One of the best things you can do before starting a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons campaign is a Session Zero, especially if this is the first time playing with the people in question. They can be used 🌳to give a synopsis and set expectations and tones, among other little things. It can help put everyone on the same page and p🐓revent specific conflicts from even happening in the first place.
Still, what topics are interesting to address here before your Dungeons & Dragons campaign actually begins? We gave some examples already, but let's dive into them more and address other essential things that can be discussed here.
5 Synopsis And Important W𒐪orld-Building Details
Session Zero is the perfect opportunity to tell your players the basic idea of your game. Sure, you can choose not to give them any plot and catch them by surprise — both methods are doable and fun — b♔ut if you provide them with a ꦅsynopsis, they can build their characters around it, and they will fit into the story better.
For example, if the players know that your world has a war between Orcs and Elves, they can use it in their plot as refugees, soldiers, or neutral people who wish to end things in peace. Regardless of if you'll give them story details or not, it's also essential to know if their general idea will or will not contradict your 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:already established world.
Maybe they want to be a Goblin, for instance. How are Goblins seen in your world? Are they usually seen as monsters who attack everybody, or are they accepted in cities? Depending on the answer, your player can choose to accommodate things appropriately by being a nice Goblin who's just another character or by having to face NPCs' prejudice against them due to the average Goblin's behavior in your scenario.
4 𝔉 🥂 Tone Or Genre
What is the general atmosphere you intend to build in your games? Many D&D campaigns go for the action route, as most of the game's core rules revolve around combat, but you can do other things to your campaign, and more importantly, you don't need to restrict yourself to a single genre throughout your story. For example, this is you and your friends having a good time together, so comedy is usually a big part of D&D, too, with everyone goofing around and doing ludicrous things at the table.
Still, nothing stops you from having a different t👍one for your campaign. Horror works surprisingly well for D&D, where you create scenarios where the players need to survive, regardless of w♉hether they kill the creatures. Mixing horror and action is pretty doable, too, and Curse of Strahd is a good example.
Romance is also very possible in role-playing games, and it is important to address if you believe it'll be a big part of the story because some players can feel uncomfortable role-playing romantic scenarios. This is an excellent time to talk about 'rating,' too. Just because all your players are adults doesn't mean they feel comfortable with extremely gory descriptions. It is the perfect moment to talk about whether you'll be light on the story or go for something a bit more serious.
3 𝓀 Boundaries ♑
Diving deeper into the aforementioned 'rating' topic, it's crucial to ask your players how far is too far, especially if you intend to write more adult stories with heavier themes throughout your campaign.
As sad as it is, if your goal as a DM is to write realistic stories with believable characters in an adult world, topics such as racism (especially in a world with many species), misogyny, or slavery, among others we prefer not to mention, can happen at your table. With that said, making racism a big deal in your story while knowing one of your players has suffered from it a lot through their life, for example, is very insensitive — unless they said they don't mind it during your session zero, which is why this is important to bring up.
Even if your players say they're okay with dealing with these topics, that doesn't mean going haywire. Don't try to make a 'heroic' NPC, who is supposed to be a significant ally, be a racist enslaver as well. That will only feel odd and very contradictory. Save terrible characteristics for terrible people, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:aka your villains; defeating a baddie to save the people they control is a big motivator, a powerful story, and it can lead to both intense moments and a very satisfying co𒊎nclusion.
2 Hous🎉e Rules And Possible Bans
No two DMs do the job equally, and that's to be expected. This also means that if these are new players who don't know how you usually DM, they're not acquainted with your usual rulings. It's important to let them know if you use specific optional rules, such as flanking or feats. Yes, feats are so popular we forget they're optional.
That also goes for the unique rules you enjoy having at your table. Common examples are having critical failur❀es at the game, with a table the DM will roll to give particular consequences for the natural one, or considering natural failures and successes on things other than combat, such as ability checks.
Another important thing to address is bans — if you have banned anything. A typical example is banning flying playable characters, which many DMs do. Or, maybe you restrict the number of species and subclasses simply because you don't have that many books and don't want to use content that is not accessible to you.
1 Players' Classes And Overall Party Configuration
This last topic is more for the players to discuss among themselves (if they want to), but it's a fun thing they can do during Session Zero as well. "So, what are you guys playing as?"
Players don't need to be an optimized party necessarily, but doing that is overall good sportsmanship, and more experienced players will probably want to talk about this to save themselves from some future headache, such as not having a single healer in the party.
Here, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:they can share classes or at least their roles in case they still want to keep some mystery for the start of the campaign. Or, they can throw mystery out the window, talk about their characters openly, and maybe even combine ideas and share their backstories, so they can start the campaign with characters who already know one another. There's no wrong answer here; whatever the group wants to go with will work, so letting them talk about this (with you being part of the conversation, obviously) will help you all reach a scenario everyone is happy.