comments from my subscribers to create the campaign that will be played on this channel , so check it out.

To Stalk the Roleplaying group and myself go here:

[emessar]

One time our group noticed that almost everyone was playing either human or half-elf. We decided that we all had the same father and that he was a philanderer that had traveled from place to place. It let each of us have our own origin and backstory and not totally know one another.

The event that brought us all together was that we had all received word that our father was dead and we were attending the funeral. During the ceremony, the area around his cemetery plot collapsed into a huge cavern and the corpse of our father became possessed by an ancient evil. So most of the campaign revolved around trying to track down and defeat the possessed corpse of dear old Dad.

I suppose that would be an example of common story background.

[samdoorley]

"Your characters rolled up a bunch of players" THAT'S a game I'd like to be a part of.

[zombiebrainmuncher]

I once took the cliche of starting in a bar and turned it on it's head.
They started in a Jar, in a giants larder.

[TheBigFuzzy]

This dude is table top's David Attenborough.

[hgarrett]

Recently I, as a first time DM with a mostly first time party, combined the sudden combat, awkward inn, and pre-game. I started them with an absurd combat scenario involving skeletal versions of themselves (easy with a lizardfolk and a kenku in the party) while skydiving with no context. Then I revealed it to be a dream as they wake up in their separate rooms in the same inn. This let me give them a taste of what play and combat feels like without putting much pressure on them. Next session they see each other again in the inn, strangers that all shared the same dream. I combined this with some plot thread NPCs to get them involved with each other and the beginnings of a story all at once. It went better than I could have imagined given how unprepared I felt...

[kainan]

"The pre-game game game" I giggled like a manly man

[TheSmart-CasualGamer]

As cliche as it is, I think the tropey "Bar Meet" works really well. You can give them a common purpose from there, and it gives all the players a little time to roleplay before an enemy force breaks in and starts hacking people apart with laser swords.

[BrazenBard]

One thing I'm planning on doing for my next campaign is to take a page out of the Dresden Files RPG (well, the old version; haven't seen the new version yet):
Part of the character creation is basically asking "How did your path cross that of the character to your left? And how did your path cross that of the character to the left of that one again?"
Essentially, making sure every character has some background connection to two of the other characters, where they've done some bonding of some sort in the past, whether they were simply classmates for a year or two, or were sent down into the local pub's cellar to kill rats together one summer day...

[MatthewCampbell]

One idea, and this can be compared to the "Common Problem" set-up: Common Selection. Give the PCs a common goal and a bunch of plot coupons that make them converge together. For example:

All your players find different pieces of a treasure map, and bump into each other some how. Because no single part of the map is sufficient to find the treasure, they have to work together.

[OperationOmegaOne]

My personal favorite way to start off is 'The Caravan.' I like it because it means they've been on the road together for awhile, and have a decent idea of one another already, and there's little reason for them to wander off (especially if they've been hired as guards), and it seems like a decent job for a low level character, and I can just have the caravan wander into the start of the adventure.

[JoyAndAgony]

What about a prophetic prologue, all players have the same dream, they're fighting a blurred final boss, they're all together but they don't know each other, NPCs talk to them as if the group has been together and active for ages. They're thrown into a battle without hitpoints, only narrative reactions to rolls. The boss, too powerful for them, wipes them out, the entire party wakes up in cold sweat, then they all meet the strange people from their dream.

[jdbeistline]

I disagree with you're take on #3 "The Awkward Inn". While I do understand the vexation with it, it *can* work.
Just recently I finished what was supposed to be a pre-session or "Session 0" where we all get together and discuss scheduling for future sessions, finishing touches on the characters, applying the backstory, determining how each player wants to play and have the party decide how they will play together, and what type of gameplay they want as far as either less narrative or more narrative.
I failed to consider what would happen if we concluded everything with still plenty of time left, thus they decided to start the first session completely taking me off-guard.
To preface, we are playing in a setting of my own creation to be as open-world as possible, since I have proven that I am at least decent in improvisation(or so I've been told). So I threw them into starting method #3, with additional narrative, and more narrative prompted by a few questions. One of the players, isn't new, but has been known to enjoy the dungeon-crawling murder-hobo type of game.(fortunately he ended up enjoying it more than he thought he would)

Yes, I agree that the Awkward Inn is quite overused, however with enough narration, story building, and a banana, it can be viable and even enjoyable.

The end result is that all the players enjoyed the impromptu session, and they demand another just one day later. I asked them what they didn't enjoy from the session, since I still consider myself a 'new' GM, they're responses were unanimously "I didn't enjoy that rude NPC which you designed to be disliked." When I asked them what they enjoyed most, the responses were a varied and unanimous "I feel like my character was validated in every moment, even though I didn't OWN the limelight."
This is the first actual campaign I intend to run, and from the first session I feel like I have accomplished something amazing.

Despite my difference of open onion, I enjoy your videos.

[lindadaheim]

The awkward inn was the start of my first adventure as a PC about 20 years ago. I remember it a bit romantically, I wish someone would do it again.

[zerowing]

Your voice sounds like you're pouring honey into my ears. You are an incredible speaker and pretty darn inspiring! Keep it up, I'd sub a thousand times if I could. You've been an invaluable help on my quest to become a great DM.

[robin]

I am going to be GMing my first ever campaign in about a week or so, and I have decided I am going to start it off with a skyrim reference and do the prison wagon intro.

[wickedly]

I actually did The Awkward Introduction and The Common Problem and it worked pretty well. They are all in a tavern, all in there for their own reasons, and most inside of the tavern are quiet and resting after a long day's work in the mines. I allowed a few of the characters to ask some things, describe themselves and then BAM! An older miner, soaked with sweat and an ear that has been split in half by an arrow looks crazily around the tavern and starts running to the rooms in the back in panic. Not long after he makes it to the next room, a small band of tribal warriors show up with blue war paint on their faces. They're fit, but a little sweaty causing some of their war paint to run. They look menacingly around the room, looking for the old man. What do you do?

This worked very well, it created questions that couldn't be answered, and left the characters in a sense of, "Should we fight them, or try to negotiate?"

In my game, the tribal warriors had zero interest in diplomacy, and when the characters tried, their goal turned into murdering the tavern to destroy the witnesses.

[gentlemanwolfgang]

I actually started my first campaign as a GM using tip 4. The common problem. The players all made there characters and were ready to start playing pathfinder in a fantasy setting when all of a sudden... they were in a metal room with a disembodied voice speaking to them and giving them tasks. I had put them all on a star-ship, something none of their characters had experience with, and then shoved them into a holodeck when they had to survive various tasks and challenges. Now I used this situation because a couple of the people were new to dnd and I wanted everyone to be able to learn about the encounters one could come up against in the world in a structured manner where the consequences would not be as dire. This worked pretty well in teaching them the basics of the game, but there was a couple of problems. The first was that completing a single task took longer then I had anticipated (sometimes taking up the entire session), which made getting through the "beginning" take many, many weeks. The second problem was that, while the players were having fun, they were not role playing much as there were only a couple of NPC's to talk to and they did not talk to each other very much. So while they knew how to use their characters quite well, their personalities were slow to develop. As soon as they finished the last task I ended up booting them out of the ship and into some farms near a village. I originally intended for them to stay on the ship, but giving them more people to talk to did help them start to more fully develop their characters' personalities. One of them even started to believe that this town was full of usurpers and ne'er-do-wells who stole the land from ogres. His paranoia began because of repeated critical fails on sense motive checks. Don't know what dice god he ticked off, but every sense motive check he tried to do, ended with a natural 1.

[GothmogLives_G]

I started a campaign set in Harn World. All the players were in an underground cell... the cell door was over head. No one had any memories of who they were or where they were. Guards could be seen walking past the grate, snow was falling in, and it was cold. Then they heard the battle start, load and bloody. A body lands on the great, dropping a sword into the pit... working together they managed to get out, but found no survivors on the out side.

[SpiroHarvey]

Great video. I've always wanted to start a game with a prologue, and the one I almost ran involved the players playing a bunch of villains shooting a place up, having the players make an entrance part way through the fight, and switching their character sheets back to their real characters. But the goal in that scenario was to create some kind of empathy for the villains and make them think about their actions as they respond.

[mothokingsley]

I love this. I don't even play Roleplaying GAMES. I just do chatroom roleplay. But knowing these things helps with not only my form of roleplay, but nudging me to try games such as these out.