In the previous article, I went into a lengthy discussion about the idea of using a “Session Zero” to gather everyone together and make sure that all of the players and the GM are on roughly the same wavelength as to what sort of campaign the game will be, what sort of characters the players will be playing, and what type of plot elements the GM should include.
So let’s say that Session Zero is in the books, you’ve gotten the buy-in from your participating players, they’ve hashed out their various character concepts and how they’d eventually mesh as a group, said characters have been built and typed up, and now the players and GM are gathered at the table, dice at the ready and eager to begin.
Remember what I said at the top of the first article about how a beginning is a delicate thing? That sentiment is never truer than when it comes to running the actual first session of a brand new campaign. Because if you fail to hook your players with that first session and leave them wanting more, then your campaign’s probably not going to last very long. In a way, it’s very much like the pilot for a TV series; either the pilot manages to hook viewers into watching the show, or the viewers wander off and the show fades into general obscurity after a few episodes. The first session of a campaign is where you are either truly going to hook the players so that they’re eager to come back each session to see what happens next, or they’re going to quickly lose interest and move on to more interesting diversions.
Regrettably, there’s no magical formula for running the perfect first session, since every player and every GM’s style of running their games is going to be different. The one thing that you as the GM can do to stack the deck in your favor is to try and arrange things so that every player gets, at the very least, a taste of what they were hoping to see in the campaign. To keep with our Mutants and Masterminds example, the first session of the GM’s Freedom City campaign should include not only a straight-up fight against a super-villain but some elements of intrigue; perhaps a beloved and effective public official only got their office because of the direct machinations of the super-villain, but the official is unaware of this fact, making it a dilemma as to whether this connection should be revealed or kept quiet.
Another thing to help hook the players in is to ensure that they never get the feeling that the actions of their characters aren’t making an impact on the setting as a whole. This has been a commonly cited issue with the Forgotten Realms setting for Dungeons and Dragons, but also crops up for Star Wars campaigns set during the Clone Wars and especially the Galactic Civil War or Rebellion Era. After all, if the players have seen the original Star Wars trilogy, they already know that it’s going to be Luke Skywalker that’s the catalyst for the Empire’s ultimate defeat. The best way to handle this sort of situation is make it clear that the actions of the player-characters do matter and are making a difference; the first season of Star Wars Rebels does a fantastic job of showing how a small group of heroes can make a significant impact both on a local and galactic scale.
As a GM, you should always be willing to alter the story of that initial session to account for what the players do; odds are good they’re going to come up with an approach to the core dilemma that you never would have considered. You as the GM should be flexible enough to alter what you’ve got planned. In short, no matter what sort of half-baked hare-brained plan of action the player-characters concoct, the GM should not shut it down simply because it doesn’t jive with what you’ve already planned out or throws a monkey wrench into what you had planned for a later session. If you cut down on the players’ ability to affect the setting and course of the campaign in the first session, you’re increasing the odds of those players not coming back to see what happens next.
A second important tip is to not immediately overwhelm them with the campaign’s metaplot or back-story; ideally the players should be rolling dice and their characters actively doing things within the first ten minutes of the campaign. If it’s going to take more time than that to explain the setting, then you as the GM are much better off typing it up and providing a copy that has the salient details to the players before the first session so that they can read it ahead of time. While some players thrive on a richly-embellished back-story to the campaign that includes various minor details on the setting, more often you’re going to have players that want their characters to be actively doing stuff as opposed to listening to a history lesson. So by taking the approach of using a “campaign primer” handout with the various background elements, you can satisfy both types of players without directly alienating one or the other.
One great tactic to kick off a campaign, particularly one that’s going to be heavy on the action, is to employ the very simple trick of “in media res” or “in the middle of things.” One well-known example of this is the opening to Star Wars: A New Hope, where after a trio of paragraphs that gave the basic setting notes, the audience is presented with a brief starship battle followed quickly by the Empire’s stormtroopers conducting a boarding action against Princess Leia’s blockade runner. By putting the players into a situation where they have a limited time to think and plan before they are required to take some sort of action, you get them immediately invested in the night’s adventure, and they’ll be far more willing to stick around and figure out just how they got into that mess. Be careful not to overuse the idea of “in media res” though, as going to that particular well too many times will tend to wear on your players and make them start to wonder if there’s anything they could do that’s not going to wind up with their characters in some measure of danger.
The third tip to making that first session count is to ensure that once it’s done, the players have a strong sense of victory in their accomplishments during that session. Make sure that it’s clear that they’ve scored at least some kind of victory against the forces of evil. In Dungeons and Dragons, maybe it’s clearing out the small goblin horde that have been preying upon the local villages and trade routes, while for Star Wars the players have allowed a group of local dissidents (and not necessarily the characters) on an Outer Rim planet to evade the Empire’s wrath or make a fool out of a petty crime lord by beating down his thugs, and for Shadowrun the players manage to pull off a fairly impressive job and get paid without too many things going wrong on them. To go back to my earlier analogy of a TV series pilot episode, you as the GM want to not only encapsulate the general feel of the campaign, but you also want to make sure that your players have at least some sense of accomplishment and have a taste of what’s to come when the session wraps for the night. If your players are eager for the session to keep going and beg you to continue even after you’ve declared an end to that initial adventure, then you know that you’ve got the players hooked. And if they’re hooked, then it’s a lot easier to keep that momentum you’ve generated running through the following sessions of the campaign.
I hope the suggestions made both here and in the prior article are helpful in ensuring that, while the beginning of a new campaign may well be a delicate thing, with proper nurturing it can blossom into a campaign that you and the players will be talking about fondly for years after it came to a long and satisfying conclusion.
