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When I wrote about the value of Session Zero in roleplaying games a few days ago I promised to share some examples of successes and failures. The other day I shared one example, Batman and the Joker in the same party. That was a downside example, illustrating what happens when you don't do a full Session Zero. Here are five more examples from my experience, some downside and some upside.
1) "We go to bed each night knowing we were the good guys that day." That was a statement of game theme the players in my group came up with after the Batman and the Joker debacle. There would be no more ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room of adventuring with people who spread chaos and fear or commit wanton crime. That's not to say the game is all rainbows and unicorns. As part of the discussion everyone acknowledged that there would be plenty of gray areas to deal with, including a) when people of genuinely good intent have opposing priorities or expectations, and b) how to function in societies where the rulers are harsh, corrupt, callously indifferent, or possibly just badly misinformed.
2) A shady background is okay, hurting teammates is not. The statement in example 1 is something a group that's basically Good (in the game mechanics of many roleplaying games) would say. What about a group that's Neutral? They'll have a lot more tolerance for a character with a shady background... possibly even a shady present. Imagine one of the team is a burglar whose skills are helpful when we need to sneak into a villain's lair. Maybe we don't care if they take thieving side jobs in between our missions. But we do care if either: a) they steal from us! Or b) a side job gets them in so much trouble we get hit in the blowback. I've seen both of these blow up games I've played in the past, so when I proposed to be a burglar in a recent Session Zero I put these issues on the table and got the players' buy-in.
3) Is anybody taking this seriously?! In the comments on my entry about the value of Session Zero two of my friends raised a common cause of failure in roleplaying games: players creating characters that are exclusively comic relief. Remember, the crux of Session Zero is to establish that the players can collaborate in telling a mutually satisfying story in the GM's setting. If everyone agrees they just want a short-lived slapstick comedy exercise then sure, go ahead and create clowns. But when there's any kind of serious plot line to resolve, dragging along a worthless clown makes the game un-fun for everybody else. That happened in a mini adventure I ran years ago. Despite having a Session Zero and agreeing on the storyline to resolve, two of the players created characters that were total jokes. One was an idiot loudmouth who bloviated nonstop, the second was a drunk who refused to take things seriously until too late. The other two players quit in frustration after the first session, and the game fell apart about an hour into the second session when the two idiots couldn't even stop being idiots long enough to win a winnable fight. It was a TPK (Total Party Kill).
4) The desert railroad. Up to this point the negative examples I've shared are of players choosing inapt characters. Can GMs screw up the game contract, too? Sure they can! In one game Hawk and I created a pair of big-city society hackers. We kept the GM in the loop and sought his advice. He approved. Then at the start of Session One he informed us that we were in a desert, didn't know where we were, had just been robbed of all our possessions, and even our nice clothes were in tatters. Through a number of narrative motions I determined that these weren't plot points. The GM didn't care about establishing why we went to the desert, or who robbed us, or how we might seek justice. The desert robbery was just a device to strip our characters of all the background we created and fit them neatly into predetermined slots for what would happen next. In roleplaying game lingo this is called railroading— as in, we'd been railroaded into a bad deal. Hawk and I quit after Session One.
5) The hayseed party. One of the most fun games I've played was a campaign Hawk ran that sadly didn't last more than about 8 sessions. (It fell apart due to work schedules.) What was memorable was that we all came to Session Zero with characters who were misfits. Generally a group can handle one character who's quirky or socially crippled, occasionally two characters... but what about when it's 5/5? It worked in this case because, unlike in the "Is anybody taking this seriously?!" example above, we aligned well in Session Zero. A) We made sure we had quirky-but-useful characters instead of pure clowns; B) we identified enough shared goals and values to want to work together within the envelope of the setting and storyline the GM created; and C) we agreed we'd have fun embracing the setbacks and complications our quirks would create along the way. "Uh-oh, it looks like everyone in this party has pronoun trouble," one player joked, referring to the fact all the characters talked like nut jobs or country bumpkins. "We're the hayseed party!" another quipped. "We met at the tractor pull," I added. "We were all peeing on the wall behind the snack stand."
1) "We go to bed each night knowing we were the good guys that day." That was a statement of game theme the players in my group came up with after the Batman and the Joker debacle. There would be no more ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room of adventuring with people who spread chaos and fear or commit wanton crime. That's not to say the game is all rainbows and unicorns. As part of the discussion everyone acknowledged that there would be plenty of gray areas to deal with, including a) when people of genuinely good intent have opposing priorities or expectations, and b) how to function in societies where the rulers are harsh, corrupt, callously indifferent, or possibly just badly misinformed.
2) A shady background is okay, hurting teammates is not. The statement in example 1 is something a group that's basically Good (in the game mechanics of many roleplaying games) would say. What about a group that's Neutral? They'll have a lot more tolerance for a character with a shady background... possibly even a shady present. Imagine one of the team is a burglar whose skills are helpful when we need to sneak into a villain's lair. Maybe we don't care if they take thieving side jobs in between our missions. But we do care if either: a) they steal from us! Or b) a side job gets them in so much trouble we get hit in the blowback. I've seen both of these blow up games I've played in the past, so when I proposed to be a burglar in a recent Session Zero I put these issues on the table and got the players' buy-in.
3) Is anybody taking this seriously?! In the comments on my entry about the value of Session Zero two of my friends raised a common cause of failure in roleplaying games: players creating characters that are exclusively comic relief. Remember, the crux of Session Zero is to establish that the players can collaborate in telling a mutually satisfying story in the GM's setting. If everyone agrees they just want a short-lived slapstick comedy exercise then sure, go ahead and create clowns. But when there's any kind of serious plot line to resolve, dragging along a worthless clown makes the game un-fun for everybody else. That happened in a mini adventure I ran years ago. Despite having a Session Zero and agreeing on the storyline to resolve, two of the players created characters that were total jokes. One was an idiot loudmouth who bloviated nonstop, the second was a drunk who refused to take things seriously until too late. The other two players quit in frustration after the first session, and the game fell apart about an hour into the second session when the two idiots couldn't even stop being idiots long enough to win a winnable fight. It was a TPK (Total Party Kill).
4) The desert railroad. Up to this point the negative examples I've shared are of players choosing inapt characters. Can GMs screw up the game contract, too? Sure they can! In one game Hawk and I created a pair of big-city society hackers. We kept the GM in the loop and sought his advice. He approved. Then at the start of Session One he informed us that we were in a desert, didn't know where we were, had just been robbed of all our possessions, and even our nice clothes were in tatters. Through a number of narrative motions I determined that these weren't plot points. The GM didn't care about establishing why we went to the desert, or who robbed us, or how we might seek justice. The desert robbery was just a device to strip our characters of all the background we created and fit them neatly into predetermined slots for what would happen next. In roleplaying game lingo this is called railroading— as in, we'd been railroaded into a bad deal. Hawk and I quit after Session One.
5) The hayseed party. One of the most fun games I've played was a campaign Hawk ran that sadly didn't last more than about 8 sessions. (It fell apart due to work schedules.) What was memorable was that we all came to Session Zero with characters who were misfits. Generally a group can handle one character who's quirky or socially crippled, occasionally two characters... but what about when it's 5/5? It worked in this case because, unlike in the "Is anybody taking this seriously?!" example above, we aligned well in Session Zero. A) We made sure we had quirky-but-useful characters instead of pure clowns; B) we identified enough shared goals and values to want to work together within the envelope of the setting and storyline the GM created; and C) we agreed we'd have fun embracing the setbacks and complications our quirks would create along the way. "Uh-oh, it looks like everyone in this party has pronoun trouble," one player joked, referring to the fact all the characters talked like nut jobs or country bumpkins. "We're the hayseed party!" another quipped. "We met at the tractor pull," I added. "We were all peeing on the wall behind the snack stand."
