Session Zero
What is it, and why is it?
Being a DM can be rough. Just a single adventure can take hours of prep work. Then on top of that, you’re juggling the expectations and playstyles of four (or more!) different people at the table. But that’s your job as the DM right? You were the one who volunteered for the role.
For a long time it was believed by the TTRPG community that everyone had their job to do. It was the Dungeon Master’s job to create the campaign and get the game itself set up. It was the job of the players to arrive on time and make sure they were pleasant enough to spend the evening with. But as new blood joins the hobby, we make new discoveries about how to best ensure the health of your gaming group.
More and more DMs are adopting the policy of a ‘Session Zero’. A sort of preliminary session where the DM and players collaborate on the setup of the campaign. As a long time DM with more than a decade of experience, here is my guide on what you can do to have a successful session zero.
World Building
Most Dungeon Masters, especially new ones, might spend a handful of weeks crafting their setting. They design the various ecosystems, map out the rich and complex geopolitics of the world's factions, nations, and religions. And you just gotta have a gorgeous world map to go with all this world building.
And who can blame them? Designing fictional worlds is fun. Tolkien made Middle Earth as part of his hobby of crafting fictional languages. I often do it myself as a mental exercise.
There is, however, one problem to this approach. And the problem is, four times out of five, players simply won’t really care about it. It's not that they won’t like your setting once they've been adventuring in it for a while. It's that your players have no investment in your world yet. So when you hand a short essay on the complete timeline of your world to the players, it would be fair to expect minimal engagement. Especially if none of the timeline events pertain to what is going on in the adventure proper.
There are two ways to circumvent this problem. The first, and easiest, is to simply use an established setting where your players are already invested. There have been plenty of great published campaign settings like Dark Sun and Dragonlance. Star Wars has been a staple of the TTRPG scene for decades. Even if RPG material exists out there already, it would only take a little work to mix the D&D chocolate with Star Wars' peanut butter.
The second way, and my favorite way, is to get the players themselves involved in the creation of the world. In this method the DM will come up with the 'big picture' idea. The concept that is central to the setting such as “space opera” or “post-apocalypse”. Then, with this idea established, each player (Including the DM) will take a turn pitching a few ideas on what they want to contribute to the world. These ideas can be just about anything. Characters, objects, mechanics, historical events. Not every idea will necessarily fit in, and it's up to the DM to determine what will appear and what will be left out.
The second method serves a lot, and I mean A LOT, of purposes. It serves as the primer for the setting in an engaging way. The players will be invested because the world is made up of their ideas. And this method is a roundabout way of getting the players talking about what they want to see in the story. If D&D is a collaborative storytelling game, get your players in on the worldbuilding too, not just the campaign. The time the DM saves in writing the world backstory can be used to write an amazing first adventure.
Character Creation
I think a lot of us have been there. First session, everyone brings their character, you look over everyone's sheet. You notice one sheet is not like the others. You ask your player about it, and his reply;
“Wouldn't you know it! I rolled FOUR eighteens! FOUR! I definitely rolled legit.”
If you don’t feel like dealing with it, you give that player the side-eyes and just make sure the dragon uses its breath weapon in his direction more often than not.
Nowadays, situations like this are largely avoided with creation methods like point-buy or the stat array. But I think this and other situations point to the various problems where players make characters individually of each other. I've seen groups where the party balance was skewed way off because no one knew what everyone else was bringing to the table. I’ve only ever heard of the hilarious situation of everyone bringing a character of the exact same class but never personally experienced it.
In a non-mechanical sense, characters can just not vibe with each other or with the world. The stereotypical situation is the paladin or cleric who bars the rogue from stealing things. But many other situations can arise when you mix strange characters with totally different worldviews together.
Just as bad is that the Player-Characters end up being a bunch of strangers to one another, leading to the problem of everyone referring to each other's character as their class, or worse, their race. If they didn’t help with the world creation (And didn’t read that world timeline you wrote for them), then they’re also strangers in the world as well. Most of the time this takes the form of players making characters whose races don’t exist in your world setting. But sometimes it can be things like the mood of characters. Like one player bringing a grimdark warlock into a more optimistic high-fantasy world
In terms of game mechanics, having everyone work together to build characters ensures that everyone is on the same page. The newer players can benefit by having more experienced people there to help build out their characters or explain some of the more complex rules.
For the sake of the group, the effect is much like getting the players involved in creating the world. When everyone is creating together, players can bounce ideas off of one another. Two players can decide their characters are related in some way or have a shared backstory. Suddenly there is context as to why all these strangers who met in a tavern are risking their lives in some gods-forsaken dungeon on the off-chance of making a few bucks.
Tutorial Time
Even the streamlined gameplay of 5th edition D&D can be, to say the least, a bit complicated. D&D and other TTRPGs are seeing an immense surge in popularity, and so there are a lot of newcomers out there needing to be shown the ropes.
It's at this point that, if I have new players, I will run some easier combat encounters for them. You would be surprised how simple some things can seem on the surface (Like turn actions and movement) that can end up being confusing to new players. This is your opportunity to ensure everyone knows how the game works. If someone is playing a wizard, make sure they know how their magic rules work. You definitely don't want to be throwing your players into their first combat encounter and hear “Uhhh, how do I do this?” when the newbie's turn comes up.
If your campaign uses any unusual mechanics, now is a great time to teach the players how they work. For instance, I’ve stolen borrowed the system of skill challenges from 4th edition D&D. Since that isn’t a mechanic present in 5e, it would be a good idea to run through a couple of simpler skill challenges to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Homebrew mechanics can be tough to get right. So running through the new mechanics will also give the DM some feedback on how well they’re working and let you know ahead of time that something needs to be adjusted before the proper campaign begins.
Ending Session Zero
I suppose there’s nothing at all wrong with ending session zero by simply determining when the first session will take place, and then packing up and heading home. But I can’t help but feel that it’s a little anticlimactic. I wouldn’t blame a new player for feeling disappointed that they came to an entire session thinking they were going to be stabbing goblins and taking their stuff, only for their experience to consist of prep work for the real session coming up next time.
Consider instead; using the ending of session zero to segue into the beginning of the campaign proper. Session zero is useful for the preliminary setup to the campaign. So starting your adventure can serve to set up the beginning of the story, and get players thinking about how they want to tackle the problem you have presented to them in session one. If your campaign begins with an impressive encounter, then it can get players excited for what lies around the corner when the real campaign begins.
Once the campaign begins proper, it can be useful for the DM to seek the input of players going forward. I’m not sure additional session zeroes are necessary. But the DM shouldn’t be afraid to ask players how they feel about the story, and what they would like to see in the future. The player’s contribution to the campaign need not end with the conclusion of session zero.
Over are the days when everyone was expected to do only their job at the table. Table-top RPG’s have always been, and always will be, a collaborative effort. Like encounter tables, treasure generators, and your list of on-the-fly NPC names, let session zero be an essential tool in your Dungeon master toolbox.
It is said that ‘people do not plan to fail, they fail to plan’. I’m not sure there is such a thing as being too prepared for your D&D campaign. D&D campaigns are complex and ever-evolving. No two are exactly the same. You will no doubt find other useful activities to accomplish over your own session zero. But I hope this article will help you on where to get started, so you can get your campaign started right.
