Depends on the adventure and the kind of feel i am going for. If I am going for a horror theme, then usually I'll try to bring them together by misfortune and place them in a terrible situation. If I am going for something with a strong sense of purpose then usually I will have the characters start the campaign together with the primary mission already established. The thing I try to avoid like the plague though...is meeting in a tavern. If thats in an adventure im running i tear out and burn the page.
I think trying to find out the background of the characters and what would make sense. For example a tavern would not work well if there is a character who hated alcohol consumption it gets silly. It also depends greatly on the setting you could have them called together and waht is at the starting town. You could have them meet on a ferry by chance or have something bad happen external that starts the adventure. Maybe even have the pcs standing around while a wanted poster is put up if catching crimnals or bandits.
How do you start a new campaign? Assuming first level characters, what is the best way to bring characters together? Whether you create your own adventure or use premade, how do you guide the characters to the prepared adventure? Do you ever just wing it?
My favorite thing to do is wing it. Usually I have an overarching idea of what is going to happen, but I tend to wing it.
My new favorite way of starting a new campaign, which I just recently read someone post, which is also how I'm going to start my new campaign is, "You are in the Dirty Mermaid Tavern, you don't know each other. You all hear someone yell, "There they are!" Roll initiative."
You can start them as established team, coming from the same village, say caster/holy man, his bodyguard and the childhood-friend-rascal-rogue or whatever: ex-military, travelin´band...hunting/raiding party, merchants/agents, Defenders of the Faith ?
I´d also recommend to ask the players for preferences and inspiration.
Work with players as to how the characters know each other and what they would like to do.
Having them work it out among themselves makes your job much easier and you may get some ideas for your campaign from any background material that they craft.
The PC's meet on the boat heading to the Oracle to ask their 'question'
Seemed to work out pretty well.
{sigh} of course the campaign fell apart shortly after that...
May I recomend starting at level 3? By that point you have a few feats each and are starting to come into yourselves as combatants. Every action hero improves throughout the course of the book/movie/story, but the first scene rarely involves him loosing a fight to a dire rat.
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Only survivors of a shipwreck or attack on a merchant caravan or disaster in a small village (or waking up in slaver's chains and having to break out together, or being outsiders in town who are framed for a crime, or just caught up in a witch hunt), is a popular theme, but I prefer characters to be designed each with a minimum of one hook to one other character, and for no two of them to be exclusively hooked to each other. (So if one group is a brother / sister pair, that's fine, but one of them should have *some* sort of connection to another party member, other than their sibling.)
I like less 'external forces bringing the party together,' and more coordinated backstories and / or player-designed reasons for the party members to hang out together. It helps party cohesiveness when the players themselves come up with the reason they'd work together, and the GM doesn't have to railroad them into working together / putting up with each other / trusting each other / splitting up loot evenly / etc.
Depending on your style, often its just easier to say everyone already knows each other, and they are a professional group of adventurers. However, that always bugged me, because I play kind of story centric games, and getting to play out the party's origin story just sounds like too much of a dramatic/cinematic opportunity to pass up. So here's how I brought my party together for my recent campaign:
I had a general idea of the overall plot I wanted to suck my party into (which it sounds like you do as well). I knew that the plot would eventually take them to a certain distant, exotic location to find a Macguffin(ie plot device item that somebody needs someone else to get for them) for their patron. So I decided that everyone would start out as strangers, but I would give them all their own reasons for trying to reach the same place. While they were rolling up characters, I pitched a number of different ideas at them for something in their background that I could use to lure them to this region. One of them was from a mercantile family, so she had a family member doing some business there who had gotten into trouble and written a letter. Another had a client who had paid him to track someone who was rumored to have fled to this distant area. Another one playing an inquisitor was being sent by his church to investigate odd reports about the activities of their missionaries on the frontier. I worked with them all to find their own reason, so they were all headed to the same general area trying to seek passage to this distant land.
I began play in a sort of enclosed environment. My campaign happened to support a train voyage, but it could have just as easily been a ship, a tavern that was the only available accommodations for travelers in a small town, or a set of ruins along a long stretch of road that travelers often used as a campsite. The party of strangers found themselves together, among a number of other strangers with whom they were compelled to share the environment with for an evening. I had a few mini-quests in this environment with a little combat which helped the party get to know each other and work together a little. Then I continued the plot, and they all traveled to the same basic pace, by then considering themselves temporary companions headed to the same area. Once there I introduced a patron who was hiring groups to go off to this foreign land and try to get him this Macguffin. He was willing and able to arrange transport and supplies for the trip. Since each of them was already trying to get there and he was willing to aid them in doing so, it made since for them to accept his offer. Now they all had a common goal, in addition to personal goals and they were well on their way to getting sucked into my plot.
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Don't have much to add... all the above are great ideas... I encourage "Team Ups" in my players... Pairs or more that have known each other before the start... either Nobles or Rogues on the run for an unknown (at the time) act, or Mercs looking for someone new to work for and so on... that way a few of the PC's know each other before they meet up in what ever you created for them.
I'm starting my players off (at 2nd level) in my next campaign as members of the same squad in the imperial army. Not counting a prologue adventure that I'm running the RPG newbie through, they'll have a mission to accomplish (during a siege) which should warm them up to their strengths and weaknesses, after which they're betrayed and abandoned by their superiors, stranding them in a relatively unknown area (at least it is to them). The rest of the campaign takes place in this area, as they tromp around doing the usual adventurer thing. (yeah, it's the A-Team meets the Bridgeburners. What can I say...?)
This way, they've fought side by side with one another for at least a year (game time, as backstory) before they even start CharGen. They also get to make up their own backstories, like how they ended up in the army, without me having to worry about figuring out how they all meet up.
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One of the best ways to figure out how to bring the players together is by making sure they have a thorough back story set up for you to read. Every meeting for the characters at the beginning of the campaign should partially due to their back story. This gives their characters more of a purpose and a sense of life/background to them that will follow them throughout that characters lives.
I encourage players to work together when crafting their backgrounds, because they may want to entwine similar circumstances, especially if they came from the home town. In my current campaign, there are 2 drow elves that escaped their matriarichal society, where they were little more than slaves. The town that they happened to come across is the town that they escaped to. There wanted to free themselves of their previous lives, but needed cover and someone to be their champion in society. Another character helped those two out and from there our campaign came to life.
I think the players should also be keyed in on how they would like to be brought together so that they are not railroaded so much. Unless you are doing a campaign that is to gear them towards a different direction, then that's different. One time we brought the players together by giving the bard of the group around 2,000 gold to start off with and he "assembled" and scouted out the players and paid them, and he became the natural party leader, to go on an excursion run about some stories he heard. Their backgrounds help dictate how they would be brought in.
Stated above is how you can prevent "tavern" groups forming.
*SNIP*
Awesome, and stolen, thanks.
I spent years waisting that first session playing out the party meeting each other. Over those years we used things from meeting in the tavern, being hired by the local magistrate, and once even being servants in a castle that was under attack. However, it was the mini-adventure in the 3.5 Eberron Campaign setting that really made me realize that this part of the game is best handled in pre-game discussions.
In that module the characters just already knew each other. No messing with the, "You walk into the tavern and see a Fighter, a Cleric, and a Wizard all sitting at different tables with no reason to group up," moment. Once we started just skipping to the point and getting the game moving and the story started we all began to have a lot more fun. This is not to say you can't still start with the traditional Tavern introduction, you just do it as a party instead of individuals.
To keep things interesting, I have a "no tavern start-up" rule for my homebrew creations. Here is how I have begun recent campaigns. A special forces squad in a volunteer army. A group of shareholders trying to get a risk management company off the ground. Temple police representing the various faiths of a city-state. And now, reporters for a newspaper who are actually undercover collection agents for the most powerful gang in the city. All of these worked well, and each was sufficiently different/unique as to keep the group interested and on their toes.
And most importantly, none were introduced with, "So you are all in the tavern when you suddenly decide to go off as a group to risk life and limb for/with people you just met and with whom you have no rapport."
Plausibility is important in my settings.
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My last two starts.
1. You step off the ship which brought you to Absalom with the wind in your face, the sounds of the docks in your ears, and an introduction letter to Jularko Marfain, Pathfinder Society, Absalom in your hand. A hand scrawled note in the right margin says "Find him in the second floor library wearing a sparkly blue robe. He never takes it off".
From start until our last session, completely sandbox game. They love it.
2. This one was a fun start...
You only wish you were in an tavern. The driving rain has not stopped for three days, the food as a guard has been terrible, and you never realized just how hard it is to change out broken wheels on a merchant wagon. You know you are close to that rich drink and the warm fire of the Laughing Oak when the caravan master finally picks up the pace and starts shouting orders. You look out from beneath your cowls to spot the rich lantern light marking the Oak. A brief moment of joy turns to shock as you realize it is not lantern light. The town is alight! You hear screams between the gusts of wind and snaps of thunder, and can barely see people running from assailants.
Your mind tries to wrap around the concept of fires of that magnitude in a driving rain storm when you hear the angry growl of....
Roll initiative
Don't ever tell me not to start you in an inn or tavern *grin*
My favorite beginning was in 2ed.
The party were the (partial) results of a high-level wizard's unique Summon spell that went haywire. (summon planar ally cast by an outsider, why shouldn't they be able to yank people from the prime material?)
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I've decided that I'm going to have everyone on the same boat heading to a city, something will happen along the way that will force them to work together, and then we'll work from there. Most likely after they arrive at their destination, they will be thanked for their helped and hired to take care of another problem.
I do find this thread quite interesting, and I think others will get a lot of new ideas from it, so maybe we should keep it going.
I've decided that I'm going to have everyone on the same boat heading to a city, something will happen along the way that will force them to work together, and then we'll work from there. Most likely after they arrive at their destination, they will be thanked for their helped and hired to take care of another problem.
I do find this thread quite interesting, and I think others will get a lot of new ideas from it, so maybe we should keep it going.
That's a good one. Serpent's Skull starts out like that, except the "something that happens" is a shipwreck. It works well.