Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

A few days ago we watched the movie Krull from 1983. It's streaming on HBO Max.

My motivation for watching Krull was an online review I read a week or two ago. The author noted that Krull was a box office and critical flop in its time and opined that failure was for three reasons that also make it a cult classic. One, the movie was a crossover fantasy/science fiction at a time when audiences were not ready for f/sf. Two, the movie is dark, and audiences didn't like movies that were dark. The smash hit f/sf movie in 1983 was Return of the Jedi, and what everyone liked best about it was the Ewoks. The annoyingly cute, so-bad-they-almost-ruined-the-plot Ewoks. Three, the movie's use of cliched tropes and over-the-top dramatics is actually a parody of the tropes and dramatics overused in swords-and-sorcery movies of the era.

Within a few minutes of starting the movie it was obvious why it was a commercial and critical flop. The movie has some redeeming qualities, but ultimately the storyline makes no sense. It's full of cliches and contradicts itself every 5 minutes.

To summarize the plot: Space aliens in a ship that looks like a rocky mountain spire land on the planet Krull. Their soldiers, called Slayers, easily decimate the sword-wielding people of Krull with laser blasters and shock-spears. They kidnap the princess and bring her back to their leader, The Beast, inside the mountain/ship. The prince, who narrowly survived the attack, assembles a raggedy band of followers and helpers to rescue her and destroy the aliens.

So, what are the redeeming qualities? Well, the movie was ambitious with its staging and special effects. Sitting here in 2022 it's easy to laugh at how primitive some of the 1983 vintage effects look, like the scene where the protagonists are navigating quicksand in the swamp. But for 1983 technology that was actually pretty ambitious. Indeed, that's part of why it was a commercial flop; they spent tens of millions (in 1983 dollars) on special effects, and the film didn't earn back its cost.

The other redeeming quality is the movie's imagination. Yes this is ultimately a good news/bad news thing. Imagining an f/sf crossover was thinking outside the box. The idea of aliens with blasters vs. swords-and-sorcery has so much potential. But the movie completely squanders that potential with a storyline that makes no sense. It's like it's a D&D adventure written by a 12 year old.

• The aliens killed almost everybody, what do we do? Oh, wait, there's a wise old man who says a magical weapon will stop them. But what does it do? Shh, you'll find out in time!


• We've got to find where the villains are hiding! Wise old guy says there's exactly ONE way to find out, it's this old seer. Oops, the seer failed his roll. Well, luckily there's exactly TWO ways to find out, the other's in this swamp. Oops, we were attacked there. Well, luckily there's exactly THREE ways to find out, the third is from this spider-queen, if she doesn't kill us all first...


• Oh, and the aliens, who flew across the galaxy in a space ship? Well, their whole ship teleports around the planet once a day. So why was the whole opening scene about it flying through space? Why not just teleport to the planet? Shhh, you're ruining it!


• That fancy weapon (5 bladed star) that it's in all the artwork does nothing until the climax, when it basically flies out of the hero's hand and then does everything while the protagonists stand back and watch. As a friend of mine quipped, mockingly, "I AM THE ALL WISE AND ALL POWERFUL. AND I HAVE NO LEGS. CARRY ME, MORTAL."

Krull does worse than simply not making sense. It tries to make sense, throwing details into plot and dialog every scene, only to contradict half those details 5 minutes later. It's like a D&D adventure written by six 12-year-olds, each one writing a different part of the adventure.

A few nights ago I decided to take the plunge and start watching Game of Thrones. Y'know, catch up with the 2010s (the show aired 2011-2019) before they're over. 🤣 Here are my thoughts as I watched through the premier episode. I'll mark spoilers though at this point, 10+ years since the episode aired, how many people want to watch the episode and haven't?

It starts like a D&D game turned TV show...

As I watched the opening scenes of the episode I thought, "Hmm, this is a like a D&D game." Swords and sorcery stuff. Three intrepid guardsmen ride their horses through a tunnel blocked by locked gates at both ends. They emerge on the far side into a snowy winterscape. Behind them we see they've just tunneled under an unnaturally shaped mountain built like an enormous wall. Let's call it the Winterwall.

North of the Winterwall, where everything is way, way colder and snowier than 1/2 mile south, the guards are looking for a clan of savages, to check up on them or something. Guardsman 1 sneaks forward toward their encampment (they see smoke rising, indicating a campfire) and finds that ( Opening sequence spoilers.... ) Guardsman 1 flees.

Okay, so it's Lawful-Neutral...

Back south of the Winterwall, Guardsman 1 is apprehended as a deserter. It's a death sentence. The local baron— though they don't call him a baron, but that's totally the kind of title he'd have in any sensible D&D game— Ned Stark comes out to deliver the sentence and perform the execution personally. Stark explains to his 10 year old son that it's important the people who pass judgment understand carrying it out.

Okay, I'm thinking, the law seems unnecessarily harsh— nobody cares why Guardsman 1 fled, like most people don't even think to ask because they assume whatever he says must be a lie and there can exist no proof or corroborating details for it— but Stark administers the law with a sense of reason. So, this D&D game setting is Lawful Neutral.

Puppies!

In the next arc of the episode Stark and his retinue are traveling back to the castle when they come across a large buck, killed and gored. Stark spots a trail and follows it to find a ( very important plot point-- wait, PUPPIES!! )

The king visits; the D&D metaphor starts to falter

Back at Baron Lord (because they avoid saying "Baron" like it's trademarked, or something) Stark's castle building with lots of stones (they oddly avoid saying "castle", too) news has just arrived that the king is coming. Preparations must be made!

In terms of a D&D game this is where stories start to struggle. Because while most groups of players I've played with ask, no beg, no insist! that the game have politics & intrigue & roleplaying rather than just combat, whenever I give them a scenario that focuses on politics, intrigue, and roleplaying they withdraw and cop sulky attitudes until it's time to Roll Initiative again.

...Actually it's not everyone who'd get sulky about actual politics, intrigue, and roleplaying. There's a big subgroup of D&D players who see this as the perfect opportunity for a robbery spree. 😨 They're like, "Everyone's busy feasting with the king? Cool, let's loot their homes and businesses while they're they're not looking!" 🤣

More raunchy sex than any D&D group has ever been comfortable with

Through the middle of the episode the storytelling alternates between scenes at not-Baron Stark's not-castle and a faraway land where siblings Viserys and Daenerys, children of a deposed king, are plotting their return to power. ( Sex, rape, more sex, more rape, but don't be late to dinner! ) Because, apparently, wanton meaningless sex is okay but being late to dinner is an unforgivable sin.

And just like that, it's an Evil game

All the raunchy sex and rape— and there's some I'm leaving out here for brevity— broke my suspension of disbelief for a moment. "What happened to this being a D&D TV show, a story of good-vs.-evil with the Whitewalkers as the villains growing in power?" I mused. Then I remembered that the Whitewalkers become big villains in, like, season 6 or something. That means about 50 episodes of raunchy sex, incest, and rape until we get back to this being a proper D&D TV series.

Oh, then there's the last scene of the episode. ( Surprise! Genuinely evil.... ) And I'm like, "And just like that, this D&D game is an evil game."

One of the blogs I follow is about roleplaying games (RPGs), called Gnome Stew. In a recent entry one of the "gnomes" wrote about players checking their phones, etc. during a game. For context, this would be at table-top RPGs (TTRPGs), where use of electronic devices and their potential for disruption has been a topic of debate over the past several years.

The author of that blog presented both pros and cons for device usage in TTRPGs. I appreciate that because most writing on the topic has been very one-sided. When small devices became common enough— and powerful enough— that players using them at the table became a big discussion in the TTRPG community, most writers took a paternalistic, just-say-no approach.

The urge behind making "No electronics" a house rule is understandable. Phones, tablets, etc. used inappropriately during games are huge distractions. Players who descend into watching YouTube videos or reading news or social media feeds mentally dropping out from the game. Even worse is when they distract others, too, e.g. by laughing out loud at the cat videos they're watching or interrupting others' roleplay to shout, "OMG, did you hear about what the {president, other party leader, governor, pop star of the week} just said?!?!"

Even if all you see are the negatives of device usage, setting a policy like a "Thou shalt not" commandment will not work with adult players. Much of the advice in recent years has worded as a parent would browbeat and punish a misbehaving child.

And the truth is that phones, tablets, and small laptops are more than just tools of distraction. They're enormous helps when used well. I can't imagine sitting down for a game anymore without a character sheet open in one window and background documents, SRDs, and rules PDFs queued up in various tabs. I frankly roll my eyes at players who are high-tech in other aspects of their lives yet sit down at my gaming table with a rat's nest of faded papers they can't their own Hit Points in without loudly rummaging around for 15 seconds. Nowadays it's like, if you don't have a device with you to organize and access information, you're not prepared.

Of course, the negatives of devices are real. Those examples I gave above about cat videos and blurting out outrageous headlines in the middle of a game aren't hypothetical or exaggerated examples; they've all happened at my gaming table. Devices are tools, and tools can be used for good or ill. So how do you limit the ill?

I find these types of disruptions are best handled not with rules specific to device usage but when treated like any other form of disruption. It's worth remembering that not all disruptions are device-based. TTRPGs have always struggled with distractions such as players wanting to catch up with each other before starting the game. Then, too, there’s the challenge of how much "meta" talk / BSing there is in the game vs. deep roleplaying. And how to manage snack/meal breaks without trainwrecking the session too badly is practically an art form. The best approach is to build a consensus among the players about how and how much of these to allow while keeping the game fun for all.

I've been playing various versions of the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons since the 1980s. Since the 1990s most of my play has been as a game master, or GM; the person who crafts & "runs" the campaign for the other players. If GM is a new term for you, maybe you've heard it as DM. GMs used to be called dungeon masters (DMs). The terminology shifted from DM to GM back in the 1990s as fantasy roleplaying games broadened beyond the genre of medieval swords and sorcery. Ironically around that time I was actually shifting my personal style of game design away from dungeons, too.

It's important to understand that the game Dungeons & Dragons has always been about dungeons. "Dungeons" is literally its first name! The game centers around the trope of the dungeon crawl.The player characters (PCs) are exploring some vast underground complex, avoiding its many traps and trying to find and defeat the villainous monsters (maybe even dragons!) that lurk within. The rule books are written for dungeon crawls; industry magazines and company blogs constantly reinforce the idea of dungeon crawling; and most published adventures are basically just dungeon crawls.

The trope of dungeon crawling has always struck me as uncreative. ...Uncreative, because after the first decision— "Let's have a huge dungeon!"— critical thought stopped. Who built all these dungeons? Why? Who's kept them up? How do all these monsters live underground? What are they doing? And why are the living in close proximity with other hostile carnivores instead of just eating each other?

"Don't think too hard about why dungeons exist," the publishers and respected elders of the industry frequently admonished us years ago. "The game involves magic, so clearly any attempt to apply real-world logic to it is foolish."

Yeah, magic, but here's the thing. Fantasy roleplaying is a creative art. Creating a game is similar to writing a fantasy novel or screenplay. They're not identical in all ways, obviously, but one key way in which they are alike is that they've got to maintain suspension of disbelief. Key to that is internal consistency and logic. Within the art of fantasy writing it's well understood by successful practitioners that a writer gets a very small number of fantasy "freebies"— things that are different from the real world, like the presence of magic and monsters in a medieval fantasy setting, or the presence of warp drives and alien races in a scifi setting. Good writers understand they get 1-2 freebie fantasy elements then must justify the rest based on logical construction from those bases.

So for me, yeah, there's magic and monsters. But dungeons under every town and mountain is a bridge too far. Fortunately it's not too hard to get away from the trope of dungeon adventures. Basically, just put your monsters outside! It opens up a lot more creativity and widens the range of challenges players can enjoy solving, too.

More next time on my approach for designing outdoors, aka non-dungeon, adventures.

A few weeks ago I blogged "D&D: New Rules, New Players, Same Old Problems". I wrote about a challenge with a player who hogged the spotlight and a GM who supported it. (FWIW, spotlight-hogging is a common enough issue in roleplaying games, though this case was more severe than most— particularly with how the GM showed favoritism.) I wrote the blog under a broad, generic title because that wasn't the only new-day-same-old-problems issue on my mind at the time. Another problem-player problem was cropping up in a second game at Session Zero stage at the time.

Thieves and "The Good Guys" Don't Mix

The problem with the player "Braz" (as I'll call him) began with him declaring that his character is a thief. ...Not just a character created with the "Thief" character class many game systems have, but actually a person who routinely steals things from others. This came after I asked a question to the group: "What's our moral center?" The group agreed, "We're the good guys."

The discussion about Braz playing a thief went back and forth for about 15 minutes. I won't relate all the twists and turns here as I don't want this to turn into a 1,000+ word essay. Suffice it to say this was a situation where the player was talking but not listening. It's impossible for the group to be "the good guys" when one member of the group expects to commit crimes against innocent people frequently and unrepentantly.

Admitting You're Bossy Doesn't Make it Okay

The next problem point arose with Braz declaring, "Just so you know, I like to do all the talking in roleplaying situations."

In any group of players it naturally happens that some are more forward than others in driving dialogue. That's fine... to an extent. Those who like to talk have got to share the spotlight with others. To merely declare that you're going to be a spotlight hog does not make it okay to be a spotlight hog. And again, he was not discussing this point with us, he was informing us.

So... This is Your Fantasy (Mary Sue)

Later in the session we looked at art to represent our characters. "I like this one," Braz said, introducing an icon. "He's holding a cigarette. I smoke, so he should smoke, too."

And there it was. Mary Sue. ...Or Mary's male counterpart, Marty Stu.

That seemingly throwaway tiny bit of information was the thread that tied everything together. Braz was set on playing a fantasy version of himself. A version of himself with all of his own habits, except he's a budding crime boss.

Look, there's nothing wrong with defining a fantasy character concept, even if it's based on yourself. It's literally called a fantasy roleplaying game. But it's a collaborative fantasy game. You've got to define a character that fits with the group, in the setting and in the plot, to tell a mutually satisfying shared story. If the rest of the group want to play "We're the good guys" and the GM's story plan assumes we're basically the good guys, your I'm-a-criminal-and-I'm-the-boss persona is in the wrong place. Go play Grand Theft Auto to act out that fantasy.

Where's the GM?

The game master (GM) had being staying out of the conversation among us players. I was of mixed minds about that. On the one hand I appreciated him giving us room to work things out as players. On the other hand I was growing frustrated that he wasn't providing guidance or supporting the idea of fair ground rules. A few times I'd directed questions to him about how challenging character concepts would fit in his setting or storyline. He dodged responsibility, giving vague non-answers like, "Well, there are different ways you can do it. [Full stop.]"

While I was dissatisfied with this Session Zero I was willing to go forward to the next step. Hawk was bothered enough, though, that she was on the verge of quitting. We spoke to the GM about it during a call for another game, when it was just the three of us online at that point.

"I don't know if Braz is going to make it," the GM said. He elaborated (when I asked), admitting that he didn't think Braz's character concept would work. He implied, though didn't commit, that he might even tell Braz certain things aren't okay for the group.

At that point I was reminded of a saying among seasoned travelers: "Don't take an idiot with you when you travel; you can pick one up when you arrive." Why are we bothering to take an idiot with us in our gaming group?

I've written before that I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for a long time. I started with the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic rules, aka the "blue box", in the early 1980s; then bought the Second Basic D&D, aka "magenta box" rules, which expanded with Expert, Companion, and Master sets; then graduated to Advanced D&D. From there I followed along to AD&D Second Edition, then (name change) D&D 3rd Edition, then D&D 3.5.

Why so many versions? Well, understand that the companies behind D&D are book publishers. They make money by selling books. What better way to drive book sales than by putting out whole new versions of the rules every 5-7 years? And that's exactly what they've done. Devoted D&D players buy new books all over again every cycle. Except I hopped off the corporate America treadmill after 3.5. I decided I'd had enough.

Partly my choice to stick with 3.5 was frustration with purchasing and absorbing ever more new systems. Partly it's because 3.5 didn't have anything majorly broken with it that I wanted to fix (at the time). And partly it was because the next version, 4th Edition, frankly sucked. It broke with too much of what had made D&D, well, D&D for 3 decades and introduced rules seemingly more tuned to short-attention-span adolescents weaned on computer games.

Fourth Edition wasn't the end of the line. Now there's 5th Edition. Friends tell me it's a lot closer to the style of D&D 3.x than 4. So I'm trying it out.

Hawk and I bought two of the D&D 5e manuals recently. Our impetus was joining a game with younger players. You see, 3.5e was released in 2003. Seventeen years ago. That means there's an entire generation of D&D players for whom 3.5 has always been old. If we want to expand our gaming circle beyond old-school middle-age players we've got to join up with the present day.

D&D 5th Edition is interesting. It's closer to the 3.5 rules than 4th edition was. It fixes one main problem of 3.5: the system of advancement that makes higher level characters basically untouchable by NPCs and monsters more than a handful of levels lower than them.

I see this in my long term game, where we use 3.5 rules. It's particularly a challenge as the characters have risen to high levels (15-20). Their increasing wealth affords them access to magic items which, when combined with their level based bonuses, make it so that even upper-mid level foes can only hit them on a "natural 20" (a 5% chance of success).

This power imbalance casts the game into a particular style. High level PCs are basically superheroes. Attacks from anyone or anything that's not also a "super" just bounce off. That's not wrong in any absolute sense, it's just a particular theme of play— a theme that may not fit with the way the setting and storylines were conceived at lower levels.

How does 5E do it differently? Two things. First, level based bonuses do not ramp up as quickly. Second, magic items have smaller "pluses", and even the lower pluses are more expensive. Together these changes keep higher level characters from being able simply to ignore lower level foes.

I don't foresee migrating to 5E in my long term game. The move from 2E to 3.0 years ago disrupted things in my game that I didn't originally anticipate. I won't repeat that level of disruption with all the years of development invested into that game. But for new games, particularly with younger players, I could see choosing 5th Edition.

At the same time I'm reluctant even to start a new game with D&D 5. It's several years old at this point, having first been published in 2014. One thing we've learned from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro/Whomever Owns It Now is publishers gonna publish. There's a whole never version of the rules every few years to spur sales of a whole new set of rulebooks. I'm reluctant to get too deeply invested— financially or mentally— in 5E. My Spidey Corporate Profiteering Sense warns me there'll be yet-another all-new rules set published soon.

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."

In my previous journal entry I introduced how roleplaying games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, have been a pastime of mine for many years. I wrote a lead-up to an idea I've been thinking about again just recently, the concept of a Session Zero. I wish I could claim ownership of the idea, or even the term, but alas neither originated with me. Though I did start figuring out the concept of Session Zero on my own, as it addresses a gaping problem in the play of roleplaying games, long before finding that others had already fleshed it out even more than I had. And had coined the catchy term.

Session One & The Breakfast Club Problem

In the old days, a roleplaying game like D&D would start with rolling up characters. A group of players would get together, create characters, and as soon as they could roll them up and put stats to paper the roleplaying would begin. Typically, as a trope, that meant having the characters meet each other for the first time at a tavern and then head off to explore a dungeon wherein there might reside a dragon. Call that Session One.

The problem with starting at Session One is that the players don't always want or expect the same thing out of playing the game. They just get together and go. There's no agreement on how to play. Imagine that while in the game the story is "meet at the tavern, go to the dungeon, kill the dragon and take its treasure", at the table the story is more like The Breakfast Club. Five people who kind of know each other are in the same room for the same purpose but have completely mismatched expectations of what's going to happen.

Two players are motivated to kill the dragon is because it's evil and a threat to good people, one wants to kill it because killing things just seems kinda fun, one wants the dragon's storied hoard of treasure, and the last one wants treasure, too... and is willing to take it from the dragon or steal it from the other players when they're not looking, whichever seems easier. And because this isn't a John Hughes movie there's no happy ending 2 hours later. The players just grow frustrated with each other. Some drop out of the game, and entire friendships may suffer. (I've seen at least two close friendships shattered due to disagreement at the gaming table.)

Session Zero: Get Aligned!

The idea of Session Zero, then, is pretty simple. It's an opportunity for the players to align on what they expect to happen in the game.

One important area of alignment is the group's moral center. What kind of people are we, overall? What's our tolerance for people with different morality? We don't necessarily have to agree 100% but we do have to make sure we're compatible enough with each other and with the scenario the game master (GM) has prepared so we can collaborate in telling an enjoyable story. (At the end of the day that's what a roleplaying game is: collaborative storytelling.)

Another important area for alignment is What do we (players) enjoy? Different people want to get different things out of the game. Some like the sense of adventure, some enjoy the dice-rolling simulation of combat, some like the challenge of portraying an alternate person, some even like games as morality plays. There's no one right answer. But a game in which different people want incompatible things is the wrong answer, because some or even all of the players will be unsatisfied.

Other topics to work out during a good Session Zero include what skills and backgrounds the various characters have (often you want a group that "covers the bases" in terms of certain skill sets), what the style of play is (shoot first and ask questions later?), and the logistics of things like how frequently the group will meet to play, for how long, and what they'll do if 1 player can't make it that session.

Why Was This a New Idea?

The idea of Session Zero didn't exist back in the old days— basically the 1980s and early 90s. Back then it assumed that there was only one motivation for gamers and that all right-thinking players automatically shared it. Does that look preposterous when written out like that? Heck yeah! But that was the essence of what was written about how to bring players together in the context of a game. Only a little of that was written in the rulebooks themselves; the creators of the games thought it was so obvious that it went without mention! Those same creators wrote more at length in early gaming magazines. Alas length did not equal wisdom. The issue remained an ongoing source of woe for gamers everywhere.

In the early 90s I started to figure out for myself that players needed to agree on the style of a game before playing it. I began working with players ahead of the start of the game— i.e., in something like a Session Zero— to gain alignment. The thing was, in my gaming community I was virtually the only person with this idea, so it was slow going. For my players it was at best an unfamiliar concept they needed time to understand. At worst they were hostile to the idea, arguing I was a weak GM who sought to limit their creativity. By the early 00s, thankfully, the concept of a Session Zero had caught on in more places as the term had been coined. It may even have appeared in some rulebooks of the era; certainly by then it appeared in online discussion and blogs.

Update: Subsequent entries about Session Zero:

• The Risk of Skipping Session Zero: Batman & the Joker
• Session Zero Successes & Failures: 5 (more) Examples
• Session Zero & Narrative vs. Meta Gaming