It's the first session of your big campaign. Your players are settling into their new characters, and most of the first session ends up being you establishing the setting and the plot while your players figure out how they fit in the world. This doesn't make it a bad session, but it also means that your players are spending more time getting started than really playing. But you can work around this difficulty with one simple action: using individualized intro sessions. By providing each player with a customized session to get them into the world and hooked into the story, you can ensure that your first session is all about the players truly getting started on the story. Read on for a full guide to creating individualized intro sessions.
Years ago, I deployed individualized intro sessions for the Eastweald campaign, and I addressed some of the benefits of these sessions, but now I would like to expand that and provide instruction as well. But let's start with an expanded look at the benefits of individual intro sessions. I'm going to focus on five ideas, specifically how these sessions allow: the player to roleplay their backstory, the player to test their abilities, the player to express themselves without pressure from the group, both players and GM to introduce story events, and the GM to work directly with players (a rarity in TRPGs).
So let's start with one of the more obvious ideas: these sessions let your players roleplay their backstory. This in and of itself affords us a collection of benefits. First, there's the direst consequence of the intro session, which is that the player gets to begin the game by simply exploring the gameworld a bit. This means that they can enter the group session with more knowledge and confidence, which is vital. For players interested in roleplaying, these sessions will also grant the inherent benefit of the player enjoying their introduction to your world on their terms. The player also gets the opportunity to figure out some details of who their character is in practice before having to interact with the rest of the party. These ideas are all related to the benefits the player reaps, but there is a massive benefit to the GM as well: you get to learn more about the player's character in a controlled environment, which sets you up to present that character with more individualized attention as the game progresses. When I did intro sessions for the Eastweald campaign, I learned a lot about my players' characters and their motivations, which better prepared me for the challenge of dealing with four players characters at once. So you see that by allowing players to roleplay their backstories, we get a wealth of benefits.
Then there's the fact that an individualized intro session lets players test their abilities. Remember that in the vast majority of campaigns, all the characters in the game will be new creations, which is to say that the players will be the least prepared to play their character effectively that they can be. I've seen first sessions where players are playing spellcasters for the first time and don't know how to cast them usefully yet, and I've seen players end up quite surprised by how their actual actions play out. You can't get rid of the test period, but you can relegate it to an individual intro session. This leads right into the idea that players also get the benefit of getting to privately test their character away from the eyes of the rest of the party. This also means that you can coach the player in a safe space, away from the potential judgment of other players. And let's not forget that the player character existed in the gameworld before the player developed them, in a sense: when a player makes a 36-year-old character, that character has 36 years of life to account for, and in that time, they would certainly have become familiar with their own abilities. An individualized intro session means that when these characters meet, they will already have a sense of what they are capable of and how to achieve results. This is more gratifying and surprising for the other players as well, who get to see this player character being capable as a first impression. Testing abilities is another feature of individualized intro sessions that provide a variety of benefits to the game.
Next, let's consider the ways that playing away from the pressure of the group can be a helpful force. I've already touched on a few of the ways this can benefit your game: players enter the true first session more confident and capable, allowing you as GM to both help and challenge them. But it's more than that. Let's think about the mindset of a player figuring out their character for the first time. They're thinking about their character concept and the details they've created, the collection of story ideas, how to fit together with the party, and plenty of other ideas. That's a lot to consider and act on. And the pressure to do well and impress the other players is a real factor. No one wants to show up and seem like the least capable person in the party. But we can take a lot of these things off the player's shoulders. An individualized intro session means that they can think about their character and the gameworld, and that is essentially it. They can integrate themselves into the world in a way that makes sense to them, and without worrying about monopolizing the session. Then, when the first group session begins, the player has already gotten practice roleplaying their character and can worry about the group details. It may sound like a small benefit, but taken with all of these other benefits, it's hard to dismiss.
Then we have the way that story events can be distributed in an early campaign. This is a delicate time for you as a GM; you're trying to unite the party, unveil your story, and keep the game going towards the endgame. Introducing the main quest at all can be a daunting task; how do you get these player characters, with their varying backgrounds, skills, and interests, to work together in the first place? But the individualized intro session lets you break that work up into smaller parts. Instead of getting an entire group of different people to agree to the same idea, all you have to do is rope one player character in at a time. You can use the intro session to set up the main quest so that when your first group session starts, your characters are already basically united. You can also use these sessions to develop the late game by revealing details that will become important later on. But it's not just you who can introduce story in these sessions. Your player will also add story ideas to the game, whether they mean to or not. When a player in an intro session identifies something as being a considerable part of their character's life, you have a new story idea; just take that idea, develop it a bit, and deploy it in the game. More on that below, but for now, just think about it this way: you get more story developments out of two sessions than one, so these intro sessions will always grant a boost to your game's story.
Finally, let's address the way that these intro sessions allow the GM to work directly with the players. You know the scenario: you're GMing, and even though you don't mean to, a certain player or character ends up being relatively left out of the game for a while. Early in a campaign, this can be a real issue; if the players and their characters aren't hooked, early struggles could unmake a campaign. You can resolve that with these intro sessions--the very first encounter the player has with the game, they're the star. Their everyday life is the plot of the session (again, more below), so it's not about the story; it's about the player character. The first time the player actually plays their character in the group session, they'll be able to join the party already knowing--and more importantly, feeling--that their character is a central part of the campaign. This strategy works especially well if you suspect that some of your players will be more dominant in the game than others; with individualized intro sessions, those more dominant players will come in already partially satisfied by the direct attention they got in the intro session. And if there's something you need to customize for a specific player (granting them a special ability, personalizing a plot hook, addressing complicated backstory, etc.), an intro session lets you give that personalized attention without seeming like you're favoring a specific player.
This is a pretty dizzying array of benefits. The relatively simple action of providing individualized intro sessions unlocks a variety of advantages, from helping players to helping yourself. And this concept need not be applied exclusively for introductions. Many GMs have encountered a time that a player character necessarily had to go about something alone. If this occasion lasts more than a few minutes, you can opt for an individualized session, which will both relieve other players of watching someone else play and allow you to really go all-out on the individualized time instead of truncating it for the other players' benefit. So it's a useful idea, but how do we implement it?
Just as individualized intro sessions are a simple idea, implementing them in the game is very simple. My instructions will pertain to specifically introduction sessions, but the same general rules apply if there's a mid-story individual session you need to run. The basic formula exists as three acts: a day in the life for Act I, a complication for Act II, and a link to the campaign for Act III.
Act I: Day in the Life. You want to depict the player character in an average day. This is partially to characterize them, partially to gather an idea of what the character is really like, and partially to make the complication in Act II more dramatic. Running this is very simple. Tell your character that it is dawn (or early afternoon if your Act III requires nighttime), and ask them to describe how they go about their day. Some players, especially those who are not roleplay-minded, may struggle with this. Encourage them and promise that it doesn't have to be interesting. By granting the player more control over the beginning of the session, we are both letting the player be as creative as they want and setting up an emotional response when the complication arises. Common activities in this act include getting a meal, tending to business needs, meeting with acquaintances, practicing skills, and other fairly inconsequential things. If your player wants the intro session to be more action-packed (perhaps they're pulling off a dangerous job that day), don't bar it entirely, but encourage them to pick something a little simpler; there will be time for that dangerous job later. Let's look at an example of Act I:
Let's say we're planning a campaign about taking down a lich who is slowly taking over small towns across the countryside. We have three players, one of whom is a fairly new TRPG player; we'll call her Greta. Greta has created a ranger-type character, which will be a challenge since she's never played a magic user before. So for Act I of her intro session, we want her to show us what her ranger (Maeve) actually lives like. Greta is a bit tentative at first, but ends up describing doing a bit of hunting for breakfast, tidying up her cottage, and heading into town for supplies, where she runs into a friend, a cleric of Obad-Hai; they share a reverence for nature and a distaste for city life, and so they have bonded. Essentially all of this information should come from Greta. If she's having a hard time imagining the details, ask open-ended questions about Maeve's interests. You want this part of the session to last about one-third of your total time, but you can cut it a bit short if your player is really struggling. (If they are, ask them to develop some more details for roleplaying their character.) Once you have a good idea of Maeve's day-to-day life, it's time to move onto Act II.
Act II: Complication. Now something interesting happens. It should be directly tied to the campaign's main quest, but remember that you're not even in the first group session, so you don't want to give everything away. The complication shouldn't necessarily be a quest; we're more looking for something that adds some intrigue and which requires some poking around. You can introduce this idea however you want; interrupting one of the mundane tasks in Act I works well, as does having an event unfold in public where the player character can see it, and disrupting the player's actions can make things even more dramatic (imagine that the player character goes to visit an old friend and finds their house boarded up with a menacing note on the door--that will shake things up). The nature of the complication isn't as important as the effect: you want your player to be a bit jarred by the transition from Act I to Act II. You also want to include some information for the player character to investigate, otherwise, this step is just one moment of drama. This act should also take about one-third of your time.
Let's say we're running our intro session for Greta, who has been having Maeve walk around town doing everyday things. She goes to a common goods shop to buy some rope, but--complication!--the store has no rope. And the shopkeeper says that no other shops in town have rope either, or many other common goods. The problem, they say, is that all the city's rope is imported from two small towns to the East, and both towns were recently sacked. The report is that some powerful villain is capturing small towns, and no one knows why. I would also have the shopkeeper disclose that there is a leader here in town who wants to fight back against the villain, give Maeve a name and location for this leader, and let the shopkeeper encounter end. But Act II isn't over; now it's time for Maeve to investigate the claims the shopkeeper made. Then we can have Maeve search for the leader (stymied initially, but succeeding with persistence) and ask them about the villain. This is how Act II closes.
Act III: A Link to the Campaign. Now for the finale. You've got your player character interested in the hook, but now we need to reel them in. Generally speaking, the easiest way to do Act III is for the whole act to be a big conversation, followed by an event which changes the stakes. In game terms, what you're looking for is a connection between the complication in Act II and your campaign, which shouldn't be too much of a challenge given that we designed Act II to lead into Act III. The gist is this: the person with information about the campaign's quest should communicate some setup ideas. By this, I mean that the NPC in question should explain a bit about what has led to the bad situation that's happening; then they propose a plan to deal with; finally, they reveal that they are constructing a team of people to deal with the bad situation, which the player character will be a part of. The NPC should answer as many player character questions as they can without you giving away anything that needs to wait for the whole group. Think of the first half of Act III as your commercial for your campaign--really try to sell the player character on the idea. Then, in the next half, we see that the stakes are different than we imagined. Something dramatic that makes the bad situation worse should occur. This will impress upon your players that the need for help is strong and hopefully personalize the appeal of the campaign (they might fight to defend a nearby town, but they will certainly fight to defend their own town). Then, to wrap things up, have the NPC who explained the situation indicate that they will be assembling the team soon to deal with these issues.
Let's say we're still working with Greta and Maeve. They've just heard that nearby towns have been ransacked and sought out the leader they were told about. The leader explains that the situation is looking bad: the villain has captured at least three villages, and while no one has yet to safely report back with intelligence on what's happening in those villages, the fear is that people are being killed or enslaved to further the villain's goals. To personalize this for Maeve, I would have this leader explain that certain sections of the forest have been targeted as well, sections of the forest that are frighteningly close to Maeve's camp. (Now it's personal, hopefully.) Then, after Maeve's questions have been answered and you feel you've sold the threat of this villain, it's time to have the something dramatic happen. We could have the lich attack the town if the whole party were here, but one player against the BBEG before the campaign even starts could fail to go anywhere. Instead, we have someone burst into the room with the leader and Maeve. They are short of breath and struggling to speak. "Another town to the east has fallen. Red Hawk has been captured. The lich is only two days' ride away," they finally manage. This messenger might be bruised and scraped; they may speak of the horrors they witnessed with their own eyes. Once you feel that your player has grasped that this indeed is the main plot of your adventure, it's time to wrap up. The leader will indicate to Maeve that they appreciate her volunteering, and that she will be assigned to a special group of agents to fight the lich. And so ends the individualized intro session with Maeve already hooked into the game pretty completely; now meeting the rest of the party is the biggest concern. I would call that a pretty successful single session.
Considering all of the benefits I have outlined above, it's easy to see why an individualized intro session can be helpful. If you have a bigger party (6+ people), it may seem daunting to do that many sessions before even starting the campaign. If that's your situation, lump people together in pairs of characters who know each other already and provide fewer intro sessions with many of the same benefits. Personally, though, I recommend an individualized intro session for any campaign that takes storytelling and roleplaying seriously--it will surprise you how much these sessions can improve the beginnings of a campaign.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to spice up generic enemies, things to include in marketplaces, and an argument for why roleplaying is the pinnacle of TRPGs. Until next time, happy gaming!
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