You all meet in a tavern

>You all meet in a tavern

>There are four players in your party

>But this is no ordinary tavern
>This is the local gay BDSM tavern
>You're not sure how you ended up in leather, but you did. Remove all your equipment from your character sheets

>''okay so you guys are travelling down the road together...''
>wait, how did we meet? My character is a cleric of Gruumsh, he wouldn't be caught dead travelling with an elf
>uh I assume you guys just decided to work together lol

The low int Bard puts on the red gag ball as if it's a clown nose.

>itt rejects who've never met anyone in a bar

Does it have to be removed if I was keeping it in my 'other' bag of holding?

I think I'm doing this wrong. I give players plausible reasons to be in the same place and usually need each other's help with something at introduction, but then they never find a reason to give the slightest damn about each other or justify sharing their homes or assisting each other in future adventures. They just travel along because "don't split the party" and remain silent about intrusions and aspects of other characters that ought to bother them. Am I supposed to provide that stuff too? How do I do that without controlling aspects of the character that should be up to the player?

Rolled 12 (1d12)

Your party gathers...

1. meet up after being separately tricked inside an evil stage magician's hat

2. literally gathered by a foraging party of giants looking to garnish their big upcoming feast with some special treats

3. all swallowed by the same enormous whale several years apart

4. summoned as equally distant and last surviving relatives of an eccentric old great-grandmother who left mysterious clues to her vast hidden fortune in her will great-grandmother almost definitely still around, now undead, very bored

5. wake up in a pile after a crazy drug orgy, each still experiencing the effects of a different drug

6. entombed still living as soldiers and civil servants of the recently deceased pharaoh - must escape tomb complex

7. get together while each being hunted by a different mad witch cult who require one of their body parts for some prophesied ritual

8. each summoned by one of the others (then both summoned, then all three summoned, etc) in individual summoning rituals which have gone wrong in a curious way that speaks of sabotage

9. mind-swapped into each other's bodies as part of a mass mind-switch done on two opposing armies by a powerful wizard seeking to enforce peace

10. the minds of ancient adventurers imprisoned inside their equipment take over the bodies of four newbies who pick up the gear, and meet each other embodied for the first time

11. all of the PCs are related to every other PC, but each PC is only aware of one of their relatives in the party

12. each PC is a talented performer in some particular art or craft (engraving, weaving, dancing, oratory, etc) and all are forced to go on the run when the mad prince is so insulted by their performances he sentences them to death

feel free to add more

Eh, there's always gonna be a bit of contrivance when it comes to getting a group together, especially if they're a weird grouping. I don't think it really matters honestly, as long as the rest of the game's good. You can worry too much about these things.

They might be uncomfortable or new or never really tried to really remain in-character, so aren't sure how to bring up those traits or how far to really go in expressing them or creating bonds.

You can ask them how they feel about things, in character. Like "Martok, you've said you hate orcs and yet you travel with Grimgor, an orc from the Black Hills. Why is that? What makes him special? Do you think he changes how you view Orcs?".

It helps if the characters are not just made in a vacuum and before the game even starts people think of reasons as to why they'd work with each other, how they feel about each other, and so forth. For that reason, I tend to avoid "y'all JUST MET" as being a thing. Session 0s are cool just because of this reason.


Keep in mind the party just might not want to deal with such problems and are really more just interested in the gamier/mechanical parts of playing an RPG. If that's the case there isn't too much you can do; different people want different things.

I don't think I've ever played a game where the party has met in a tavern

It'd make sense in a early/mid 1900s setting more than anything else anyway

"You all meet in a speak easy as a police raid begins" would actually be a pretty rad start to an adventure.

>you all play in your basement

>roaring 20s setting with mobsters, prohibition, machine guns and nyaaaaaa

it's so obvious, but I never thought of this and damn it could be great. bootlegging crew dodging coppers and getting bitches

>DM gives us no background for the campaign
>Okay so how do you guys meet
Nigga I don't even know what city I'm in, let alone what I'm doing or who I'm doing it with.

>You are in a tavern. You've been to this bar before, whether it be only once or twice or hundreds of times, you can't recall, and you only now just realized that this place hasn't changed a bit. The bartender has always been cleaning that same cup in the same way, that fat pig of a man in the corner is struggling to light his pipe. There's a band of adventurers splitting a seemingly bottomless pile of cash, with no piles of money getting any larger.
>You've no idea how long you've been in here, what you've been doing, or why you're here, but you know you've been here to long.
>You stand up. You see others rise alongside you.
>Introduce yourselves.

>The PCs are desperately trying to gather money for the rent before their sadistic landlord takes it in other ways

I would totally a Hotline Miami session

But what system would it be under?

>This is the local gay BDSM tavern

No joke I think in one of my old groups my rogue stalked and killed a guy in one of these.

Our DM thought buggery was hilarious for some reason.

Or, they're just assholes and shitty players

This is why you ALWAYS build your characters together in a zero session.

All the bad groups I've been a part of have been because everyone brought in their own shitty special snowflake characters.

In a group like that, every player thinks they're the protagonist.

TLDR make your players make their characters together. If one guy wants to be Notting Pershonale the CN drow assassin you can shut that shit down right there

Im normaly give the players plot device or skills wich the other characters need. E.g. one player is a money broken pilot who needs desperatly the other player, a skilled fighter, to make money. The fighter needs a lift and cant use public transport because hes wanted.

>implying
The leather club is to blocks down, buddy.

>surprise, the entire campaign was an illusion! roll your characters back to level 1.

Needs more JPG, I can still make out his eyebrows.

>you're all meat in a Wyvern

>except muhammad al muhajadin
>he's outside the children's school

>Eh, there's always gonna be a bit of contrivance when it comes to getting a group together

Not neccesarily, most games have some pre-established way to group the party together and some element of the setting that forces them to work together, the sabbat and camarilla forced coteries together for instance, werewolf septs would similarly be organised from multiple clans by the local werewolf autorities, Wraith had people being uncowled and processed by the heirarchy etc... What's funny is that Planescape in theory offers something that could do that, but because it's fighting itself to both be an ur-setting you strap onto existing games AND a setting in its own right you don't see parties being assembled by Sigil's council from the various factions to do a task they all kinda have some investment in and need it done "right" or need it overseen by one of their own.

Meanwhile let's see from those settings I have in the pipeline...
>band of adventurers are shot out of a cannon from a ship floating in the sky sea onto the land far above them, having not spoken much until they all have to strap into the "arrival shell" they're about to launched in.
>group of spec ops arrive in the city that's being used as an "open prison/retirement home" for spec ops types who know too much on the same flight and are picked up at the airport by the same car and briefed on the rules of their "retirement".

Generally speaking D&D is actually super odd in that it's one of the few TTRPGs that doesn't have a ready answer for "why are you guys together?".

This is a really good point the very beginning of the campaign doesn't mean shit. Everthing after is a different story.

Zero sessions are a lot of fun. You can see where characters dovetail into each other.

I had fun with a campaign start that basically amounted to "You've all taken this job from this royal. Why?" One of the characters was forced into it, another needed some political favors, one was a mercenary, one was just lost, and the last couple just needed a boat out of hock. The party was balanced because they were hired as a balanced group and the players talked things out beforehand. I even got some recurring NPCs to torture the party with out of their handlers.

Another fun thing was just having them all stranded in a cave together for their own reasons when the bad guys attacked and the plot forcing them to keep moving. Anyone who tried to leave was forced into rejoining the main group. Except for the that guy that thought he could take the Orcs on his own, across three different characters.

>RELAX, DON'T DO IT, WHEN YOU WANNA GET TO IT!

...

sauce?

>the orgy is interrupted by screams that are distinctly not orgasmic

>you roll perception, you roll diplomacy, you roll use magic device, and you roll escape artist

...

it's actually not porn

13. wake up in a cell after a priest exorcised demons posessing them, then sent to "repent for their spirit's weakness"

No Fuck YOU leather man