Prepping Plots, Part 3: Enter the Players

So you've gone ahead and sketched out a rough outline of where you want your campaign to go. Now all that's left is the most important ingredient: getting your players on board! In this installment of Prepping Plots, we're going to go over the two important parts of player onboarding: the Player's Guide, and Session Zero, and what kind of notes you should be taking along the way. 

Good God that is an unflattering haircut

The Player's Guide

A lot of my inspiration for what a good Player's Guide looks comes once again from Paizo. These things are comprehensive, offering recommendations for classes, subclasses, archetypes, skills, and so on, as well as providing a host of unique traits your characters. Fortunately, as a GM playing with a crowd of three to six instead of making products for an audience of thousands, we don't need to go that far-comprehensive information is only a Discord message or text away. 

And that's good, because the player's guide should be short and to the point. There is plenty of time to get people involved in lore later on if they're interested, but right now we're going to be much more about sizzle than steak. It should include the following:

• What's the basic gist of what you're going to be doing? Is this a nautical pirate thing, Conan vs. the Martians, a riff on Der Ring Des Nibelungen except you're all gnomes? Explain the high concept if you have one.
• Are there any special houserules at play? For instance, when playing 5th Edition I like to give everyone extra hitpoints at first level because I'm a Fourth Edition fangirl I think it gives me room to make more interesting encounters.
• What's the basic setting? For example, to take the example of my home campaign set in the Elsir Vale, "This is a frontier region along the silk road between two much more developed parts of the world. There was a Dwarven kingdom, then a human kingdom, and now lots of small lords. Twenty years ago there was a big war with hobgoblins called the Goblinblood Wars."
• What buy-in do you need from the players? Are they all from the same village or crew, or can they be total strangers? For my home game, I said "Y'all can't be goblins, and your character needs a reason to be at the Lord of Brindol's wedding."
• If your game has classes like the Ranger, who have Favored Enemies, you might want to say "We'll be fighting a lot of humans and goblins in these adventures." Then you either gotta commit to that or, if you decide fighting goblins and humans sucks ass, give the Ranger a chance to switch out their Favored Enemy types. 

Session Zero

So you've gotten together your group of friends and you're all sitting down to make characters and answer questions. If you're playing a game like modern Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of that time is going to be spent with players making mechanical decisions by themselves (hope you have enough Player's Handbooks!), which gives you time to make notes and ask questions! Questions like:

• What is your name?
• What is your quest?
• What is your favorite color? 

And what, Sir Knight, is your mother's maiden name?

I jest, but only slightly. Asking probing questions like this is a great way to help players flesh out their characters a bit before play starts, and writing down the answers will help give you stuff to add to future session prep. Think like Solid Snake; every answer is an opportunity for more questions. For example, while talking to my players this past Saturday, I found out a few things:

• Our Halfling Wizard got into necromancy when two of his sisters died, and he has them in cold storage somewhere like Walt Disney under the Matterhorn, so I should throw in some necromancy stuff into the adventures I'm running.
• Our Tiefling Fighter was raised by a group of missionaries somewhere on the frontier, and is looking for her former mentor, the swordmaster Jordathan. 
• The Wizard's player made an offhand joke about our fighter (raised in a temple) and our Aasimar Cleric (raised on the street) being switched at birth, and I think that could be a fun and silly little subplot to do.

Asking these kinds of questions ("Is this the first time you've killed someone?" is one of my favorites) isn't new, obviously. Narrative focused games have been doing this for decades, and they can often have huge knock-on effects that affect the campaign. Because your rough outline is a rough outline, you have a lot of room in order to insert stuff that the players want to see. 

This is part of why I do Stars and Wishes at the end of each session: the easiest way to figure out what your players would like to see is to ask them. 

Conclusion

Once the characters are made, you get out of what I call "The Schrodinger Zone." The story has its Destined Heroes, which enables you to spend a lot more time figuring out what their opposition and exploits are going to look like without any work being wasted. Next time on Prepping Plots, we'll see how a session can be structured such that no one feels like their agency is being trampled over, through the importance of choosing the right connective tissues!