How much planning do you put in before your first session?
I admit that preparing for a first session of any PbtA game makes me anxious. On one hand, I want to have a whole cast of NPCs and villains ready to go with action-packed drama in my pocket so I can drop the PCs right into the fire for an explosive opening that will have them hooked. On the other, I want to leave a lot of blanks so that the character creation process can fill in the world with relevant NPCs that come with ties to the PCs, leaving the role of major villain to them to insert their Nemesis, spawned when they answer questions about their characters. The story needs to be about them!
How do you all balance those two to feel ready for the first session?
Follow-up, how many of you do session 0 as character generation only, and how many combine with session 1 where you actually play the characters through some scenes?
Well i have truly only two experiences, in the first one the character creation and the questions about the “when first meet…” Cast a lot of npcs from the PC’s background then the history of the session 1 was about some from there.
In the other hand the second time with another people the PC’s don’t involve a lot of villains involved in their backgrounds, so for the session one I think like you a lot of npcs and some kind of escene to frame the PC’s into the action. From there the history evolve and meanwhile for the session 4 there is not archinemesis for each character there is a word plenty of heroes, and villains to fight. Each experience have the good and the bad things but both are filled with all the things that the PC’s want to play.
I do session 0’s for any campaign. For Masks, my prep includes just brainstorming more and more villains, heroes, and other npcs. I don’t do too many settings, it’s built usually more around my characters and what they want. I typically start off with a more generic mission to start, like their events leading to encountering a bank robbery or car chase.
I’ll have a rough idea for a villain to use for an intro fight if time permits, but otherwise I’ll wait until after the first session to sketch out the bad guys.
I do lots of one shots and have started two campaigns. By the second launch, I had a small body of setting details “banked” from earlier runs. But generally, for a first session, since I have to make large allowances for decisions made during character generation, I keep the details pretty light and swap out player-created NPCs on a whim. I usually try to have 1 or 2 villain ideas, a challenge for the players, and some sort of mid-session pivot.
I ran a Session 0 of character creation and “When Our Team First Came Together…” and then immediately ran Session 1. I had some ideas already for the scenario and villains, but also included several NPCs based on the players’ answers to things.
the third “encounter” my party had was actually their foe from “when the team firstcame together” and it caught them all by surprise, even after hinting at a similar power and making them take a powerful blow from drinking a smoothie (the enemy was The Bartender) until I actually said it and then the realization hit
Hannah Banks I brought the “Team First Came Together” foe back, too! The players assumed he was a joke villain (a pretender to the throne of the Big Bad) but in a later session some of the team went to interrogate him in prison and he pulled a Hannibal Lecter-like psychological attack from behind bars, including exploiting the Bull’s programming from the people who changed her. A very twist-y and exciting session.
Hannah Banks This sounds amazing: “making them take a powerful blow from drinking a smoothie (the enemy was The Bartender)”
Don’t wait too long to incorporate the Big Bads and villains from character generation into the game. It’s just plain more exciting to fight the guys who were responsible for the Bull’s transformation than some random bank robbers.
I have a host of hero and villain npcs that I’ve created over the years (several of the heroes/villains are from my City of Heroes/Villains MMO days).
I let the players create any characters they want from their playbooks, but if they can’t come up with something I’ll usually ask if they want a few names from my now-extensive list. I’ll typically match the names with the style of character they’re playing (so no cosmic-sounding names for a character that is essentially a street level hero), and give them three options.
Once they’ve picked a name I’ll ask if they want to tell me about the NPC or if they want me to tell them. If they ask me, I’ll tell them what they know about the NPC.
I’m one of those folks that just likes to create characters though, so YMMV.