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Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Party first meets

I tend to avoid the party meets in a tavern meme. It feels too contrived to me. Some of the ways I've gotten around this include:

1. All of the adventurers are from the same village, and grew up knowing each other. Some of them may even be related.

2. The adventurers all work for the same person, from before the actual campaign starts. Maybe they are part of the same mercenary company, maybe just guards on the same caravan.

3. The adventurers have all received a bounty notice, where they have been summoned to meet the wronged person at a scheduled meeting. This is pretty similar to the tavern idea, but at least avoids a disjointed one person at a time talking to someone problem.

4. The party is initially split into smaller groups, but with one player knowing everyone and introducing the groups to each other.

This provides a more realistic reason for the characters to adventure with each other. After all, how many people would make a life-threatening trek into the unknown or an obviously trapped dungeon with complete strangers?

1 comment:

Dennis Laffey said...

I used to worry about that, too, and used some similar ideas to what you've used--recruited by an agent of an authority figure, all on the same ship/caravan, etc.

These days, I go back to the way we did it as kids, and just don't worry about it. Everyone's got a character, and they've somehow decided to adventure together. The whys and wherefors don't matter to me much these days.

If it's important, the players can figure it out as they go.