First Session

Well, you obviously don't know how to have proper fun.

I think that's fine. It helps that we had It presented as
"Welp, due to some bad circumstances, you don't get to look so good. We "Episode X: Accusation"now"

But we also had a start in a prison, as a band of cellmates
>Oh, we're doing Elder Scrolls now?
>Yes

>Instead, you're drugged and all your equipment is taken away!
Meh, if it's a first session and the equipment isn't anything you really earned, I don't mind going through that as a player.

If things after that are played right, I much more prefer this beginning to the dull tavern thing. You're overreacting.

You're just poorly trying to start shit, user. That's hardly even amusing.

>Good subversion
This cliché is trite and overdone, I'll replace it with something that makes more sense.
>Bad subversion
This cliché is trite and overdone, I'll do exactly the opposite for the sake of being contrarian.

>Good alternative to "you all meet in a tavern"
All of you have been conscripted in the same military unit and are forced to work together.
>Bad alternative to "you all meet in a tavern"
You all meet in a prison. Which is almost the same as all meeting in a tavern except now you have no equipment. Also, starting in a prison is utterly unrelated to the plot lol.

I am guilty of doing this once. Admittedly it was also followed by "and you have had hideous experiments conducted on you" and then gave them interesting mutations and powers. They liked that bit.

>The transport taking you to prison is attacked and crashes into a tavern

>You're characters have been falsely accused of murdering a member of the local nobility, and on a wagon transport to the prison.
>Are you bad enough dudes and dudettes to escape and prove your innocence?

>Instead, you're drugged and all your equipment is taken away!
There's literally nothing wrong with this. Hell, if t's the first session, you kind don't even really *have* equipment anyway -- not until you start playing. Any purchasing you may have done before you started playing is more pre-game planning than anything else. And who gives a shit if they lose starting equipment? Are you so possessive and materialist that you value the shit in your character's backpack more than the role-playing experience? Must the GM always be super careful not to hurt your feelings by taking away what is rightfully yours? Being imprisoned, etc. is a legitimate way to start off a campaign. There have been modules written about that shit (pic related, and it isn't even the start of the campaign). What a bullshit sense of entitlement so many role-gamers seem to have these days.

lost pic

That's the cost of war, sadly. I never want to be the guy who asks himself, "How many soldiers/civilians is this position worth?"

You are freed from a tavern and given a revitalizing cleanse, after which people gift you equipment.

That's the thing of all kinds of leadership. You need to take unpopular decisions and ask yourself whether an end result is worth a certain sacrifice. Air support might kill five villagers, but how many villagers are killed without that air support? Less or more?

It sounds dark, but it requires a certain sense of emotional disconnect from the situation.

>Whatever you do you fall, aren't I a smart GM?

poor myconids

Can't session zero just establish how players were recruited together for work in the first place? Then players build their characters according to that. Woulad make WAY more sense than "Oh look, we all have these characters. time to piece them all together into a party somehow"

>first session
>you all know each other and you got together for a common cause

U G H

I ran the 'you-start-with-no-items' trope for a roll20 game and session 0 where we did chargen I explicitly said "Don't worry about items, your not going to be starting with any'. Afterwards towards the end of the session where everyone is still mulling over their characters I turn my camera off and leave to get food. I come back and what do I see? 3 players are still on roll20 with their cameras up discussing buying equipment. And it was a huge slap in the face because I told them no items and they confirmed what I said and went behind my back to do it anyways. We hadn't even gotten to the first session and players were being little twinks to me.

An osr system was involved in this wasn't it?

Fuck you the tavern is a great start. Especially when something is either happening to, or about to happen to said tavern. Got to get that ball rolling, all of that smoke isn't going to just get itself out of your lungs on its own.

I don't see what the problem is. They can buy all the equipment they want; they just don't get to start with any of it. It shouldn't matter to you one way or the other. The only thing telling them not to buy equipment accomplishes is keeping them from being upset when their equipment gets taken away from them. At this point, it's their own fault if they get upset. You warned them. You did your due diligence. Now if they start whining, you can simply remind them that you told them not to buy equipment and they confirmed what you had said.

No, but they're bad enough to actually murder at least one of the wagon guards.

I'm pretty sure the post you were replying to was sarcastic.

What i fucking hate is when one of gms takes gear to rebalnce the game.

It is always railroaded, strips us all and then throws us back into the wild where you either make a deal with a obvious evil fuck or you wander aimlessly until you do. Fucking gm knows that i have to do two of our players numbers because they are fuckwits as well.

Told him last time the next one of these i will stop hosting sessions and he has been gearing up to another gear wipe.

user, you should read what you just wrote and ask yourself, "Am I That Guy?"

Fine, i will just have to be one.

I have put up with this shit for 15 years and i no longer fucking care.

Dude, it's just stuff. If your character is defined by his equipment, he's not a good character.

We had, like, an entire Iron Man movie about that and everything.

Apropos, has anybody here played Out of the Abyss? Does it start something like the OP's suggestion?

Yea, it's about zero of those things.

It's more "hey, we tried to hit that target, mostly missed and killed a bunch of civies instead."

"So, what? Fuck 'em," replies most of the people in the room, while one or two people might experience some kind of conflict of conscience or moral injury. The leadership cares even less, because they've already done the same thing a dozen times.

You are already so entirely disconnected from the reality of fighting a war either by being literally disconnected and directing missile strikes from hundreds or even thousands of miles away so you experience no great sensation on the matter anyway, or you're actually in the shit and so terrified about making it out alive that you never stop to consider the ramifications of your actions, or you're in the shit and jaded from experience and probably legitimately hate who you are fighting against and want them dead.

Your leadership has either been numbed by living through those same situations (if they are enlisted) or never gave a shit in the first place because they are even more disconnected from the human reality than you are. At a certain level, they don't even see you as people anymore. You're either resources to be used or problems to be solved, because they are so disconnected from you they can't imagine you as anything else (part of the reason they make generals go around and give speeches is to try to counter act this).

And that's all before the tribalism, the decades of propaganda, the vindicated revenge seekers, all the other shit that's going on in your life that distracts, or any of the other ways we are taught to marginalized "the enemies of [YOUR COUNTRY]" and reduce their humanity so fewer people suffer mental disorder afterwards.

No one stopped to think "I don't really want to do this, but it's a necessary evil." No one is that invested, literally no one.

Source: My experience from fighting/supporting operations during two wars

Yes, you are brought as prisoners to the underdark and without equipment need to escape.

I'm running Out of the Abyss right now. It does indeed start with the players having already been captured - though given that they're a bunch of level 1's and the force that would have captured them consists of like a dozen drow mooks, four or five elite drow warriors, a drow cleric, a drow priestess, and twelve quaggoth slaves, there really isn't much point in playing out any theoretical capture scenario anyway - they'll lose.

There is a location within the outpost where they end up where the book specifically mentions that the PC's gear might be stored, so a particularly generous DM can allow them to get their gear back.

I am not a particularly generous DM. I did allow them to find and steal stuff to replace their lost gear, like a spellbook with a few semi-random spells in it for the wizard, but otherwise they had to get all new stuff.

He does it to "rebalance" the game.

He does not rebalance xp, character's abilities, magic or powers. Just the gear.

Really helped make things balanced last game where our dark heresy party had out gear evaporated and the two psykers annihilated enemies while three of use wrestled one guy.

It was even better years ago when my kensia in 3.5, who is literally defined by his weapon had it stolen in a "hollywood" moment with a dc 55 skill save to keep it.

What is your ideal first session user?

What exactly is this guy's idea of balance?

Personally I'm of the opinion that in media res is best res.

My game started with all the players waking up in a crypt with no memory of how they got there, all apparently having been killed in a battle they couldn't remember. They started with no equipment other than candlerods and burial shrouds...am I the GM you all hate?

make characters, decide why they're working together, get some idea of what the world and campaign are going to be like, then a brief bit of play with a short encounter (probably combat, maybe not) and a clue or mystery to think about until next session
if there's going to be bullshit like getting captured or elsewise mercilessly railroaded, let it happen in the second session (or first, if you're going to be pedantic and insist this is a session 0)

Getting right down to business.

>I think you shouldn't really be that attached to your gear.
Except some classes (especially in 5th ed) get royal dicked over by not having their gear. No holy symbols? Good luck trying to heal someone, Cleric. Lost your Thunder Cannon, Artificer? Now you're down way more gold than the rest of the party, not to mention the in game time sink required to make a new one. Just a few examples.

Also - not all games start at 1st level. If my GM said we started at 5th (for example), expected us to have a backstory that included why we had certain items, then pulled something like OP, I'd be miffed too. Really the whole "you lose your equipment thing" comes across (to me) as lazy GMing. On paper it might sound like a good way to get your players to think outside of the box and prevent them from overpowering an encounter with magic items, but in reality it turns into a slog of "How do we get our stuff back GM?"

His balance is gear.

From what another player and I guess, he thinks he does not have to adjust enemies if we have worse quality gear. If something can make its own gear or fight without it, it is over powered unless it is a spell caster.

Monks and soul knives are broken in his mind and get shit on. Mages get special treatment until 10th level where he sees them as a threat and wont stop until they are killed. If you do well in one combat, it is time to up the difficulty or gear wipe.

Thus the cycle of violence continues and will never be broken. Sad, but true. What wars did you fight in, if you don't mind me asking.

I've robbed the party right off the bat a couple times. It's a great way to see how creative players will get, and how well they tolerate the world fucking with them.

If they go full autism over losing their starting gear it's just not going to work out. If the party swordsman can't lower himself to using a makeshift club for a few sessions he's way too uptight to handle any sort of real setback. If the party wizard can't find a way to be useful outside casting magic missile, he's not long for the world anyway.

Dealing with a bad hand is one of the most interesting situations and I don't see why so many people resist it so.

Slice of Life followed by immediate dungeon crawl.

>tfw no spice and wolf rpg
Would probably work with only 1 dm 1-2 players, unless players were willing to play extras/sometimes recurring characters

What about this?

You all just so happen to be in the same Tavern when the Big Bad's Legions of Evil attack the town. You have to unite and work together or die.

The only issue with getting "all your equipment" taken away in the first session is if the GM doesn't:

A) Tell you in advance so you don't waste time on pregame shopping
or
B) Give you a chance to get that stuff back later

It'd have to be a 1 on 1 type deal because every player would want to dick Horo.

Who wouldn't want to? But you're forgetting the possibility of someone playing horo/whatever animal spirit.

>oh no, you all don't meet in a bar
>you meet as you are all slated to be publically executed fot crimes you may or may not have commited.
I did this once. It actually went pretty well.

Letting a player actually control Horo would just dissolve into constant ERP. You'd have to keep her firmly in GM control.

>high fantasy game
>players start in a briefing room, with a magical PowerPoint about their mission
>GM actually prepared a fucking slideshow.
>we're all being treated like operators
>briefing ends and we're shrunk to the size of mice and given to an awakened hawk to be dropped behind enemy lines.
>rings of feather fall just in case.
>there are fucking 1:72 da Vinci tanks 6 squares from my guy with a great sword
>our rogue and wizard have to walk allied artillery onto targets.
>we get CAS options after taking out a battery of Wizards and magic cannons.

Fucking kill me.

Eh. It all depends on how it's done. I'm strongly against a sense of player entitlement where they pitch a fit if any of their precious equipment gets touched, but if a GM repeatedly and clumsily strips people of their equipment, that would get old.

Ryuutama works pretty well, I'd imagine.

Starting in a prison with the first bit of adventure as a breakout sounds pretty great actually.

I absolutely would not mind a session 1 prison break if it was discussed beforehand.

I want to make it my life goal as a GM now, that the party always winds up meeting in a tavern because of some crazy contrivance. You're to blame.

I'd rather be surprised. It makes things more exciting.

My favorite starting session was a trial by fire, fighting in a war. We didn't know each others characters, we all did what we what had to do to survive, our party/squad was given the task of holding a bridge with several NPCs.

Looking back now, it was pretty intense and a great way to kick of a session and a campaign.

DM: "Don't worry guys, you just have to work together to get out of this. You'll get all your gear back afterwards."
Party: "Alright cool mate"

Problem solved

>>Instead, you're drugged and all your equipment is taken away!

LaughingMonkParty.jpg

>Personally I'm of the opinion that in media res is best res.
I like starting in medias res, but some people spazz out about it because you're making assumptions about their character and putting them in situations you didn't play through from the start. They view it as background and want to have the sole say in determining their character's background. I think that's a ridiculous position, but I remember at least one bitterly contested thread here on Veeky Forums a ways back where it was like 50/50 arguing in either direction, from what I recall.

>DM: "Don't worry guys, you just have to work together to get out of this. You'll get all your gear back afterwards."
Fuck even that. The players don't have some divine right to their equipment, and the GM isn't obligated to twist things around just so they always get their original shit back. Shit should unfold logically, and if the situation is such that it makes more sense that they wouldn't get their stuff back, well, then that's a setback they'll have to live with.

I don't mind if a GM put me in an unexpected situation unless he sperg out when I say "actually, my character totally wouldn't do that, it's unthinkable"
My experience is that the majority of GM who put players in unexpected situation want to control the character and give back control when they want.
That doesn't make me want to play with them.

If you're in a situation where you have to point out what your character would not do, that's not "an unexpected situation", that's "my GM keeps telling me what my character does". They are entirely different concepts.

An idea: Out of the Abyss, but instead of each player having a single character sheet, they share a big pile of them, representing a mass jailbreak, and the players vote on what the crowd of escapees should do. Any who escape become a pool of first-level characters they can use on future adventures, if they don't want to use their own. Maybe the ones who escape can have some small advantages, too, like extra gold or something.

>I don't mind if a GM put me in an unexpected situation unless he sperg out when I say "actually, my character totally wouldn't do that, it's unthinkable"
>My experience is that the majority of GM who put players in unexpected situation want to control the character and give back control when they want.
That's not been my experience, unless the player is super picky about what his character would do, anyway (and those are the same sorts of players who refuse to cooperate with the rest of their party and shit like that because "that's what my character would do"). Usually when a GM is setting up a scenario that starts in the middle of things, they aren't being super specific. They aren't playing people's characters for them blow-by-blow.

The party has been ambushed while guarding a caravan (if you can't justify your adventurer character ever being in a situation to guard a caravan, you should probably make up a new character). The party has been captured by slavers (I don't even know what the argument against this would be -- my character would never be captured by slavers?). And so on.

Players have an obligation to try to cooperate to create for a successful adventure. That doesn't mean smiling while their characters do stupid, unreasonable shit that's horribly out of character, but it does mean trying to find a justification to go along with things. In the cases where a GM puts you in a situation where this is impossible, I find it's best to call a time-out and say something along the lines of "I'm having difficulty seeing how my character would go along with this. Could you help me go through this and come up with something that works, or maybe tweak things a little bit so that things click into place better for him?" Of course, if these sorts of problems are a repeated occurrence for you (and not the other players), you may have failed in your task of creating a character whose personality is conducive to the promotion of a good campaign.

For some GM, it's close.
"You're in a prison because you murdered some guy in the street!"
"Well, ACTUALLY, I'm a lawful good paladin and even if he assaulted me I would have only knocked him out?"
"NO"
Don't forget that often players are on guard because they met very, very bad GM

those fungal bastards knew where the line was, and they stilled raised interest rates

Or you feel a mixture of apathy and satisfaction because even though they're nominally civilians, those goatfuckers were hiding weapons and ammo and were sheltering insurgents who killed your buddy, so fuck em

You all go to the tavern, but it's a prison in disguise, someone put a price on your heads.

Did they wake up as undead?

I think he has kinda a point. I understand OPs starting scenario but if GM regularly does equipment wip because of messing up the balance and generally eradicates player's sense of satisfaction and progress for the hell of it in already a strongly railroaded campaign, it can be treated as a giant "fuck you" even if more likely - it's just GM who sucks at pacing the story and properly scaling the loot vs challenges.

>Monk and Soul Knives are overpowered
>Can't handle the worst of the worst classes

Your GM is such an idiot for thinking this. He'll probably get a heart attack if the party gets even on-par gear for their level, or if the Cleric/Wizard buffs up the party.

Not necessarily. If you want to make it a romance-heavy thing then yeah, likely a couple of players and a GM would be tops but if you're interested more in a comfy trading with some adventure and folklore overtones, you can as well be a party of traders starting their own business or managing a few businesses that are different steps in manufacture or some other way of processing of particular goods.

>I want to run spec ops game, what do?
>just refluff pathfinder

You must be wonderful at communicating with people.

I'm fine. I just don't game with babies.

I'm kind of with him, actually. as long as the DM respects that some players get attached to their gear, and they're not much worse off afterwards, then it's not the worst way to introduce roleplay factors into a game.

A campaign I'm in right now has a bit of a problem with this actually. The GM encouraged us to make characters with fleshed-out personalities and all that, except we didn't really know anything about what the campaign would entail and other than two players who worked together on their characters (heirs of rival merchant families), there isn't a lot of reason for our characters to be together or to go out on the quests they have.

The first plot hook worked fine for getting us together since it was a coming of age ceremony, but after that it's always been sluggish moving to the next quest. Basically all of us ended up making characters that don't have much reason to leave the village other than being PCs.

This reminds me of a start up plot that a session had, basically we woke up in a prison for reasons unknown to us, I broke out of my chains first by rolling a nat 20 acrobatics check, before removing the strap covering one of my teammates mouth, no longer silenced he proceded to get himself and the last of the three out of chains, at which point the third, a barbarian, tried to get information from a now horrified guard, and rolled another nat 20, this time on indimitation, what we learned was that we were locked up for "henious crimes" and were supposedly extremely dangerous, one startup dungeon later, we were at the chamber of the prison owner, after defeating a glass demon that burst out the stained windows, and defeating him in fencing, we discovered that HE commited the crimes and blamed us, we killed him shortly after.

recent starts i used

first level party
>on the road to their destination: having all been hired or called upon to do a favor
>a simply bodyguard gig taking supplies from one town to another

high level party
>let players decide if they're old friends or just met
>old friends
>start them off just after they set up camp, their destination on the horizon
>they are nearing a infamous dangerous place
>they leave a record of who they are in a small tome to leave at their campsite as a record
>reading their entries allowed as they write it for an introduction to eachothers characters

aloud*

fuck my fingers

My DM though so, too. We lost half the party murdering a CR7 warden and burning the place to the ground. The remaining party members jumped to level 3 and our DMs been giving us shit since.

That really depends on the system and DM style at hand, more than anything. Take DnD, where your equipment is an important part of your ability to do anything. No spellbook or holy symbol means no magic, a thief without lockpicks is up the river, and not having your +1 sword means good luck hurting anything even remotely magical.

That said, I have a fun group, using a generic system an old GM made, wherein being deprived of equipment isn't a character killer and leads to some fun situations as we think around it.

You deserve the stupid shit you get into if you lack the critical thinking skills to avoid situations like this and the people that cause them.

But go ahead, blame everyone else for your own idiocy.

>Monk party
>The bandits, pitying you, give you magic items

>gm pulls this with my paladin and the team cleric
>in town that would make the word sleeze feel insulted for being mentioned in relation to the city
>both of us are out healing the sick and infirm because we're both the party healers with nothing better to do
>turns out the guy we were healing, after finding him in the gutter bleeding out several times, was actually murdering people!
>except it's not shocking at all because it was pretty fucking obvious seeing as he's proclaimed several times he likes to FUCK with Paladins
>the cleric kills him after this guy mentioned he was going to kill children
>We honestly both feel terrible about it but feel we've at least done some good removing this evil from the world
>gm keeps trying to hold it over our heads like it was some master ruse
>just ignore it and continue to smite evil
Christ almighty I'm enjoying playing a paladin but I swaer it's like every gm thinks they come up with masterful shakeups of the orc baby situation.

>Seek shelter
>Drawn by a haunting voice, we come to the elfsong tavern.
>It is a small place, filled with a oddly assortment of patrons... and grizzly trophies.
>There the haunting voice is all around you and the patrons are silent as the song washes over them. All seemed lost to its call...

Taverns are great

>lack of critical thinking to avoid situation

Unless your talking about not playing D&D. How can you avoid that if the GM starts you in it.

Our last party met in an IHOP

Are you still monitoring this thread? I'd really like to know what your rank, length of service, and MOS were.