Picture it: You’re getting ready to start a new campaign, the GM has given you a 2-3 sentence “teaser” description, and you know what level your character is expected to start at. You’re at home, by yourself, Players Handbook open, diligently following the instructions in Chapter 2 (pp. 33-47) to fill out your paper character sheet.
Alright, I know I’ve already lost most of you: the 2014 PHB never explains how to complete a character sheet, no one has read the '24 PHB, everything is done on D&D Beyond, and paper is for the sort of weirdos that have Mastodon accounts. Let’s pretend we’re in a more civilized age and adapt our thinking to align the hypothetical to our actual process.
Having completed all the tax-filing fun of tallying HP totals, figuring out how many spells a 5th level Illusionist wizard should know (please help: I think it’s 17), and recording starting inventory, it’s finally time for the good part. You break out your favorite composition notebook - it gets more use now than during that class - and lovingly trace the arc of the rainbow-ribbon swirling through star-spangled space around the smiling unicorn (it’s an alicorn, damnit!). You pour your heart out and, eighteen pages later, you’re ready to go - you have the perfect character backstory, embroidered with all the minute detail of a memoir, festooned with plot hooks for the GM to grab and gaily dance maypole-style all the way to a fully-realized conclusion in 9-10 years. You took the Noble background, so you sent the GM your detailed notes on the aristocratic customs and families you invented, as well as you backstory novella.
Except…
Except the GM intended this campaign to run for only 6 months. The four other people in the party all did the same thing. One of them reads the same fiction as you cribbed the same “orphan of destiny” hook you lifted from your favorite book, but there can be only one. The setting is a wilderness frontier, making it difficult to weave in the party’s three “wealthy urbanite” backgrounds, not least of all because they’re each from a different city improbably far from the campaign’s action. Perhaps worst of all, everyone chose to play one of three arcane spellcaster classes and, shamefully, none of them were Bard.
This could all have been avoided with One Simple Trick. Unlike clickbait articles, this is one that “they” really, really want you to know about: Talk to Each Other.
You’re all about to sit down together for several months worth of game sessions. Players and character are going to be working together through all of that time, so why not get together ahead of that first game and collaboratively author those characters?
That’s not a rhetorical question - I’m earnestly curious why we tend to create our characters in isolation from one another rather than in session together. Often that’s called a Session Zero, a time before a campaign or adventure begins to set expectations and establish boundaries. It often also serves as a time for the players to step into a “writers’ room” and develop character ideas that align with and accentuate each other.
Surprisingly, the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide offers worthwhile guidance (pp. 137-139) on key topics to consider and discuss during this session. Overall, the new version of that manual is greatly improved over its prior edition: it actually details aspects of running the game, not just authoring your own content for it.
The actual structure of a “Session Zero” (or whatever you choose to call it) is up to you. There are some standalone products designed to guide groups through the process. The session itself can be as formal or as casual as you’d like it to be, but my own advice is to avoid overthinking it. If you need an hour of preparation to sit for a Session Zero, you’re overthinking. Here are some options from my own experience:
- Guided interview. The GM asks the other players open-ended, exploratory questions to help them develop their own character and the relationships they have with other party members.
- An RP-only play session. Leave the dice in their bags, we’re not intending to make D20 Tests here. The idea is for players to express their character ideas first, reacting to in-game social stimuli, and pay attention to how the character handles situations in order to record their tendencies afterward.
- Group build. Players “build out loud” as they construct a shared - or connecting - history for their characters while the GM acts as a moderator, clarifying important aspects of the intended campaign.
- Pre-gen draft. This could be a great option for new-to-the-game players, and it’s the approach most Starter Set products take. Players choose from a pool of pre-generated characters and backgrounds, sharing with each other things the other characters might know about.
Remember that this is a game and, like a lot of things, it’s a lot more fun with other people. We can super-charge that fun by working together from the very start, co-authoring the characters we toss into the adventure we intend to write together.