Players show up at the first session

This is where you should politely prompt your players and work with them to come up with something, while explaining the difficulties you'd have doing it all yourself. Adult communication, sonny jim.

b8

This is actually easier to do than more specific stuff, for me at least. The OP just sounded like "I'm not cut out to be a GM."

I had one player give me all sorts of leads as to his motivation and backstory, all very specific but not wordy. I spent like 4 hours on that part alone. Granted, it played into everyone's experience when they visited his homeland, but it was SO MUCH MORE work than just assembling some random Guild members. I had to create like a dozen merchant houses from scratch. After like 10 levels there he straight up admitted that he had no intention of going there and it was just something "interesting" he put in his backstory. His character was barely viable and he expected to just die.

In most cases the problem is "the character creation process in the manual encourages players to come up with some backstory elements and provides vague concepts that they're supposed to develop but they don't bother"

THIS
IS WHY
WE
HAVE
SESSION 0
MAKE THE WORLD
AND THEN HAVE EVERYONE COME UP WITH CHARACTERS AT THE SAME TIME
NOT THAT HARD

That's a hella shallow world if you came up with it in a handful of hours.

>Please read my unpublished novel

>world
The point is that the players are making 3-6 characters at the same time. God forbid you try to read a poem if you can't even figure that shit out.

Really because that sure as fuck wasn't what was said.
>Please have a poorly thought out and shallow world because I can't understand thinking about things in depth.
Not my fault you think the only options are
>Pffft whatever fuck it
>and
>Here's a triple digit page info dump you need to know in order to play.
Do you think you can't play a pre-existing setting without having first read all of its defining literature? You fucking sped.

You're assuming your players WANT backstories weaved into your world.

Agreed. I think players forget that it's their job to "GM" their own characters, in a way. What I mean by that is that a player should bring a reasonably thought-out and well motivated character and together with the GM, fill in the gaps.
>Step One: Players and GM talk about what kind of game would be enjoyable for everyone. Yes, the GM should be having fun, too.
>Step Two: While the GM works on the setting, the Players work on their characters.
>Step Three: Sit down and talk about the setting, characters and story. Everyone should be willing to make appropriate changes and compromise.
>Step Four: Now you can play.

So you want people with no goals? Then why the fuck are they willing to leave home for your adventure? Are you going to hook them in completely in session 1 with some unifying quest? How will you guarantee this quest appeals to everyone? Even in lotr the characters had some personal shit in addition to the overall 'get ring 2 mordor' quest.

It's their job to say "so my dad went missing and I want to find him, they say he was taken by some cult." It's your job to have that cult be supplying slaves to your bbeg's mcguffin mines, so that when they investigate the mines they don't find "random miner npc who tells them about stuff," they find pc's dad and HE tells them stuff.

I try to make backstories with 3 side characters who can work for whatever the DM might want to use them for. For example my character was being investigated by an inspector of the city guard in his backstory. When there was a plague going around we spoke to some guards and the inspector was among them. It wasn't something deep, just a minor use of a character.

I see side characters that are mentioned in backstory as a tool for the DM to use to make the players more involved. It is up to the DM if they want to use them or not.

This is the way to do it.

Backstory should do a few things.

1- give us the jist of who the pc is, both for the dm and the player who is actively figuring that out at this point. Alternatively, who they *were* and who they *became* after...

2- important events in pc's life! If it matters a lot it should be briefly mentioned. Is pc married? Is pc's family dead? How did pc come by these abilities he has?

3- set up any goals, either minor or major. 'ever since then pc always wanted to save up enough money to open up a store of his own,' 'now pc wants to find the guy who killed wife and get back her necklace,' 'pc really hates orcs.'

If a player really wants something big (to be the son of the king, to have the bbeg kill his family) then he should swing that by the dm before carving it in stone. Ideally a player should try to be ambiguous so that the dm can work within the sandbox of their backstory to tie things to the campaign as he sees fit.

Recently I played a game where all we knew was there had been two countries and a long time ago god destroyed the other one. SO my character's backstory was that he had found a seed for a weird plant, grew it, and the flower game him a geas to go to the destroyed country and plant it there. The dm was like.... but it was destroyed? I said yea, the plant might not know that. My character is going to try to go there if he can, but if it's actually destroyed or never existed or whatever that's totally fine. DM was fine with it and of course the other country did still exist. He wound up making the seed spawn an evil demon who had been trapped in it. Then we had to stop that guy. A+

One of them is looking for a loved one.
The other is looking for that same person, in order to kill them.

mfw the frogposter patrol missed this guy

My players typically can't come up with backstories on their own. I usually have to start each new campaign with a "prologue" where I walk them through an earlier point in their lives.

I don't actually mind this. Once I've essentially made up their background and motivations for them they dive into it full force. It also makes coming up with plot hooks easier and best of all more personal. When I work with players, I come up with far more interesting worldbuilding than I could if I just did it all by myself.

I think what OP is saying is that the players don't specify that it's their dad, just that they're looking for someone and that he doesn't feel it should be his job as DM to come up with who or why that is. OP, for the record, is completely correct. You don't make a character and leave their motivations up to someone else, it's your character.

This is why you involve the players in setting creation.

Wait what the fuck is the problem?

You don't need a world.

You need a setting to play a fucking game in. With other people.

>spending more than an hour making a world

I laugh at you. You are like a child in the mother's shoes.

They're looking for each other, they just don't know it yet.

>i have to create and remember characters and ties that you didn't even care to come up with
Oh no. A DM has to come up with an NPC. How horrible. Ooooooh noooo.

They gave you the Dark Souls of DMing, and you failed. You absolute casual.

>being enough of a simpleton to be satisfied with a shitty inconsistent and poorly thought out setting
????

Frog and toad are pretty solid children's characters.
The art actually has some effort put into it and doesn't make me want to start spewing insults at the OP. As a frogposter basher, there's nothing wrong with this OP.

You can definitely make a world in a handful of hours. It'll be shallow at the time, but all you need to do is have the outline of the major players and one major city.

You can flesh it out from there as needed, as long as you can agree with the players where they will be going for the next session so you can turn the sketch into a scene and story.

>Thinking that your nightly masturbations on "muh world" make for a more consistent setting than what the party came up with in session 0

People who spend more than a few hours on setting design are either still in school or autistic manchildren.

say yes or roll. what the fuck is your problem? you are a gm and you dont like coming up with background and stories? man the fuck up or be a pc

>HERE IS DUNGEON. EXPLORE. TRY NOT DIE.
honestly, who gives a fuck about a character's backstory? If it didn't happen at the table, it isn't 'real'; levels 1-3 /are/ your backstory, the stuff before you became an adventurer is irrelevant.
>tldr: angry grog with mighty neckbeard.

>players show up at the first session
>two out of four have a 'looking for someone' motivation that I'm expected to fulfill by adding a bunch of NPCs they've written that barely fit the setting and will dominate the story

fucking why, i don't want to deal with that shit, i have the rest of the fucking game and half the table to cater to as well with a well rounded game
i've seen this in other groups, why do players tend to make backstories that end up as extra weight on the gm's shoulders
it's not my job, or anyone's, to fulfill your character's goal if it means that i have to create and remember characters and ties that you wrote into the setting uninvited

As much as I hate to say it this is kinda true.

The most important thing for setting immersion is it feels lived-in. Like real people populate it and the players would actually want to explore this world. When you bog down the observer with pointless bullshit it takes him out of the world. Obviously who's king is important in a larger sense but what does that really mean for the players? So many worldbuilders are wannabe novelists yet they don't understand the most important rule of fiction writing: don't waste the reader's time.

More than that, when you frontload the entire setting history and world politics then you cheat players out of discovery. Better to spend a little bit of time establishing a simple world to hook your players and expand it over time.

Shut the fuck up you pretentious asshole

There is an important difference between creating a world and bogging people down in the world.

It's a cliche, but a setting needs to be 'fit for purpose'. It needs to hook the players and keep both them and the DM reasonably entertained during the time they spend either prepping or playing the game.

If the DM and the players are not on the same wavelength about how much fictional history homework is going to be required, that's something you need to discuss beforehand. If you don't, you're setting either the DM or the players up for disappointment.

RPGs are different things to different people, but I'm fairly sure no one thinks they should be disappointing experiences.

We *JUST* had this thread.
People like awkward shirty improve theatre more than they like Swords & Sorcery.
Go back to your blogosphere.

>If it didn't happen at the table, it isn't 'real'

Fuck you

On the other hand, having notes on who the local royalty are could be extremely useful as a talking point for some NPC or other. Of course you don't want to bog down the players with a whole bunch of minutiae, but if you want the setting to feel "lived in" that's how you have to do it.

Is this a 'rate my backstory' thread? Here's one for my last Warhammer Fantasy game, a peasant

Alex (he has no surname) is son of a Sheperd, his name is Mark and a bowmaker who is named Sora: Alex is one of the middle born children, meaning he has two older siblings- the oldest being his brother Zoss and the secondborn Ella. His youngest sister is called Amelia and is about thirteen years old. Amongst his family, he gets along very well with Amelia and definitely trusts Mark the most. He loves his mother Sora a lot, too, but she passed away from illness when Alex was fourteen, meaning Ella and Amelia wound up taking over the household: at least Ella did, Amelia was much more interested in keeping up with Alex and getting into trouble. So, while Alex helped Mark with the herd most days, Zoss would continue making bows occasionally helped by his brother and Ella would run the house and help Zoss too. Amelia would help where needed or try to at least.

Since before Alex was born, Mark had this tattoo of an axe on his shoulder: saving as much money as he could, Alex one day set off to the town a couple of miles away from here with his father, to get the very same tattoo. His whole family, including his deceased mother have the same tattoo on their shoulder, all made by the same nosy old man who has been a friend of Mark since ancient days apparently. This old man, Alex learned, was an uncle of his father and taught the boy a little bit about gambling, to the chagrin of Mark.

(cont.)

Yes, but you don't need to have all of it written down before.

A bit of gambling aside, Alex is a good kid, if supersticious as most peasants: in fact, after a hedge wizard passed through the village, he noticed that Ella had lost the necklace of silver with a cute flying sparrow depicted on. Of course, Alex' sister was shaken that the necklace had vanished and the young man decided to get his mother's heirloom back from the "thieving cunt" that had stolen it: he would pursue the wizard, who had been seen taking off to the town the day before and retrieve the necklace one way or another.

>Spending any time on a setting is bad, because some people who world build are bad at it.
Yeah, ok, great point.
Here's the thing user. Since you're so into the "just fuck it" style of giving a shit. Having a good idea of your world as a gm is one of the best tools you can have for improv. You don't need to dump it all on your players, but since you have everything you're going to give them all a much better summary.
Players also have plenty of questions. If you have a fleshed out world, guess what. You don't need to wing it when they do so. Even if you don't have have an answer in your head/notes, you can thanks to your general understanding of your own setting, snap one out that would fit, much easier.

More prep makes for a better game in the hands of a gm that isn't immediately assumed to be a piece of shit. Because if assuming that the gm is a piece of shit that would take their prep and rattle it all off in an info dump is the core of your argument about being prepared, guess what? That gm is also going to be shit at making shit up as they go. Because they're a shit gm.

Wrong.
All the work that doesn't reach the table is wasted work. So, you either have a lot of free time, or you care more about your fantasy special place than your real life.
Plus, input from the players makes for better games, because they are more invested, informed on the things they are going to meet, and you all know what direction the game is taking.

Remember Schrödinger and Checkov

Until you look, the bandits could be there or they can not be there: depends on what the players do.
Also, if you put detail into something, have that thing become relevant later. (Otherwise you run into the problem known as Red Herring)

>All the work that doesn't reach the table is wasted work.
Completely wrong. First, doing prep work doesn't mean you can't take player feedback. That's called being inflexible, not being prepared.
Secondly, we're on Veeky Forums right now. We're both already wasting some amount of our own time.
Thirdly, you're also using the assumption that you either spend the bare minimum amount of time on a setting, or far far too much because you're an idiot. I walk to work, some people take the bus or commute. That's an hour a day worth of thinly time right there, maybe more maybe less.
Finally, I find it pretty funny that you're dissing a creative hobby on a board about discussing that very same hobby. Here's the thing though. If an artist doesn't show people their sketch book, and all they see is the final painting. Are all of the sketches wasted? Great analogy for this. No because those sketches prepared the artist for the painting, and without them it would be worse off. And secondly no, because in a few years they'll be able to sell that sketchbook off for a quick buck (you can always reuse and refit unused content user).

>players show up with backstories I don't want
>I feel obligated to cater to them now

This is why you hold a session zero. It clears up most of this stuff, gives you time to have a dialogue about it, think things through, even reject some stuff outright. It also helps clue your players in to what kind of game you have in mind, so they can do some self-selection.

It's like, if you plan on spending hours every week (or once a month) with these characters, world, and backstories, then it's worth spending some time to make sure they're actually what you all wanted instead of praying that you all read each others' minds beforehand and soldiering through stuff you never wanted to deal with.

I take any game without a "session 0" as a very bad sign.

>player gives me his backstory
>he has a small paragraph of stuff written for his family
>I expand on what he wrote to make sure my vision of them align with his
>put the 4 of them in as NPCs (and don't kill any of them)
>one of them ends up helping the party since he's the leader of a street gang, OoC they love the dude IC they hate him cause he's just a dick
working with players makes stuff better

That's what you get for playing plot railroad games.

I'm not dissing a creative hobby. I'm dissing your way to do it.

The problem about tabletop roleplaying being a creative hobby is that most people are not even close to being creative. Shitty backstory that no one will ever read is wasted work in the context of playing a game and the no. 1 point of RPGs is still playing a game.

Tabletop roleplaying games are first and foremost games, creative authorship for things like setting and backstory play second fiddle.

A) I'm talking about gm prepwork not player prep.
B) Even if it's shity and not used, that doesn't mean the player got nothing out of doing it, they got less, but noting is dishonest and discounts entire player types shittiness notwithstanding.
C) I don't even know why you think the games are games thing has any part in this. I'll even agree with you on that point. It has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. But I agree.
Try playing a game that is pure mechanics and tell me how that works out, though.

>Try playing a game that is pure mechanics and tell me how that works out, though.
I'm not saying games should be only mechanics and no fluff. Just that people shouldn't try to shoehorn in their boring fanfiction or world description that doesn't interest anyone just because "that's what RPGs are".

For the most part something simple like "I used to be a potato farmer but now I'm a fighter and I hit monsters with a sword" is more than enough to get a game going. After that, the character will develop through gameplay that is directly tied into the game instead of irrelevant fanfiction pre-written by the player.

This is also true for the GM's part. Having very detailed histories and fiction for every possible place and person in the world is actually detrimental to the game. Mostly because players don't really care about that stuff. Only the apparent things, what their characters can feel, hear and see, are relevant. Information dumps suppress player choice.

I legitimately do not know why you've found the need to point any of this out.

Because it's not obvious to many people in the RPG hobby.

Why, exactly?
I've always only heard it used as a shorthand for "let's chill for a couple hours and hash out characters".

Not him, but it means the group is far more likely to have mismatched expectations, out-of-place characters, a game idea not lining up with what people wanted, lack of setting knowledge, backstories not fitting the campaign world, PCs antagonizing one another, and other preventable issues.

Inability to communicate is a bad sign for any player or gm, user. Session 0 has nothing to do with it. If anything the way you describe things, session 0 seems more like mandatory tard wrangling.

Session 0 just makes sure everyone is on the same page before the game starts, rather than trying to work things out after the game has already started.

While you can obviously work things out after the game is already going, but it's just easier to spend a bit of time to do it early.

I also feel it's of immense help if you are trying a new ruleset or a totally new/different setting than what the players are used to.

>inability to communicate
Session zero is, among other things, an event to facilitate communication. Things can go okay without one, but it's considered a best practice. I've had great experiences with them, and found that it's an opportunity to smooth out a lot of potential issues in advance.

Or, now hear me out here. You can talk about the game at literally any point before session 1, with the players. You're acting like talking to people can only be done properly if it's structured and formalized, and that's retarded.

>they're unsure of who the person actually is
Halfway through the campaign, they realize after expositing enough that they were looking for eachother all along

Holy fuck it took me two whole seconds to think of that.

>waaah i just want to be a referee don't make me use my imagination reeee

>You're acting like talking to people can only be done properly if it's structured and formalized

That's not what we're saying. If you can reliably smooth out all issues and make everything happen, that's great whether you call it "session 0" or "just talk to people" or what have you. The event we're talking about is just one way to make that happen.

I don't think I implied that. The post you quoted says nothing about structure or form of session 0

It's just the most common approach to have an actual session where you discuss about the setting and people's expectations, then everyone rolls characters which fit the setting and the group.
However that's by no means the only way to hold a session 0, nor have i ever implied that it would be.

Oh so the word session is just whatever you feel like. Got it.

>He doesn't do group creation

Keep netdecking, pathfag.

>Trying this hard to bait

Shame.

>If I accuse someone else of trying too hard, it will disguise how hard I'm trying.
Aren't you a clever boy.
You not so much.

Session 0 is just a shorthand term to describe discussion that is recommended to be had so everyone is on the same page prior the game starting + group creation...but just saying Session 0 is much easier.

No need to get so buttblasted about it.

Yes, it IS your job. It is explicitly your job. It is not solely your job, but it is your job. If character arcs are getting in the way of "your story", YOU HAVE NO GAME. If you can't find a way in 3 fucking seconds to fit two characters into your story, you shouldn't be DMing.

For one, if they leave it up to you, they get what they fucking get. Have some fun with it. If that's too much effort for you, you shouldn't be DMing.

When I write, I make easily half of my content just out of what I know about what kind of content the players and their characters are looking for, with varying degrees of relevance to the main thread. You should be fitting your content into their characters, not the other way around.

Tell ya what, give me a quick rundown on the campaign and characters and I'll do it for you right here and now.

Are you trying to fucking gaslight me or something? Like I can't reread old posts?

>You don't need a session 0, you can just talk to people
>Nah you need a session 0
>Fuck you
>Relax man, session 0 is just a code word for talking to people
Fuck off.

>players give gm chart blanche motivation so he may integrate them into story at no effort
>gm can't use it
git gud pal

I'll never understand why Veeky Forums get so autistically angry at, like, term usage.

Really, with how deeply ingrained the 'badwrongfun' meme has become on this board I'm shocked the lfg threads pulled themselves out of a spiral a couple years back because who would WANT to play with anyone that bitches this hard about this much stuff.

see
The VERY first person you replied to said "session 0 is just shorthand".

The way I run games, I give a short pitch and a rules rundown ahead of time, then I gather the players and we flesh out the setting together. There are games, such as Fate, that are built around that assumption, but I find that some of those concepts work well in more or less every situation. This saves me a ton of work, makes all players invested in the setting, tells me what they want to be the game about, and makes me enjoy the game more because I get to be surprised too.
We usually manage to get character creation in there too, allowing us to work on the party as a whole. Again, there are tons of games built with this assumption, and it's good form to bind the characters to one another the same way.
Call this session 0 or whatever, but it works.

>Inb4 ur game is shit
I know user, we're all on Veeky Forums. But I have a game and I enjoy it, can you say the same?

Seriously why are you so mad about this?

You seem to agree with the base premise of session 0, which is to simply talk with your players before hand, yet you are for some strange reason getting super angry about the term "Session 0", it's frankly bizarre.

You do you user, whether you call it session 0 or not, does not matter.

I don't give a fuck how you run your game.
>I disagree
>You're wrong
>Fuck you I'm wrong
>Woah woah woah, by you're wrong I meant I agree completely with what you originally said
Gee I fucking wonder.

Yeah it is really strange, like i get it some people dislike terminology that they find too artificial or unneccesary, i totally get it, but then getting upset when someone uses those terms is just weird, honestly i'm secretly hoping these people are all just trolling.

But what you're describing is literally the opposite of what happened.

See , again.

>i'm secretly hoping these people are all just trolling
I divested myself of that happy delusion w/r/t this website like six years ago.

Fuck off, reddit.

>waaah i just want to be a referee
>don't make me use my imagination reee

I'm going to unironically call shit DMs "refeREEs" from now on

pic unrelated, but relevant to some of the posters itt

>I don't give a fuck how you run your game.

Why are you in this thread then?
You are sounding more and more upset. Is everything okay?

What can i say, i guess i'm still an optimist, but it is tragicomic to see people flip out about terminology when talking about a hobby we all share.

Sorry, I didn't know this thread was about you user. I'll just fuck off since none of are you clearly give a shit.

So basically you admit that you like intellectually rolling around in shit. Thanks for confirming, simpleton.

>Hey, let's go backwards through the thread and find new people to troll!

Dude, just... Just stop. It's embarrassing.

>He can't differentiate between 2 people
>Still lectures about communication
Holy shit, there's a unique poster count for a reason dipshit.

Except it's about having everyone together to talk about it, instead of each person developing characters in vacuums or in sub-groups. It also makes sure people aren't overlapping each other in ways they don't like or don't see the setting in the same way.

It is just a small step to get everyone together and increase the likely hood of the game being good for everyone.

Maybe if you've been playing with the same people on the same game and same setting for decades you don't need one. For everyone else it's very useful, especially if you play online with randos.

screencap this
top tier tg advice