Thanks to Idle Champions, you can log in and use code GINN-YGET-GOLD to unlock Karlach and 3 Gold Karlach Chests! Not sure how to claim a code in-game? Check out this video on UA-cam for an easy step-by-step tutorial: ua-cam.com/video/xFxlqZ1Awec/v-deo.htmlsi=yUKUqTDRDEBHx-oy. (Expires Aug. 31, 2024)
Thank you so much for that combination code that came with the free Karlach champion. I just recently started a 3rd account on my new Samsung Galaxy Tablet, and I was really hurting for some good champions, especially since some of the champions I got was just a few members of the Absolute Advesaries which are characters from Baldur's Gate 3, but i only had the Dark Urge (and now Gale), getting Karlach from your code was fantastic for me and helped me get through a lot of adventures that required 2 good tanks. Getting Karlach with the code really helped me out. Edit: Also, getting a combinations code as part of a sponsorship for a youtube video is very unusual because most combo codes are provided during an idle champions live stream (which I rarely have time to stop by for), so when I saw this I jumped on it because it was so easy to get something that I wanted for free and yet at the same be potentially helping the content creator. :)
I'm in a game where we all decided to be siblings. It's been amazing for RP, we don't even need to work out details. All we need to do is reference a vague past event. I once said 'This is just like when you got me grounded' and the other player ran with it with no prior planning; His response was 'For the last time, that wasn't my hedgehog!' and now the whole family keeps referencing the hedgehog... My sister still blames me :P
Back in second edition we played lawful good quintuplets of rangers, paladins, and a cleric. Coming from Army based D&D, the GM just couldn't handle us, so the campaign died quickly. The main thing that came from it was our moto "The family that slays together, stays together.
We had this as well. We each had to come up with a memory that involved us and one other player. I loved just hearing the memories that the other players come up with more me and for each other. Even silly comments managed to get worked into how we saw our own characters and played them.
My favorite recently has been, "Regardless of your varied backstories, include a reason why you've been a regular at this pub for the last 4-6 months." This way they don't have to be great friends with each other, but they at least know each other a bit because they're the regulars at the same pub 👍
This is my style of starting backgrounds for PCs and NPCs Pick a hard and fast thing that makes it work Then you get the soft details that make it gel together
I’ve been playing d&d for a few years, and the most memorable campaigns were always ones with very close pc relationships. A friend and I teamed up to play a married couple without mentioning it to the other players to see how long it took them to catch on. Now it’s a tradition to make our characters know each other before the start of every campaign we play!
@@GinnyDioh absolutely, the relationships evolved from “they’re my older sister” to increasingly ridiculous scenarios like “we met while we were both trying to rob the same necromancer and then started arguing so loudly we both got caught and ended up imprisoned together” 😂
My absolute favourite example of this is in World's Beyond Number, where they did a full mini-campaign of all their characters meeting as children, having a little adventure that formed the basis of who they were, and gave them their first ever class features, and then they all reunited as adults at the beginning of the *actual* campaign. I would *love* to do something like that in a game of my own one day.
One of the best games I was ever a part of is where we all started as kids and became childhood friends in the same village. We played out a story where something catastrophic happened and we all had to escape and we all got split up. Then we jumped forward as our adult characters and found each other to reunite and fight the baddies who took our home. The banter was AMAZING.
My first AF&D campaign was similar. We were all born under a Blue Moon in the same village and were trained to be heroes who could potentially fulfill the prophecy.
In the campaign we are currently playing the eldest children of a Halfling village who got attacked by the evil army and we are now stopping them from ransacking other villages under the guidance of Potartar, the Goddess of Harvest and Health. Her boones to her followers are the abillity to make divine white potatoes, and an immediate knowledge of all foragable plants in an area. We set up kitchens in each town to feed refugees and are working to end starvation.
We thought the home brew of Potartar would be insignificant and funny, but her avatar Mrs. Potato head has visited her Paladin and spoke to him with Mrs. Doubtfire's wisdom twice. She makes sure we always have rations.
I love your point about the lone wolf character being viable with a preexisting connection to another PC! This is what my friend and I did in one of our campaigns. We played as student wizards from Strixhaven who’d been assigned to partake in the mission as a last-ditch effort to save ourselves from getting expelled. My friend played the “dead inside, disappointed, done” Goth lone wolf whose parents were rich enough to pay him out of trouble, but he stuck with the party the whole way through because I played his lover, a rambunctious ball of energy and red hair, whom he wanted to protect. We ended up being the party’s resident comedy duo. It was so fun and memorable.
LOL... One of the games I'm DMing right now has a PC that is the Party "Mother" edit: I must have been tired when I typed this... Typo corrections and clarity.
I'm playing a dad who always wanted to go on an adventure - it was a sort of "gap year" thing but their life got complicated, responsibility built up with kids, jobs and business....now their kids have grown up and they're finally ready to go on that adventure from when they were younger.
I'm the "dad" playing a paladin that protects his companions. He is making sure everyone comes home. Come hell or high water. We are in Avernus. (Not an actual dad)
@@davidjennings2179reminds me of the Dungeons ‘n Daddies podcast, where four dads ended up whisked to a fantasy land in their van and have to find their kids.
Immediately thought of the interactions between Clint and Natasha in Avengers. They'd been in separate movies, but with a few well-done interactions ("You and I remember Budapest very differently!") we got the dynamic between them and it gelled in a way that spoke of years of camaraderie.
In the last Fantasy game I ran, the starting premise was that the player characters were already an adventuring party, and were celebrating their big win over the self-titled 'Goblin King'. I started the game in a tavern, with the player characters carousing after having just been paid, and then had the patrons ask them about their recent adventure. I then made the combat tutorial be a flashback to defeating the goblin king, using the bar table as our battlemap, and trinkets, coins, and wine-corks as our tokens. This gave the player characyers a sense of comraderie, a reputation as capable adventurers, and fans at the inn who they'd told their exploits to.
I actually wrote a TTRPG that is all about telling the exploits afterwards - you roll not for how successful you were, but how you succeeded and whether the listeners believe you!
I'm an old curmudgeon who has been playing RPGs for long enough now that when the big surge in popularity hit circa 2020, my greatest dismay was watching "D&D Advice" videos on UA-cam where people would make the same ignorant recommendations that I saw folks make on forums twenty years ago. It's been extremely faith-restoring for me to watch you (Ginny) catch up on twenty years of theory in just four short years, such that now you're able to give a complete and correct breakdown of D&D's flaws, how other games have fixed it, why D&D hasn't fixed them, and why the best way to fix things is to change the system itself to suit your goals. I hope your fans appreciate the way you've bootstrapped yourself into becoming an genuine guru at this, while so many ostensibly-more-experienced guys on other channels haven't evolved at all! KEEP IT UP GINNY!
YES! THIS!! Been playing D&D since 1978 and I wish Ginny and her videos were available back then. Ginny Di, you are breathtakingly wonderful in your presentations of the game.
Exactly how i feel. Ive been at a table for 12 years with people who have been playing for 30, and we talk about ideas she breaks down on a regular basis. Most recently her artificer video, ehich is gold in my opinion.
I added a mechanic my players like and pitched it to my GM for his campaign and I simply call it: "The amount you talk is the amount you travel." So it takes 3 days to get from point A to point B. You aren't gonna be silent the entire 3 day walk, so to simulate the time traveled, banter, talk, get to know each other, talk trash about last encounter, about the big bad. They should eat? Alright what does your character eat? Where do you find that on their journey? It forces everyone to get acquainted a lot faster, suddenly banter shows up in combat. And they don't get the new area/location without talking. They HAVE to talk, whether it's dinner plans or just like talking.
I ran a campaign where two character had a relationship as lovers that they kept secret even from me. Without knowing about it i had the bbeg force one of them to kill the other (they messed up a lot and got a bad ending). It being a secret made the tragedy so organic they all still talk about the campaign years later. I will probably never have a campaign that good again. We all loved it for different reasons. In terms of party cohesion i had the party conscripted by the military after they were rescued from being kidnapped. Like session 1 was them all waking up bound on a pirate ship and they explained to each other how they got there.
The best example of this I've seen in a liveplay was in EXU: Calamity when Aabria and Sam, who I don't think had roleplayed together before, made the legendary decision to play divorcees whose positions forced them to work together. The tension was hilarious and the sense of backstory their bickering brought to the table made both characters feel more real. And of course it turned out they weren't over each other and wanted to protect each other even if they weren't prepared to concede any of their old arguments. It was funny and sweet and added so much to the show.
I played a campaign once where my elf fighter was best friends with a plasmoid wizard. They met when she lost a fight and awoke at the side of the road with the plasmoid trying to eat her thinking she was roadkill. From then, Lavinia and Puddi were inseparable, and Puddi always valued Lavinia for helping her with the game of "food or not food?".
I'm writing a D&D style humor story and have found this to be a really fun way to write character interactions! Several of the characters in the party have history long before the party was formed. The halfling wizard and his ranger daughter met the bard when he was having his flute enchanted. The father kept trying to play matchmaker with them, which led her to come out and admit that half-orc ladies were more to her liking. This creates tension and humor in the party when the half-orc paladin whose dad was a halfling joins the story.
On Dimension 20 they have an unaired session every season to a) establish any pre-existing relationships between PCs and between PCs and NPCs, and b) to actually roleplay out these relationships so that in episode 1 everyone is already in the swing of it.
My group just started our third major campaign, and though all the players really enjoy the slow burn of revealing their backstories over time as their characters grow closer, this time two players decided to play as an Eladrin father and daughter combo. Even two sessions in it's led to some really unique group interactions and we love it. When it comes to running one shots, these days I usually have my players all begin as an established party who already knows each other to save on time. In exchange, they recently surprised me by showing up as a group of four tortles who may have been teenage ninjas in their past lives! That led to some amazing moments, like them worshiping the god of pizza and spreading it everywhere they went.
My favorite barbarian (My PC) was a Bugbear who was befriended by a half-elf rogue (Other PC) - Who had been running scams together for months before the campaign. The rogue was the brains and my bugbear, with his mighty 5 INT/8 WIS and 20 STR was the brawns. It was an absolute blast to get to play someone else's challenged wrecking ball. Our table regularly compared us to George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
One of my favorite one shots was when I and another player both made our characters as Aasimar Rangers, and our backstories said we were from the same town. The DM laughed so hard at the odds (we had no clue the other made a similar character) and we rolled with it - the relation eventually wound up with my character being the father. It was such a fun dynamic and definitely gave us both a reason to stick together.
First time GMing. Its honestly a super SCARY experience. I've been a player for some time and eventually wanted to be a GM. Thankfully everyone is super cool and helping me on occasion. We're on our 8th session this weekend and my GF is joining my session.
@GinnyDi I try. I learn from my mistakes and give it my all! Right now there going to save children from Dragonborn mercs and then... a fight with a mommy and daddy basilisk to get to lvl 4.
In my most recent campaign, I'm the party's healer, and also well known as a prominent doctor in town. I had passing familiarity with everyone because of that, particularly one person that's gotten into a lot of scrapes over time and needed to be patched up, because he has sticky fingers. Meanwhile, I've also been tapped a few times by the less ethical members of the local government to perform various... unsavory methods of extracting information from prisoners over time. That got me introduced to another party member who tends to run in the underbelly of the city and cleans up crime scenes professionally. It was great getting to see a tactic that my group has kinda taken on organically over time be featured in your video! I know there's not really any wrong way to play tabletop games, but it sure helps reinforce that there are things that can be right!
Ginny Di strikes again! My group is probably sick of me sending your vids to them, but they're very helpful and I want you to keep making them as long as you want to, so I gotta feed the algorithm. In a Traveller game I played in, my PC dropped out of college and another PC was super smart and basically a legend at his college. His character was a few years older, so he was like this mythical creature come to life for my dropout techie. Another PC in that game had bailed me out of some financial trouble in my past and hadn't been paid back yet, so that was another great interparty connection.
Honestly just having pairs of characters makes everyone much more comfortable. I played at a table where we had six players - one were the privileged son of a merchant and his (reluctant) bodyguard, as you suggested; two were just war buddies, and my friend and I were drinking/travel buddies. It already made the first fight much more meaningful in watching out for one another, and the heir/guard had, over thr course of the campaign, one of the most beautiful bromances I've seen to this day, despite the players not knowing each other before the game started. It also makes at least one piece of your backstory immediatly meaningful at the table!
Your hair game is on point this episode. Our group used this systemized relationshippery in our spelljammer campaign to bond the characters together and it helped out big time. As an already established pirate crew there was no awkward first session where the warriors are puffing their chests at each other, vying for leadership or finding ways to softly railroad the characters into an adventuring party. They already had prepared inside jokes and battle tactics before we even started the first session. I've never been more proud as a DM.
I definitely like to weave my players' backstories together as much as I can. One of my favorite relationships was one my players came up with on their own, being inspired by the lore. The grung mystic saw the tortle ranger as his slave, where the tortle saw the grung as his best friend. The tortle's mind has been addled by a steady application of the grung's poison (the tortle wouldn't accept food from anyone other than his best friend). As a slave master, the grung didn't actually exert much control over the tortle, and basically only told the tortle to do things he would have done anyways.
100% i love the idea of pre-existing roleplay hooks like relationships. for a recent one-turned-four-shot i went a step further and added _motives_ (yeah, it was a murder mystery) and even _public perceptions_ to every character sheet on the table. the players picked from that pile and it really jump started the roleplay at the table. you _know_ what motives you have, and that'll get people interested in figuring out how to pull off their crime. and with public perceptions, players know what people think of their character and can play into or subvert that expectation
I was relatively new to the friend group in college, and I was entirely new to Dungeons and Dragons. When one of the veteran players suggested we could have an established relationship prior to the game beginning, I jumped on the chance with both feet. That relationship, he the OP feral human and me the little lizard person that could somehow control him, gave us some amazing RP opportunities, and an excuse to sit together so he could help me with the rules. It also made us closer out of game too. I will always appreciate him for that.
Some of the session 0 homework I give my players is to determine a "call-to-action" for why they would want to find a party and go adventuring. It's helpful to get the ball rolling! Also you mentioned "lone wolf" characters - while creating a backstory connection for them can absolutely be helpful, I maintain that these kinds of characters can work in 5e. If a character is edgy and moody and quiet, instead of roleplaying with them, their version of "roleplay" can be to describe their body language, their movements and behaviors as they react to stimuli. I once played an edgy rogue like this and we didn't have many issues with roleplay since my character still has presence in the scene, even if he wasn't talking. Lots of creative ways to solve problems!
My fiancé and I have recently realized this technique is such a great way to cut to the action, get rid of the messiness of characters struggling to find reasons to stick together, and getting to the good stuff so that they can RP from there! Forged in the Dark systems also tend to “cut to the action” like this. Thank you for sharing your experience with this version to the community!
Examples from Critical Role: Vax and Vex are brother and sister. Pike and Grog have a shared backstory. Caleb and Nott travelled together and have many schemes.
Also: Molly and Yasha share a history in the travlling circus. Orym, Fearne and Dorian travelled together. As did Laudna and Imogen. Ashton and FCG's backstory is interwoven as well ;)
Ginny's whole theme though fits into one of the best groups in Critical Role one-shots, The Darrington Brigade. There's no reason why those characters would get together, but because they volunteered because they saw Tarion's flyer, it became an immediate connection for this group of very different characters.
Played a one-shot of a Wildmount campaign and my character was a human fighter while the rest of my party were all some form of beast/magical race. I remember having connections with three members of the party: worked with a dark elf in the same soldiering company who unbeknownst to my character betrayed the company where I was the only one left (yet still on friendly terms), a dark elf/half orc who healed me after said betrayal, and a kobold that I caught trying to steal scrap from my things and won my character over with their lovably timid and mischievous personality. It is my favorite game so far. ❤
I played in a FATE Accelerated campaign set in the Dresden Files universe where two of our characters were best friends in high school, and one died in a cult ritual at 18 and became anchored to his best friend. The living one was a gnostic street preacher who was always on the run, and the ghost one was basically a kid who never grew up. The two together were a straight man-funny man duo and an absolute laugh riot! That game was our favorite one to play and produced some of our best characters!
This is such a great idea. I was playing a new game with some old friends about a month ago and it was our first session of a new RPG. One of the players rolled up his character and then started figuring out how he knew all the other characters. And that was how the rest of us met. It was so simple and so fun.
My newest character is from earth, she did the classic millennial joke of standing in a fairy circle being like "Oh no, it would be a shame to get kidnapped by a fairy" but she DID actually get sucked into the feywild. Eventually someone sent her to the elemental plane of Earth thinking thats where she was trying to get to. Then a Genie said "I can't get you to your home, but I can at least get you to the material plane, I'll send you to one of my followers so you're not alone, but you have to protect her." And that is how my character met our party's warlock, and she brought me in to the rest of the group.
@@ghostsuru8429 I mean millennial as in the gallows humor that we're ok with with it b/c the world is bad, not the old wives tale itself, lol. But yeah, definitely was a fun way, we're now in Barovia though, so she's learning that even in the fantasy land she's in things could end up sucking. haha
That's a really cool way to bring a character into the party! The first campaign that I played in long-term (I think it was close to 3 years before scheduling and DM burnout made us stop), my character became relevant by helping the party -- that she'd never met before -- fight a green dragon. She gained their trust quickly so the new-party-awkwardness wasn't really there, though creating pre-existing relationships within the party would have been cool too. I think you *can* make it work without pre-existing relationships but it is definitely harder. I just liked how my DM did things for my character, it made her relevant/important to the story, characters, and world immediately.
I’m running a campaign with 4 PCs at the moment. 3 of them knew each other prior to the events of the campaign, and 1 they met after the inciting incident. He happens to be familiar with their situation so it naturally made sense for him to join them. I played separate one shots with each pair of the 3, so they could form bonds/figure out how they felt about each others characters. It’s been a godsend because they now have connections that the other players don’t, and allows them to have smaller interconnected stories within the bigger story. Like my rogue having a mentor type bond with the son of my fighter. Or my fighter being one of the only people not to underestimate my Ranger. Or the rogue wanting to platform the Ranger and let him prove himself rather than fall into his imposter syndrome.
My current players drew a connection between two other players ranging from former lovers, distant relatives and former cellmates. A tiefling and a halfling drew the 'distant relatives' one and their web of logic for how this is possible made roleplay much more engaging.
tbf! we had a tabaxi and a half drow/half tiefling in our game who were cousins.... through a human (who adopted one and married the uncle of the other) so anything is possible really :D
I feel inspired by this video! I've had this idea for a character that I will not be playing next time around so if my friends read this comment, it won't spoil anything. The character is a Changeling Warlock/Bard who literally sold his soul for rock and roll (or fantasy equivalent) and, in the process, had to sacrifice (trap or something darker) a mortal traveller to appease his new patron. The character then takes on the form of this traveller and goes to the mortal plane as them. With connections, it would be SO much fun to go to someone in the group who likes to improvise and build a connection to them but have the connection be the false identity and tell them to make stuff up about you!
My first Pathfinder 2e character was was Chaotic Neutral and hearing how that alignment can be a problem, plus a part of her backstory is a tendency to bond deeply with people when she does, I wanted her to start bonded with someone. Well one of the other characters happened to be from a place I had to travel through to get to the adventure location, and ended up being the party moral compass. This meant that I could still play CN and do things like draw a dagger on a tavern patron without hesitation but still not needing to be forced to follow the adventure. At one point when the rest of the players were not committing to the next leg of the adventure path I even used this bond to push the game on "I know that you think this is the right thing to do, and if you say your going to I am in. So why don't we skip the decision making and just say yes to helping."
There was a clever spin on Traveller’s version in that Traveller campaign on the Glass Cannon Network, Voyagers of the Jump, where they don’t decide on the actual connection until a mid-session flashback so the two players can each pick a skill that they know will fit with the campaign. EDIT: Seth Skorkowsky has an example of this in a video he did of mechanics to borrow from other systems (full title escapes me) and he started using it in his own games because he was a player in the Glass Cannon campaign.
@theadventuresofhuckletaryfin there's a lego dnd set coming out soon, and it includes an adventure that can be played with the set itself. Lego is running a game that can be watched, and Ginny is one of the players.
Our group started a really cool mini campaign recently where our DM had us use relationship prompts in session zero. Since the campaign is meant to take place over several time periods, our party begins as a scrappy group of kids/teens. Having pre-existing group dynamics for this was wonderful. It felt really natural to fall into the mindset of our young characters -- who they stick close to, who they're wary of, who they look up to, who they want to protect... we've had three sessions and I'm so attached to this party already.
I almost always start a new campaign with a "you've all traveled here for the last couple of Rides in the same caravan" or whatever variation on that. I encourage people to talk to other players to talk to each other about pre-existing relationships, because thats often also the richest backstory and where I can take a lot of ploot hooks. Fantastic advice, Ginny
15:11 No way! I once played a player who built an automaton that was another player 0.o And oddly enough, my character _did_ become sisters with another character, and it was great! (And FWIW, we are both male IRL. The sister relationship was really compelling for RP.) And all that was with randos on RoleGate! The DM told us to include a relationship with at least one other player in our backstory, and shared brief blurbs from each of us, who then collaboratively expounded on our shared backstories.
One of the games I've played for many years, Mutant: Year Zero, has relations between PCs and NPCs as a central feature. In fact, putting yourself on the line for them is rewarded with EXP. That being said, this is very useful advice I wish we would've had when we started. Will definitely take it with me whenever I'm starting in a new group.
Love your point about the lone wolf character using a preexisting relationship to join a group. I actually used that in one of my more recent games. My character didn't even want to be an adventurer. He was a sword for hire and the party's artificer had hired me as a bodyguard. We had a lot of fun with him being all "I want to examine this place!" and me being all "It's not safe. You shouldn't go in there." Then he answered "I'm not going. WE are going. Who's paying you?" It worked out beautifully, was a blast, and let me play a very different sort from my usual flamboyant and high charisma sorts. I joked with our table about just being a weapon for the artificer, even if I did have more going on, just way more quietly.
I once DMd for a short campaign and one of the players wanted to try the "you killed my father" background, but they felt that something was missing in the character's depth, so I suggested that the other players could help. I cannot even begin to describe the joy I felt when they sent me the backgrounds of the entire family of the deceased man, each of them with a different outlook on the quest. Barbarian grandma included.
Two of my players wanted to do a similar thing: their characters were supposed to be offsprings of rivaling families, but these edgelords couldn't figure out who killed whose parents and why they'd stick together after that. The solution I suggested was that their families are stuck in a time loop killing each other for eternity and they need to find a way to break the cycle, which is why they travel alongside each other. They agreed, but asked me to ensure that their PCs would end up as orphans one way or another)))
I was running a campaign with two people who decided to have a backstory that revolves around each other. This made roll play with them so much fun. Whenever something interesting happened with one of them, the other got some spotlight too; and they were ok with that! It overall made the campaign all the more interesting. 1 year later they got into a relationship (not saying this will happen, it just was just so sweet).
Fantastic video! I’m really glad you brought up the imbalance that can occur when some players create prior relationships and others don’t. I played in a campaign that fizzled out where 2 players decided that they were incredibly close with each other before the campaign started, while the other 2 of us had no prior bonds. Sessions felt like they devolved into just a 2 player show, since these two constantly defaulted to making decisions with each other, and pretty much ignoring everyone else. Having this type of relationship building be deliberately fostered table-wide is incredibly important in order to ensure that no one feels left behind once play starts.
First, I want to say I love your videos! They are well produced, entertaining, and informative. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into them! Now, on to the heart of my comment. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a similar concept. The Gamemaster's Screen insert has a table called "How do I know you again?" with 50 different connections. Some are good, some are bad, but all of them are interesting. The few times I've used it have resulted in parties that were more cohesive and easier to get involved in the story.
We never got this campaign off the ground, but when I was making a character for a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, I had a back and forth with another player where we were crewmates on a ship. I was the ship's cook, he was the navigator, and the kickoff for our plotline was that my character found out they were working for pirates, and that the navigator was shanghai'd into service. He "freed" the navigator by kidnapping him and quit his job by setting the ship on fire. We were gonna pick up at the first village we end up in in session one, but for life reasons the campaign didnt even start.
I have a character recently who is incredibly cold and self centered Prince. Helping people purely cause it helps him and his goals out in the future. But everyone loves him because one of the other characters is a body guard who grew up with him and now they travel with each other. The body guard is the only one Prince would literally leave everyone to die for. And he’s had multiple moments of dropping everything to make sure his body guard is okay. It seems like despite how he treats others, everyone is invested in the story between the two and it makes them want to interact with one or the other. It’s been a lot of fun to see how that plays out.
Agreed! Things that make so much sense and are that much richer with examples and ideas to implement in our next games. Amazing point to especially include all players that might not jump in with as much alacrity to forge existing connections. And wooooo! Fate Core! “Character Creation IS play.” I reference Ginny’s inspiration video for all metacurrency in all my games. I dish it out for collaborative world-building, and will likely start adding it for building connections. “Choose to know!” I’ve been gorging on so many GMing videos to hone those skills, and I love videos and articles that help me be a better player. Next time I sit down as a player I’m going to announce I need a connection. 2:37 And by “Tabletop Police…” are we really talking about the Pinkertons? 😉
Roll 2d6 1. Family 1. Siblings 2. Distant Cousins 3. Family Friends 4. Cousins who are equally likely to inherit 5. In love with the same person 6. Black sheep of the family 2. Friends 1. Friendly Rivals 2. Childhood Friends 3. Friend of a Friend 4. Former co-workers 5. Neighbours 6. Mentor & Student of one trait or another 3. Fellowship 1. Longtime adventuring companions 2. Reluctant Allies 3. Bound together by a sacred oath 4. Members of a guild 5. Traveled to town together 6. One’s the brains, one’s the brawn 4. Secrets 1. The only survivors 2. The only two who know the secret 3. Members of a secret cult 4. Witnesses to an assassination 5. Each carries half of a treasure map 6. You keep him close because he knows your secret 5. War 1. Brothers in arms 2. Mercenary and Employer 3. Fought in the militia together 4. Served opposite sides in the last war 5. A blood debt still needs to be repaid 6. Refugee & Helping Hand 6. Magic 1. Both carry a curse 2. Trained together 3. Blessed by the same church 4. Servants of the same supernatural power 5. One dreamed that the other would save their life… long before they met 6. Linked together by a dark ritual OR, roll 1d20 Is a sibling of Was saved by Served with Protected by Adventured with Is a friendly rival of Childhood friend of Is magically bound to Survived with Escaped with Apprentice of Acolyte of Idolizes Drinking buddies with Business associate with Lost a bet to Is indebted to Was trained by Dueling partner of On the run with
I love your advice. I have connected relationships between my own PCs because i love the developing storylines they have with each other, but never thought to connect the players together in the same manner. As I have only months of D&D experiences under my belt, this is invaluable advice that I am certain I will seek to incorporate in my games, both as a player and DM.
Many decades ago, I played in a D&D-like fantasy game that had a lot of options for character design. The character that brought the party together was a wealthy sorceress, and as far as anyone else knew, my character was her mostly ineffectual valet and social secretary. He would occasionally suggest in very deferential tones that she use her magic for some purpose, and while everyone (including the other PCs) was distracted by her loud chants and dramatic gestures, my character would very quietly cast the needed spell--because he was actually a wizard, but he owed her for the student loans her family gave him when the two were in magic school together. Acting as her servant was how he discharged his debt. Amazingly, the other players never caught on.
This is a great video, and it's one of my favorite topics, figuring out how to bypass the awkwardness of early sessions and tie the characters together via backstory. 200% agree with the lone wolf point too, I remember Matt Colville bringing up a similar example in one of his vids before as well. I've got 3 different examples of how preexisting relationships were set up for campaigns I was in/ran. In-line with the first bit of advice from the video, I remember one game where for session 0, we formulated tie-ins for how our characters got roped in to an expedition. We decided my paladin was acting as the parole officer for the reformed rogue, and managed to arrange a bargain to get him released early if he volunteered for service--something that had to be done through his cleric contact and friend in the government (who wound up being ordered to join us by her superiors, cause someone wanted her office). Can definitely attest that it works--the early interactions were incredibly strong and interesting, and it was probably the best session 0 I've ever participated in. One other option is a common enemy. One of my favs was in a campaign I played where every player had been horribly wronged by some local, scummy criminal. The first session involved the individual players getting a letter about a chance to finally get back at him, which resulted in the party meeting up for the first time to take this guy down. Turns out the letters had been sent by the ghost of one of his victims, who had chosen our group to save the city from a much bigger threat. While nobody had any strong ties beforehand, they were formed pretty quickly and organically cause of our common goals, and it was a super memorable start. And one I've used a few times is via a theme game. There's one game I've run that had two character creation guidelines: one, everyone has joined up with a mafia ran by a vampire, and two, each player has some kind of undead tie-in (from practicing necromancy to being a vampire spawn), for an undead mafia. There's an expectation of teamwork out the gate, and provides a baseline for familiarity / simple relationships, but it also still keeps the door open for deeper relationships. Plus, theme games sometimes can open up character ideas you wouldn't normally play (e.g., the mafia allowed for way more 'morally gray' characters.)
Earlier this year, I joined an ongoing campaign with a tiefling Harper who was sent to spy on another PC, a half-elf who happens to be her semi-distant cousin. My character is very reserved and not trusting of other people, but she needs to gain the trust of everyone in the party to make her cousin open up, and it's led to some of my favourite roleplay moments I've ever had at a D&D table.
As someone who was DMing since probably before you played your first game, I am always impressed by how often your little tricks are something I already recommend or will start recommending based on how well you made your case. You are a credit to the table top community.
I implemented this rule as a DM 2 campaigns ago and I agree Ginny, it makes the roleplay just so much better, when there are pre-existing relationships between the PCs! Fantastic video.
GINNY POSTED A NEW VIDEO!!! Thank you so much for your helpful tips!! I have been playing DND because of you and I am so happy that I have found your channel ❤
I've been doing improv classes for a while now, and this was a note I got that made a lot of scenes click. You can just decide your history, and knowing who you are *to each other* is invaluable for showing you how to improvise/role play.
I always give the players a reason to have gathered before even a one shot. Recently, ran a one shot where the party was being hired to track down a missing prince and bring him back alive. One person played a criminal that was given the chance to earn freedom, and another played a member of the Guard that worked with them first hand after they were arrested. Everyone else was an adventurer, and had already established a solid reputation within the guild itself. That gave everyone an excuse to already be at least mild acquaintances, or at the very least be aware of each other's accomplishments.
yeah I get that, a good part of the french community can tell you that it worked so well with show "aventure" we just jump with a four member party composed of a half-devil wizard, a semi-elemental ranger, a dwarf blacksmith with a robot arm and a human paladin/inquisitor of lumos and we learned who they are while following them
Thank you for posting this- a natural device for party cohesion and good roleplay is sorely needed for so many tables. I'll definitely be implementing this uin my Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Dungeon Crawl games as well!
I played a bard where the party had two bards and we where in a band together. I was the quiet type person cause of a stutter and the other bard was a chipper over excited person that dragged me everywhere.
I love your videos Ginny, i am very depressed and they keep me going at work, and in times of quiet solitude where those long stretches might torture me otherwise. I appreciate your work and your affect while doing it. Your videos make me happy, and even get real laughs out of me when im feeling like shit. Thank you!
Sometimes you can improv character relationships, or give the party prompts for someone to fill in on how they'd be connected to you. For example... I was in a one-shot module last weekend. As such, we had to already know each other, but didn't have much time to coordinate backstories, so there was some hand-wavy "you all already know each other" after we gave the elevator pitches of our characters' backgrounds. The game was going to start with us at the after party of a wedding. But my character was kind of an edgy, brooding bastard with a revenge plot, so why would he be at some random wedding party? So I said to the group, "I had learned that one of the people I'm trying to get revenge on is at this wedding, so my character basically said to the group 'someone get me into this party'" and one of the other players says, without missing a beat, "Oh, that was me for sure!" ... and yes, it was the bard who said that : )
Great video. I have always found having players form pre-existing relationships as part of the session zero to be a great starter for this. In my new campaign, I gave the players a foundation, "You all grew up in this village (the starter area), so you already know each other". I gave them some starter ideas, friends, romance, frenemies, etc, and let them run with it. It worked out really well.
My husband and I often make up a shared backstory for games we play in. It all backfired once though, when we decided to play an adventurous but naïve academic and his over-protective mother-hen cousin convinced their family would blame her if she let him walk off a cliff. The rest of the party kept assuming my character secretly had a crush and I had to remind them every few sessions that we were not that kind of family 😫
I did this for my campaign as well. I had 3 of them, that already got along, be pirates that used to sail together during the Orc Wars. One of them was the captain and the other two were his officers. It worked out quite nicely. The others had firm relationships, even family, with other NPCs. That worked out even better than I had hoped. It brought the whole team together and they were invested in each other's stories. It helped them play their characters better as well. So I agree with you, it's a great idea and does make player easier and more fluid.
Played with a group where 4/6th of the party were siblings and it was ridiculous fun. Sibling banter is some of the best drama. I've played spouses with other PCs in a few games too. A dragon burns down a tavern? "My love, it's our 14th anniversary all over again."
I've seen this trick before, but it's a great idea! I'll add it to my homebrew list. Noodle incidents are indeed another great thing that comes of this. I've got this inherently in the Pathfinder game I'm running currently. They're all goblins who are part of the same extended family hunter-gatherer band in the paleolithic. It makes coming up with plots related to their backstories much easier, too. The inciting incident that made them go off on a journey was a curse turning the band's last shaman into a ghoul, so now they need to go find the other half of their extended family that split off some years back to break the curse that's on the shaman's son, and to find a replacement shaman who can teach the shaman's apprentice.
"You don't generally become someone's sibling over the course of the adventure" happened twice to me. First time was one of our bards and my wizard share a half brother, that my wizard didn't know existed, but share no blood between them. The second time our wizard latched onto my cleric as a brother figure but if THAT doesnt count she died and her disease became the next player character that was JUST born and my cleric gave them his last name.
To your point about the RP buddy system, I turned my "Campfire Stories" into duets several months ago, and the results were exactly as you described....AMAZING!
Bond mechanics are Great for Role-playing. The system I've been using is based on Dungeon World's take on Bonds, where exploring and developing your Bonds with the other players is one of the main systems that rewards XP. You're just as incentivized to kill an epic boss monster as you are to meaningfully role-play with the other character. My addition to this is to better define how to write these Bonds so that they more clearly define what your current relationship is, and how you'd be interesting in exploring how the relationship might develop. A State & a Hook. "Daniel seems naive to the ugly reality of the word."
This is part of character creation in the RPG Monster of the Week, and each of the playbooks (think classes or backgrounds) comes with premade relationship prompts to help facilitate this discussion. It works out great.
I feel like this is explaining the players doing their part to tell a good story. Like poor players make video game main characters that the DM has to fit together into a party whereas good players either do it themselves or make it very easy for the DM to do that. One of the best players I’ve had in this area was actually a first timer who irl was very friendly so he naturally wanted to be friends with characters in game and it bonded everyone in about 10min
Excellent tip Ginny. It works every time. In one campaign, at session zero, I suggested the characters could be all siblings and children of the local Baron. They liked the idea. We rolled to see in what order they were born. After that, they created their characters and determined how they relate emotionally to each of their siblings. One of my best campaigns.
I joined a Curse of Strahd game halfway through, so to give my character a purpose for being there another player offered to make our characters best friends that were separated a long time ago. The best part is this other PC is a complete menace that nobody likes because he makes everyone miserable…all except his best friend a.k.a my character. It’s surprisingly really sweet.
I've been chaperoneing a DnD group of middle schoolers and they pulled me in to play a character. I've never actually played DnD, but I love watching your videos. Watching this one seems just so perfect as we recently went around the table introducing ourselves. Probably inspired by you, I wrote in a prior connection with each student's character, so everyone would feel connected. I'm not sure if they needed the help though. Most had already made character to character connections. Anyways, I've already seen some of the consequences of these relationships. One of the students decided to grab my character and just chuck them down the pathway towards our destination. I checked my notes, and our characters grew up together as friends leading me to just go along with it, and with athletics as my dump stat, this ends with me landing flat on my face in cloud of prestidigitation glitter and taking the first damage of the campaign. Keep pouring your heart into your content! You never know how many distant people you effect.
JUST talked about this last night over a cup of tea. As players you know your expected to form together into a group, but even the best DMs can struggle to railroad you into this first little bit. Having pre-formed bonds lets the narrative put strain or lessen tension on people’s interpersonal relationships to see how that impacts their decision making!
Yes Ginny! I do this! Because we can't all meet at an inn and become family. No it doesn't work that way. In session 0 we determine the relationship of the characters and I bring some concepts to throw out to the players. Love this!
At 8:26, the way that you transitioned into the text from taking a drink? I loved that. It made it feel more intimate and chill. I think the advice is great!! I like how Daggerheart does this, like you mentioned.
I've just realized that every time I've done this, it has been loads of fun. I'm going to try my best from now on to suggest this to other players. Great video!
that's an amazing advice, that i've been using for a while now! i think that my favorite example is when i ran a oneshot inspired by EXU: Calamity - where i made each player some important figure in a very powerful city. regardless of backstory, i tasked every player to have some relationship and preexisting opinion over at least 2 other players, and the RP was magnificent. when introduced, each player already had someone to interact with, and a role in the catalist event of the oneshot, leading to a already existing dynamic and a very quick way to get to the heavy tones of the oneshot.
This is one of my favorite rp tips! As a GM i implement it every time we do a session 0, and as a player i’ve had many games where i’ve chosen to be tied to another pc. I’m an only child irl but i’ve had fantasy brothers in two long-term campaigns.
Our current campaign had us started with all characters being in some way tied to my character (because main plot reason only the DM and I knew). Three players are her adoptive children, one knows her through her through her late mentor and the last party member met her through delivering mail to her on the regular. Even our newest player made it so that their character knows her (a fey creature always recognizes his queen as they put it) It's created such a fun dynamic and stuff hits different. PCs dropping during combat is more dire, rp moments and reveals are intense, the main story where everyone is pulled in a different direction contrasts the family dynamic really well, it's so good. Even if not to this level, I highly recommend playing from time to time that characters already know each other/someone in the party to some extent.
Great advice! I had a fantasy campaign that in session zero we created short adventures involving each of the PCs and NPCs. I then bonded those characters throughout the first adventure. In another game I created archetypes that already knew one another but left details to the players.
This was a thing in the first 5e campaign i played and has been a staple of every game our friendgroup does since then. Some were sisters, some friends, others battle buddies, the newest crew is one who gets hired occasionally to go hunt monsters who picked up a guide and a few muscle men on the way to the campaign start. This is an absolutely glorious tool that I wish more people embraced because having it as a standard in most games I don't know how people lived without this.
This is amazing advice. My best friend and I joined an existing group of 4 rl strangers. We made Goblin Warlock brothers with rival patrons, and we riff new backstory lore every game that makes the other players ask us lots of questions, leading to deeper party friendships.
In my groups we have done a version of this. In one we learned before session one that we would all be arriving on a new continent on the same ship. This allowed us to play by post how our relationships developed throughout our sea voyage. In the group I DM for they were all part of the same organization and had been training and travelling together extensively already. Both versions worked really well, I am happy to say. Oh, one thing though: this kind of pre-excisting relationship in game is even more important if the players don't know each other from earlier.
I always liked the way that the cypher system does it! It gives you a lot of neat little seeds for connecting to other PCs pre-campaign, both flavorful and mechanical!
Good advice. I have found my games go way better when players do this on their own, and even better when we do it as a group in a structured way. Kids on Bikes is my personal favorite format for this. The depths of emotion and connection I got in the 4 campaigns I ran were amazing
just realised all my favourite campaigns are the ones where another player character immediately attached to another/mine. implementing this at the start is such a cool idea!!! I have a player who (and by the way, it was basically their first time playing a roleplay game) in the first session of the campaign (a oneshot set 50 years beforehand), immediately improvised a tragic connection to the two other players -- a 'i was secretly in love with you' subtext (that became text) and a 'what happened after highschool, we said we'd be friends forever' conflict that drove the story and it was so crazy and plot thickening!!! I'll deffo be carrying this forward, as usually I just make everyone work for the same company/etc. awesome advice!!!!
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks to Idle Champions, you can log in and use code GINN-YGET-GOLD to unlock Karlach and 3 Gold Karlach Chests! Not sure how to claim a code in-game? Check out this video on UA-cam for an easy step-by-step tutorial: ua-cam.com/video/xFxlqZ1Awec/v-deo.htmlsi=yUKUqTDRDEBHx-oy. (Expires Aug. 31, 2024)
I laughed so hard at "I'm committing tax fraud" that I woke up my wife, and am now in trouble.
Thank you so much for that combination code that came with the free Karlach champion. I just recently started a 3rd account on my new Samsung Galaxy Tablet, and I was really hurting for some good champions, especially since some of the champions I got was just a few members of the Absolute Advesaries which are characters from Baldur's Gate 3, but i only had the Dark Urge (and now Gale), getting Karlach from your code was fantastic for me and helped me get through a lot of adventures that required 2 good tanks. Getting Karlach with the code really helped me out.
Edit: Also, getting a combinations code as part of a sponsorship for a youtube video is very unusual because most combo codes are provided during an idle champions live stream (which I rarely have time to stop by for), so when I saw this I jumped on it because it was so easy to get something that I wanted for free and yet at the same be potentially helping the content creator. :)
I'm in a game where we all decided to be siblings. It's been amazing for RP, we don't even need to work out details. All we need to do is reference a vague past event. I once said 'This is just like when you got me grounded' and the other player ran with it with no prior planning; His response was 'For the last time, that wasn't my hedgehog!' and now the whole family keeps referencing the hedgehog... My sister still blames me :P
😂😂 incredible. I love it when people are so happy to play along with those kind of jokes! D&D at its BEST
I have done this even when not playing the same race. When people question it, we just look at them like, "What are you talking about".
Back in second edition we played lawful good quintuplets of rangers, paladins, and a cleric. Coming from Army based D&D, the GM just couldn't handle us, so the campaign died quickly. The main thing that came from it was our moto "The family that slays together, stays together.
@@scottmilner1951 I mean, that's one way to find out you're adopted... :D
We had this as well. We each had to come up with a memory that involved us and one other player. I loved just hearing the memories that the other players come up with more me and for each other. Even silly comments managed to get worked into how we saw our own characters and played them.
My favorite recently has been, "Regardless of your varied backstories, include a reason why you've been a regular at this pub for the last 4-6 months." This way they don't have to be great friends with each other, but they at least know each other a bit because they're the regulars at the same pub 👍
This is a great starter :D
That is BOMB!
This is my style of starting backgrounds for PCs and NPCs
Pick a hard and fast thing that makes it work
Then you get the soft details that make it gel together
So...alcoholics. Got it! :-) LOL
I’ve been playing d&d for a few years, and the most memorable campaigns were always ones with very close pc relationships. A friend and I teamed up to play a married couple without mentioning it to the other players to see how long it took them to catch on. Now it’s a tradition to make our characters know each other before the start of every campaign we play!
😂😂 that's BRILLIANT.
And I'm betting now they try to guess your connection before the start of the campaign?
@@GinnyDioh absolutely, the relationships evolved from “they’re my older sister” to increasingly ridiculous scenarios like “we met while we were both trying to rob the same necromancer and then started arguing so loudly we both got caught and ended up imprisoned together” 😂
@@stardust5544 bravo 👏👏
@@stardust5544
I love this so much xd
This sounds so much fun!
@@stardust5544 I didn't know there was a right way to build a character but I think you may have figured it out 😂
My absolute favourite example of this is in World's Beyond Number, where they did a full mini-campaign of all their characters meeting as children, having a little adventure that formed the basis of who they were, and gave them their first ever class features, and then they all reunited as adults at the beginning of the *actual* campaign. I would *love* to do something like that in a game of my own one day.
One of the best games I was ever a part of is where we all started as kids and became childhood friends in the same village. We played out a story where something catastrophic happened and we all had to escape and we all got split up. Then we jumped forward as our adult characters and found each other to reunite and fight the baddies who took our home. The banter was AMAZING.
Love this!
Like "It" 😊
My first AF&D campaign was similar. We were all born under a Blue Moon in the same village and were trained to be heroes who could potentially fulfill the prophecy.
In the campaign we are currently playing the eldest children of a Halfling village who got attacked by the evil army and we are now stopping them from ransacking other villages under the guidance of Potartar, the Goddess of Harvest and Health. Her boones to her followers are the abillity to make divine white potatoes, and an immediate knowledge of all foragable plants in an area. We set up kitchens in each town to feed refugees and are working to end starvation.
We thought the home brew of Potartar would be insignificant and funny, but her avatar Mrs. Potato head has visited her Paladin and spoke to him with Mrs. Doubtfire's wisdom twice. She makes sure we always have rations.
I love your point about the lone wolf character being viable with a preexisting connection to another PC! This is what my friend and I did in one of our campaigns.
We played as student wizards from Strixhaven who’d been assigned to partake in the mission as a last-ditch effort to save ourselves from getting expelled. My friend played the “dead inside, disappointed, done” Goth lone wolf whose parents were rich enough to pay him out of trouble, but he stuck with the party the whole way through because I played his lover, a rambunctious ball of energy and red hair, whom he wanted to protect. We ended up being the party’s resident comedy duo. It was so fun and memorable.
DnD mom out here helping everyone be the hero she always knew they could be. Thanks, Ginny.
LOL... One of the games I'm DMing right now has a PC that is the Party "Mother"
edit: I must have been tired when I typed this... Typo corrections and clarity.
I'm playing a dad who always wanted to go on an adventure - it was a sort of "gap year" thing but their life got complicated, responsibility built up with kids, jobs and business....now their kids have grown up and they're finally ready to go on that adventure from when they were younger.
I'm the "dad" playing a paladin that protects his companions. He is making sure everyone comes home. Come hell or high water. We are in Avernus. (Not an actual dad)
I love all of these responses, guys. Keep it up.
@@davidjennings2179reminds me of the Dungeons ‘n Daddies podcast, where four dads ended up whisked to a fantasy land in their van and have to find their kids.
Immediately thought of the interactions between Clint and Natasha in Avengers. They'd been in separate movies, but with a few well-done interactions ("You and I remember Budapest very differently!") we got the dynamic between them and it gelled in a way that spoke of years of camaraderie.
Yeah it felt believable enough that I thought I missed a movie lol
In the last Fantasy game I ran, the starting premise was that the player characters were already an adventuring party, and were celebrating their big win over the self-titled 'Goblin King'.
I started the game in a tavern, with the player characters carousing after having just been paid, and then had the patrons ask them about their recent adventure.
I then made the combat tutorial be a flashback to defeating the goblin king, using the bar table as our battlemap, and trinkets, coins, and wine-corks as our tokens.
This gave the player characyers a sense of comraderie, a reputation as capable adventurers, and fans at the inn who they'd told their exploits to.
I actually wrote a TTRPG that is all about telling the exploits afterwards - you roll not for how successful you were, but how you succeeded and whether the listeners believe you!
That's a fantastic use of In Media Res.
wow, I love this!
@@valerynorth xDD Your Big Fish story is TOO amazing, ha ha ha!!
I'm an old curmudgeon who has been playing RPGs for long enough now that when the big surge in popularity hit circa 2020, my greatest dismay was watching "D&D Advice" videos on UA-cam where people would make the same ignorant recommendations that I saw folks make on forums twenty years ago. It's been extremely faith-restoring for me to watch you (Ginny) catch up on twenty years of theory in just four short years, such that now you're able to give a complete and correct breakdown of D&D's flaws, how other games have fixed it, why D&D hasn't fixed them, and why the best way to fix things is to change the system itself to suit your goals. I hope your fans appreciate the way you've bootstrapped yourself into becoming an genuine guru at this, while so many ostensibly-more-experienced guys on other channels haven't evolved at all! KEEP IT UP GINNY!
I genuinely don't even know how Ginny manages to put together all this in-depth, well thought out advice with such great production quality.
YES! THIS!! Been playing D&D since 1978 and I wish Ginny and her videos were available back then. Ginny Di, you are breathtakingly wonderful in your presentations of the game.
Exactly how i feel. Ive been at a table for 12 years with people who have been playing for 30, and we talk about ideas she breaks down on a regular basis. Most recently her artificer video, ehich is gold in my opinion.
Do you have any favorite forums that are still around?
@@gae0tic Certainly none that are still around from those days. Finding people who have anything new or useful to say about RPGs is a tall order!
I added a mechanic my players like and pitched it to my GM for his campaign and I simply call it: "The amount you talk is the amount you travel."
So it takes 3 days to get from point A to point B. You aren't gonna be silent the entire 3 day walk, so to simulate the time traveled, banter, talk, get to know each other, talk trash about last encounter, about the big bad. They should eat? Alright what does your character eat? Where do you find that on their journey? It forces everyone to get acquainted a lot faster, suddenly banter shows up in combat. And they don't get the new area/location without talking. They HAVE to talk, whether it's dinner plans or just like talking.
amazing
This is a REALLY good idea!
Absolutely genius, for sure requires a reasonably talented GM, but definitely stealing.
That's brilliant.
I ran a campaign where two character had a relationship as lovers that they kept secret even from me. Without knowing about it i had the bbeg force one of them to kill the other (they messed up a lot and got a bad ending). It being a secret made the tragedy so organic they all still talk about the campaign years later. I will probably never have a campaign that good again. We all loved it for different reasons. In terms of party cohesion i had the party conscripted by the military after they were rescued from being kidnapped. Like session 1 was them all waking up bound on a pirate ship and they explained to each other how they got there.
The best example of this I've seen in a liveplay was in EXU: Calamity when Aabria and Sam, who I don't think had roleplayed together before, made the legendary decision to play divorcees whose positions forced them to work together. The tension was hilarious and the sense of backstory their bickering brought to the table made both characters feel more real. And of course it turned out they weren't over each other and wanted to protect each other even if they weren't prepared to concede any of their old arguments. It was funny and sweet and added so much to the show.
I played a campaign once where my elf fighter was best friends with a plasmoid wizard. They met when she lost a fight and awoke at the side of the road with the plasmoid trying to eat her thinking she was roadkill. From then, Lavinia and Puddi were inseparable, and Puddi always valued Lavinia for helping her with the game of "food or not food?".
"Food or not food" XDDD! That's adorable.
Also good for a Minthara like character
A dark elf from a Lolthite settlement having to unlearn all their gendered customs
I'm writing a D&D style humor story and have found this to be a really fun way to write character interactions! Several of the characters in the party have history long before the party was formed. The halfling wizard and his ranger daughter met the bard when he was having his flute enchanted. The father kept trying to play matchmaker with them, which led her to come out and admit that half-orc ladies were more to her liking. This creates tension and humor in the party when the half-orc paladin whose dad was a halfling joins the story.
On Dimension 20 they have an unaired session every season to a) establish any pre-existing relationships between PCs and between PCs and NPCs, and b) to actually roleplay out these relationships so that in episode 1 everyone is already in the swing of it.
Incorporating this into a session zero seems like a good idea
My group just started our third major campaign, and though all the players really enjoy the slow burn of revealing their backstories over time as their characters grow closer, this time two players decided to play as an Eladrin father and daughter combo. Even two sessions in it's led to some really unique group interactions and we love it.
When it comes to running one shots, these days I usually have my players all begin as an established party who already knows each other to save on time. In exchange, they recently surprised me by showing up as a group of four tortles who may have been teenage ninjas in their past lives! That led to some amazing moments, like them worshiping the god of pizza and spreading it everywhere they went.
My favorite barbarian (My PC) was a Bugbear who was befriended by a half-elf rogue (Other PC) - Who had been running scams together for months before the campaign. The rogue was the brains and my bugbear, with his mighty 5 INT/8 WIS and 20 STR was the brawns. It was an absolute blast to get to play someone else's challenged wrecking ball. Our table regularly compared us to George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
One of my favorite one shots was when I and another player both made our characters as Aasimar Rangers, and our backstories said we were from the same town. The DM laughed so hard at the odds (we had no clue the other made a similar character) and we rolled with it - the relation eventually wound up with my character being the father. It was such a fun dynamic and definitely gave us both a reason to stick together.
First time GMing. Its honestly a super SCARY experience. I've been a player for some time and eventually wanted to be a GM. Thankfully everyone is super cool and helping me on occasion. We're on our 8th session this weekend and my GF is joining my session.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it! DMing is honestly one of the scariest things you can do so it's amazing that you're putting yourself out there!! 🥰
@GinnyDi I try. I learn from my mistakes and give it my all! Right now there going to save children from Dragonborn mercs and then... a fight with a mommy and daddy basilisk to get to lvl 4.
In my most recent campaign, I'm the party's healer, and also well known as a prominent doctor in town. I had passing familiarity with everyone because of that, particularly one person that's gotten into a lot of scrapes over time and needed to be patched up, because he has sticky fingers. Meanwhile, I've also been tapped a few times by the less ethical members of the local government to perform various... unsavory methods of extracting information from prisoners over time. That got me introduced to another party member who tends to run in the underbelly of the city and cleans up crime scenes professionally. It was great getting to see a tactic that my group has kinda taken on organically over time be featured in your video! I know there's not really any wrong way to play tabletop games, but it sure helps reinforce that there are things that can be right!
Ginny Di strikes again! My group is probably sick of me sending your vids to them, but they're very helpful and I want you to keep making them as long as you want to, so I gotta feed the algorithm. In a Traveller game I played in, my PC dropped out of college and another PC was super smart and basically a legend at his college. His character was a few years older, so he was like this mythical creature come to life for my dropout techie. Another PC in that game had bailed me out of some financial trouble in my past and hadn't been paid back yet, so that was another great interparty connection.
Honestly just having pairs of characters makes everyone much more comfortable. I played at a table where we had six players - one were the privileged son of a merchant and his (reluctant) bodyguard, as you suggested; two were just war buddies, and my friend and I were drinking/travel buddies.
It already made the first fight much more meaningful in watching out for one another, and the heir/guard had, over thr course of the campaign, one of the most beautiful bromances I've seen to this day, despite the players not knowing each other before the game started.
It also makes at least one piece of your backstory immediatly meaningful at the table!
Your hair game is on point this episode. Our group used this systemized relationshippery in our spelljammer campaign to bond the characters together and it helped out big time. As an already established pirate crew there was no awkward first session where the warriors are puffing their chests at each other, vying for leadership or finding ways to softly railroad the characters into an adventuring party. They already had prepared inside jokes and battle tactics before we even started the first session. I've never been more proud as a DM.
I definitely like to weave my players' backstories together as much as I can. One of my favorite relationships was one my players came up with on their own, being inspired by the lore. The grung mystic saw the tortle ranger as his slave, where the tortle saw the grung as his best friend. The tortle's mind has been addled by a steady application of the grung's poison (the tortle wouldn't accept food from anyone other than his best friend). As a slave master, the grung didn't actually exert much control over the tortle, and basically only told the tortle to do things he would have done anyways.
100% i love the idea of pre-existing roleplay hooks like relationships. for a recent one-turned-four-shot i went a step further and added _motives_ (yeah, it was a murder mystery) and even _public perceptions_ to every character sheet on the table. the players picked from that pile and it really jump started the roleplay at the table. you _know_ what motives you have, and that'll get people interested in figuring out how to pull off their crime. and with public perceptions, players know what people think of their character and can play into or subvert that expectation
I was relatively new to the friend group in college, and I was entirely new to Dungeons and Dragons. When one of the veteran players suggested we could have an established relationship prior to the game beginning, I jumped on the chance with both feet. That relationship, he the OP feral human and me the little lizard person that could somehow control him, gave us some amazing RP opportunities, and an excuse to sit together so he could help me with the rules. It also made us closer out of game too. I will always appreciate him for that.
Some of the session 0 homework I give my players is to determine a "call-to-action" for why they would want to find a party and go adventuring. It's helpful to get the ball rolling!
Also you mentioned "lone wolf" characters - while creating a backstory connection for them can absolutely be helpful, I maintain that these kinds of characters can work in 5e. If a character is edgy and moody and quiet, instead of roleplaying with them, their version of "roleplay" can be to describe their body language, their movements and behaviors as they react to stimuli. I once played an edgy rogue like this and we didn't have many issues with roleplay since my character still has presence in the scene, even if he wasn't talking.
Lots of creative ways to solve problems!
My fiancé and I have recently realized this technique is such a great way to cut to the action, get rid of the messiness of characters struggling to find reasons to stick together, and getting to the good stuff so that they can RP from there! Forged in the Dark systems also tend to “cut to the action” like this. Thank you for sharing your experience with this version to the community!
Examples from Critical Role:
Vax and Vex are brother and sister.
Pike and Grog have a shared backstory.
Caleb and Nott travelled together and have many schemes.
Also:
Molly and Yasha share a history in the travlling circus.
Orym, Fearne and Dorian travelled together.
As did Laudna and Imogen.
Ashton and FCG's backstory is interwoven as well ;)
Ginny's whole theme though fits into one of the best groups in Critical Role one-shots, The Darrington Brigade. There's no reason why those characters would get together, but because they volunteered because they saw Tarion's flyer, it became an immediate connection for this group of very different characters.
Played a one-shot of a Wildmount campaign and my character was a human fighter while the rest of my party were all some form of beast/magical race. I remember having connections with three members of the party: worked with a dark elf in the same soldiering company who unbeknownst to my character betrayed the company where I was the only one left (yet still on friendly terms), a dark elf/half orc who healed me after said betrayal, and a kobold that I caught trying to steal scrap from my things and won my character over with their lovably timid and mischievous personality. It is my favorite game so far. ❤
I played in a FATE Accelerated campaign set in the Dresden Files universe where two of our characters were best friends in high school, and one died in a cult ritual at 18 and became anchored to his best friend. The living one was a gnostic street preacher who was always on the run, and the ghost one was basically a kid who never grew up. The two together were a straight man-funny man duo and an absolute laugh riot! That game was our favorite one to play and produced some of our best characters!
That definitely sounds like the sort of nonsense you’d get in a Dresden Files novel. 😂
Jim Butcher would be proud. Well done, that sounds like an amazing campaign to be in.
This is such a great idea. I was playing a new game with some old friends about a month ago and it was our first session of a new RPG. One of the players rolled up his character and then started figuring out how he knew all the other characters. And that was how the rest of us met. It was so simple and so fun.
My newest character is from earth, she did the classic millennial joke of standing in a fairy circle being like "Oh no, it would be a shame to get kidnapped by a fairy" but she DID actually get sucked into the feywild. Eventually someone sent her to the elemental plane of Earth thinking thats where she was trying to get to. Then a Genie said "I can't get you to your home, but I can at least get you to the material plane, I'll send you to one of my followers so you're not alone, but you have to protect her." And that is how my character met our party's warlock, and she brought me in to the rest of the group.
That's not a millennial joke. That was an old wives tale from centuries ago. But man, that sounds like a fun way to start.
@@ghostsuru8429 I mean millennial as in the gallows humor that we're ok with with it b/c the world is bad, not the old wives tale itself, lol. But yeah, definitely was a fun way, we're now in Barovia though, so she's learning that even in the fantasy land she's in things could end up sucking. haha
That's a really cool way to bring a character into the party! The first campaign that I played in long-term (I think it was close to 3 years before scheduling and DM burnout made us stop), my character became relevant by helping the party -- that she'd never met before -- fight a green dragon. She gained their trust quickly so the new-party-awkwardness wasn't really there, though creating pre-existing relationships within the party would have been cool too. I think you *can* make it work without pre-existing relationships but it is definitely harder. I just liked how my DM did things for my character, it made her relevant/important to the story, characters, and world immediately.
100% want to steal this at some point
Haha that's cool
I’m running a campaign with 4 PCs at the moment. 3 of them knew each other prior to the events of the campaign, and 1 they met after the inciting incident. He happens to be familiar with their situation so it naturally made sense for him to join them. I played separate one shots with each pair of the 3, so they could form bonds/figure out how they felt about each others characters. It’s been a godsend because they now have connections that the other players don’t, and allows them to have smaller interconnected stories within the bigger story. Like my rogue having a mentor type bond with the son of my fighter. Or my fighter being one of the only people not to underestimate my Ranger. Or the rogue wanting to platform the Ranger and let him prove himself rather than fall into his imposter syndrome.
My current players drew a connection between two other players ranging from former lovers, distant relatives and former cellmates. A tiefling and a halfling drew the 'distant relatives' one and their web of logic for how this is possible made roleplay much more engaging.
tbf! we had a tabaxi and a half drow/half tiefling in our game who were cousins.... through a human (who adopted one and married the uncle of the other) so anything is possible really :D
My first pc was a halfling who had a human sister which was fun to explain to others lol. My halfling mum married her human dad and made them family.
I feel inspired by this video!
I've had this idea for a character that I will not be playing next time around so if my friends read this comment, it won't spoil anything. The character is a Changeling Warlock/Bard who literally sold his soul for rock and roll (or fantasy equivalent) and, in the process, had to sacrifice (trap or something darker) a mortal traveller to appease his new patron. The character then takes on the form of this traveller and goes to the mortal plane as them.
With connections, it would be SO much fun to go to someone in the group who likes to improvise and build a connection to them but have the connection be the false identity and tell them to make stuff up about you!
My first Pathfinder 2e character was was Chaotic Neutral and hearing how that alignment can be a problem, plus a part of her backstory is a tendency to bond deeply with people when she does, I wanted her to start bonded with someone. Well one of the other characters happened to be from a place I had to travel through to get to the adventure location, and ended up being the party moral compass. This meant that I could still play CN and do things like draw a dagger on a tavern patron without hesitation but still not needing to be forced to follow the adventure. At one point when the rest of the players were not committing to the next leg of the adventure path I even used this bond to push the game on "I know that you think this is the right thing to do, and if you say your going to I am in. So why don't we skip the decision making and just say yes to helping."
There was a clever spin on Traveller’s version in that Traveller campaign on the Glass Cannon Network, Voyagers of the Jump, where they don’t decide on the actual connection until a mid-session flashback so the two players can each pick a skill that they know will fit with the campaign.
EDIT: Seth Skorkowsky has an example of this in a video he did of mechanics to borrow from other systems (full title escapes me) and he started using it in his own games because he was a player in the Glass Cannon campaign.
Im looking forward to seeing you in the lego dnd session!
the what?
@theadventuresofhuckletaryfin there's a lego dnd set coming out soon, and it includes an adventure that can be played with the set itself. Lego is running a game that can be watched, and Ginny is one of the players.
I'm so excited for everybody to see it! 🥰 It was so much fun to play!
@@TheGreatFunguywhen and where?
@@squali1930 April 6th, 17:00 BST on the Lego website
Our group started a really cool mini campaign recently where our DM had us use relationship prompts in session zero.
Since the campaign is meant to take place over several time periods, our party begins as a scrappy group of kids/teens.
Having pre-existing group dynamics for this was wonderful. It felt really natural to fall into the mindset of our young characters -- who they stick close to, who they're wary of, who they look up to, who they want to protect... we've had three sessions and I'm so attached to this party already.
I almost always start a new campaign with a "you've all traveled here for the last couple of Rides in the same caravan" or whatever variation on that. I encourage people to talk to other players to talk to each other about pre-existing relationships, because thats often also the richest backstory and where I can take a lot of ploot hooks. Fantastic advice, Ginny
15:11 No way! I once played a player who built an automaton that was another player 0.o
And oddly enough, my character _did_ become sisters with another character, and it was great! (And FWIW, we are both male IRL. The sister relationship was really compelling for RP.) And all that was with randos on RoleGate! The DM told us to include a relationship with at least one other player in our backstory, and shared brief blurbs from each of us, who then collaboratively expounded on our shared backstories.
One of the games I've played for many years, Mutant: Year Zero, has relations between PCs and NPCs as a central feature. In fact, putting yourself on the line for them is rewarded with EXP.
That being said, this is very useful advice I wish we would've had when we started. Will definitely take it with me whenever I'm starting in a new group.
Love your point about the lone wolf character using a preexisting relationship to join a group. I actually used that in one of my more recent games. My character didn't even want to be an adventurer. He was a sword for hire and the party's artificer had hired me as a bodyguard. We had a lot of fun with him being all "I want to examine this place!" and me being all "It's not safe. You shouldn't go in there." Then he answered "I'm not going. WE are going. Who's paying you?" It worked out beautifully, was a blast, and let me play a very different sort from my usual flamboyant and high charisma sorts. I joked with our table about just being a weapon for the artificer, even if I did have more going on, just way more quietly.
I once DMd for a short campaign and one of the players wanted to try the "you killed my father" background, but they felt that something was missing in the character's depth, so I suggested that the other players could help.
I cannot even begin to describe the joy I felt when they sent me the backgrounds of the entire family of the deceased man, each of them with a different outlook on the quest.
Barbarian grandma included.
Don't make Grandma angry. You won't like her when she's angry...
Two of my players wanted to do a similar thing: their characters were supposed to be offsprings of rivaling families, but these edgelords couldn't figure out who killed whose parents and why they'd stick together after that. The solution I suggested was that their families are stuck in a time loop killing each other for eternity and they need to find a way to break the cycle, which is why they travel alongside each other. They agreed, but asked me to ensure that their PCs would end up as orphans one way or another)))
I was running a campaign with two people who decided to have a backstory that revolves around each other. This made roll play with them so much fun. Whenever something interesting happened with one of them, the other got some spotlight too; and they were ok with that! It overall made the campaign all the more interesting. 1 year later they got into a relationship (not saying this will happen, it just was just so sweet).
Fantastic video! I’m really glad you brought up the imbalance that can occur when some players create prior relationships and others don’t. I played in a campaign that fizzled out where 2 players decided that they were incredibly close with each other before the campaign started, while the other 2 of us had no prior bonds. Sessions felt like they devolved into just a 2 player show, since these two constantly defaulted to making decisions with each other, and pretty much ignoring everyone else. Having this type of relationship building be deliberately fostered table-wide is incredibly important in order to ensure that no one feels left behind once play starts.
Pretty sure every GM's worst nightmare is Brendan Lee Mulligan bursting into their game and pointing out everything incorrect.
😂😂😂 wait, everyone has those dreams?!
I can't picture Brennan doing that to anyone. Murph on the other hand...
Maybe not Brennan but perhaps Wrennan Wee Wulligan would
this comment is enough to make me break into a cold sweat
Hey now, he'd at least stick around long enough to guide ya in how to fix what was wrong (with some hysterical and blistering commentary!)
First, I want to say I love your videos! They are well produced, entertaining, and informative. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into them! Now, on to the heart of my comment. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a similar concept. The Gamemaster's Screen insert has a table called "How do I know you again?" with 50 different connections. Some are good, some are bad, but all of them are interesting. The few times I've used it have resulted in parties that were more cohesive and easier to get involved in the story.
We never got this campaign off the ground, but when I was making a character for a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, I had a back and forth with another player where we were crewmates on a ship. I was the ship's cook, he was the navigator, and the kickoff for our plotline was that my character found out they were working for pirates, and that the navigator was shanghai'd into service. He "freed" the navigator by kidnapping him and quit his job by setting the ship on fire. We were gonna pick up at the first village we end up in in session one, but for life reasons the campaign didnt even start.
I hope you get to go back to that game! Ghosts of saltmarsh is a lot of fun!
I have a character recently who is incredibly cold and self centered Prince. Helping people purely cause it helps him and his goals out in the future. But everyone loves him because one of the other characters is a body guard who grew up with him and now they travel with each other. The body guard is the only one Prince would literally leave everyone to die for. And he’s had multiple moments of dropping everything to make sure his body guard is okay.
It seems like despite how he treats others, everyone is invested in the story between the two and it makes them want to interact with one or the other. It’s been a lot of fun to see how that plays out.
It sounds like obvious advice but the way you implement this is so much better then what we have been doing. Thanks for this!
You're so welcome! Glad it was helpful
Agreed! Things that make so much sense and are that much richer with examples and ideas to implement in our next games. Amazing point to especially include all players that might not jump in with as much alacrity to forge existing connections.
And wooooo! Fate Core! “Character Creation IS play.” I reference Ginny’s inspiration video for all metacurrency in all my games. I dish it out for collaborative world-building, and will likely start adding it for building connections. “Choose to know!”
I’ve been gorging on so many GMing videos to hone those skills, and I love videos and articles that help me be a better player. Next time I sit down as a player I’m going to announce I need a connection.
2:37 And by “Tabletop Police…” are we really talking about the Pinkertons? 😉
Roll 2d6
1. Family
1. Siblings
2. Distant Cousins
3. Family Friends
4. Cousins who are equally likely to inherit
5. In love with the same person
6. Black sheep of the family
2. Friends
1. Friendly Rivals
2. Childhood Friends
3. Friend of a Friend
4. Former co-workers
5. Neighbours
6. Mentor & Student of one trait or another
3. Fellowship
1. Longtime adventuring companions
2. Reluctant Allies
3. Bound together by a sacred oath
4. Members of a guild
5. Traveled to town together
6. One’s the brains, one’s the brawn
4. Secrets
1. The only survivors
2. The only two who know the secret
3. Members of a secret cult
4. Witnesses to an assassination
5. Each carries half of a treasure map
6. You keep him close because he knows your secret
5. War
1. Brothers in arms
2. Mercenary and Employer
3. Fought in the militia together
4. Served opposite sides in the last war
5. A blood debt still needs to be repaid
6. Refugee & Helping Hand
6. Magic
1. Both carry a curse
2. Trained together
3. Blessed by the same church
4. Servants of the same supernatural power
5. One dreamed that the other would save their life… long before they met
6. Linked together by a dark ritual
OR, roll 1d20
Is a sibling of
Was saved by
Served with
Protected by
Adventured with
Is a friendly rival of
Childhood friend of
Is magically bound to
Survived with
Escaped with
Apprentice of
Acolyte of
Idolizes
Drinking buddies with
Business associate with
Lost a bet to
Is indebted to
Was trained by
Dueling partner of
On the run with
I love your advice. I have connected relationships between my own PCs because i love the developing storylines they have with each other, but never thought to connect the players together in the same manner. As I have only months of D&D experiences under my belt, this is invaluable advice that I am certain I will seek to incorporate in my games, both as a player and DM.
Many decades ago, I played in a D&D-like fantasy game that had a lot of options for character design.
The character that brought the party together was a wealthy sorceress, and as far as anyone else knew, my character was her mostly ineffectual valet and social secretary.
He would occasionally suggest in very deferential tones that she use her magic for some purpose, and while everyone (including the other PCs) was distracted by her loud chants and dramatic gestures, my character would very quietly cast the needed spell--because he was actually a wizard, but he owed her for the student loans her family gave him when the two were in magic school together. Acting as her servant was how he discharged his debt.
Amazingly, the other players never caught on.
This is a great video, and it's one of my favorite topics, figuring out how to bypass the awkwardness of early sessions and tie the characters together via backstory. 200% agree with the lone wolf point too, I remember Matt Colville bringing up a similar example in one of his vids before as well.
I've got 3 different examples of how preexisting relationships were set up for campaigns I was in/ran.
In-line with the first bit of advice from the video, I remember one game where for session 0, we formulated tie-ins for how our characters got roped in to an expedition. We decided my paladin was acting as the parole officer for the reformed rogue, and managed to arrange a bargain to get him released early if he volunteered for service--something that had to be done through his cleric contact and friend in the government (who wound up being ordered to join us by her superiors, cause someone wanted her office). Can definitely attest that it works--the early interactions were incredibly strong and interesting, and it was probably the best session 0 I've ever participated in.
One other option is a common enemy. One of my favs was in a campaign I played where every player had been horribly wronged by some local, scummy criminal. The first session involved the individual players getting a letter about a chance to finally get back at him, which resulted in the party meeting up for the first time to take this guy down. Turns out the letters had been sent by the ghost of one of his victims, who had chosen our group to save the city from a much bigger threat. While nobody had any strong ties beforehand, they were formed pretty quickly and organically cause of our common goals, and it was a super memorable start.
And one I've used a few times is via a theme game. There's one game I've run that had two character creation guidelines: one, everyone has joined up with a mafia ran by a vampire, and two, each player has some kind of undead tie-in (from practicing necromancy to being a vampire spawn), for an undead mafia. There's an expectation of teamwork out the gate, and provides a baseline for familiarity / simple relationships, but it also still keeps the door open for deeper relationships. Plus, theme games sometimes can open up character ideas you wouldn't normally play (e.g., the mafia allowed for way more 'morally gray' characters.)
Earlier this year, I joined an ongoing campaign with a tiefling Harper who was sent to spy on another PC, a half-elf who happens to be her semi-distant cousin. My character is very reserved and not trusting of other people, but she needs to gain the trust of everyone in the party to make her cousin open up, and it's led to some of my favourite roleplay moments I've ever had at a D&D table.
As someone who was DMing since probably before you played your first game, I am always impressed by how often your little tricks are something I already recommend or will start recommending based on how well you made your case. You are a credit to the table top community.
Ginny, thanks for being so articulate, funny, entertaining and bringing my awareness to those situations ! Btw, your hair is really pretty
I implemented this rule as a DM 2 campaigns ago and I agree Ginny, it makes the roleplay just so much better, when there are pre-existing relationships between the PCs! Fantastic video.
GINNY POSTED A NEW VIDEO!!! Thank you so much for your helpful tips!!
I have been playing DND because of you and I am so happy that I have found your channel ❤
So glad you're enjoying my content 🥰
Hope you've been loving playing your game too!!
I've been doing improv classes for a while now, and this was a note I got that made a lot of scenes click. You can just decide your history, and knowing who you are *to each other* is invaluable for showing you how to improvise/role play.
I always give the players a reason to have gathered before even a one shot. Recently, ran a one shot where the party was being hired to track down a missing prince and bring him back alive. One person played a criminal that was given the chance to earn freedom, and another played a member of the Guard that worked with them first hand after they were arrested. Everyone else was an adventurer, and had already established a solid reputation within the guild itself. That gave everyone an excuse to already be at least mild acquaintances, or at the very least be aware of each other's accomplishments.
Same. My plot hook for session zero is usually enough to draw them together and give them a reason to party up.
yeah I get that, a good part of the french community can tell you that it worked so well with show "aventure" we just jump with a four member party composed of a half-devil wizard, a semi-elemental ranger, a dwarf blacksmith with a robot arm and a human paladin/inquisitor of lumos and we learned who they are while following them
Good luck with your new campaign
!
Thank you! 🥰
Thank you for posting this- a natural device for party cohesion and good roleplay is sorely needed for so many tables. I'll definitely be implementing this uin my Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Dungeon Crawl games as well!
I played a bard where the party had two bards and we where in a band together. I was the quiet type person cause of a stutter and the other bard was a chipper over excited person that dragged me everywhere.
I love your videos Ginny, i am very depressed and they keep me going at work, and in times of quiet solitude where those long stretches might torture me otherwise. I appreciate your work and your affect while doing it. Your videos make me happy, and even get real laughs out of me when im feeling like shit. Thank you!
Sometimes you can improv character relationships, or give the party prompts for someone to fill in on how they'd be connected to you.
For example...
I was in a one-shot module last weekend. As such, we had to already know each other, but didn't have much time to coordinate backstories, so there was some hand-wavy "you all already know each other" after we gave the elevator pitches of our characters' backgrounds.
The game was going to start with us at the after party of a wedding. But my character was kind of an edgy, brooding bastard with a revenge plot, so why would he be at some random wedding party?
So I said to the group, "I had learned that one of the people I'm trying to get revenge on is at this wedding, so my character basically said to the group 'someone get me into this party'" and one of the other players says, without missing a beat, "Oh, that was me for sure!"
... and yes, it was the bard who said that : )
Great video. I have always found having players form pre-existing relationships as part of the session zero to be a great starter for this. In my new campaign, I gave the players a foundation, "You all grew up in this village (the starter area), so you already know each other". I gave them some starter ideas, friends, romance, frenemies, etc, and let them run with it. It worked out really well.
My husband and I often make up a shared backstory for games we play in. It all backfired once though, when we decided to play an adventurous but naïve academic and his over-protective mother-hen cousin convinced their family would blame her if she let him walk off a cliff. The rest of the party kept assuming my character secretly had a crush and I had to remind them every few sessions that we were not that kind of family 😫
I did this for my campaign as well. I had 3 of them, that already got along, be pirates that used to sail together during the Orc Wars. One of them was the captain and the other two were his officers. It worked out quite nicely. The others had firm relationships, even family, with other NPCs. That worked out even better than I had hoped. It brought the whole team together and they were invested in each other's stories. It helped them play their characters better as well. So I agree with you, it's a great idea and does make player easier and more fluid.
Played with a group where 4/6th of the party were siblings and it was ridiculous fun. Sibling banter is some of the best drama.
I've played spouses with other PCs in a few games too. A dragon burns down a tavern? "My love, it's our 14th anniversary all over again."
I've seen this trick before, but it's a great idea! I'll add it to my homebrew list.
Noodle incidents are indeed another great thing that comes of this.
I've got this inherently in the Pathfinder game I'm running currently. They're all goblins who are part of the same extended family hunter-gatherer band in the paleolithic. It makes coming up with plots related to their backstories much easier, too. The inciting incident that made them go off on a journey was a curse turning the band's last shaman into a ghoul, so now they need to go find the other half of their extended family that split off some years back to break the curse that's on the shaman's son, and to find a replacement shaman who can teach the shaman's apprentice.
"You don't generally become someone's sibling over the course of the adventure" happened twice to me. First time was one of our bards and my wizard share a half brother, that my wizard didn't know existed, but share no blood between them. The second time our wizard latched onto my cleric as a brother figure but if THAT doesnt count she died and her disease became the next player character that was JUST born and my cleric gave them his last name.
The minute I wrote that line, I was like... I guarantee somebody's done that, I need to quality this statement 😂
To your point about the RP buddy system, I turned my "Campfire Stories" into duets several months ago, and the results were exactly as you described....AMAZING!
Bond mechanics are Great for Role-playing. The system I've been using is based on Dungeon World's take on Bonds, where exploring and developing your Bonds with the other players is one of the main systems that rewards XP. You're just as incentivized to kill an epic boss monster as you are to meaningfully role-play with the other character. My addition to this is to better define how to write these Bonds so that they more clearly define what your current relationship is, and how you'd be interesting in exploring how the relationship might develop. A State & a Hook.
"Daniel seems naive to the ugly reality of the word."
This is part of character creation in the RPG Monster of the Week, and each of the playbooks (think classes or backgrounds) comes with premade relationship prompts to help facilitate this discussion. It works out great.
I feel like this is explaining the players doing their part to tell a good story. Like poor players make video game main characters that the DM has to fit together into a party whereas good players either do it themselves or make it very easy for the DM to do that. One of the best players I’ve had in this area was actually a first timer who irl was very friendly so he naturally wanted to be friends with characters in game and it bonded everyone in about 10min
The only dnd game i ever played, I had a pre-existing relationship with another player and it really did help roleplay!
WELL ACTUALLY-
Excellent tip Ginny. It works every time. In one campaign, at session zero, I suggested the characters could be all siblings and children of the local Baron. They liked the idea. We rolled to see in what order they were born. After that, they created their characters and determined how they relate emotionally to each of their siblings. One of my best campaigns.
I joined a Curse of Strahd game halfway through, so to give my character a purpose for being there another player offered to make our characters best friends that were separated a long time ago. The best part is this other PC is a complete menace that nobody likes because he makes everyone miserable…all except his best friend a.k.a my character. It’s surprisingly really sweet.
I've been chaperoneing a DnD group of middle schoolers and they pulled me in to play a character. I've never actually played DnD, but I love watching your videos. Watching this one seems just so perfect as we recently went around the table introducing ourselves. Probably inspired by you, I wrote in a prior connection with each student's character, so everyone would feel connected. I'm not sure if they needed the help though. Most had already made character to character connections. Anyways, I've already seen some of the consequences of these relationships. One of the students decided to grab my character and just chuck them down the pathway towards our destination. I checked my notes, and our characters grew up together as friends leading me to just go along with it, and with athletics as my dump stat, this ends with me landing flat on my face in cloud of prestidigitation glitter and taking the first damage of the campaign. Keep pouring your heart into your content! You never know how many distant people you effect.
JUST talked about this last night over a cup of tea. As players you know your expected to form together into a group, but even the best DMs can struggle to railroad you into this first little bit. Having pre-formed bonds lets the narrative put strain or lessen tension on people’s interpersonal relationships to see how that impacts their decision making!
Yes Ginny! I do this! Because we can't all meet at an inn and become family. No it doesn't work that way. In session 0 we determine the relationship of the characters and I bring some concepts to throw out to the players. Love this!
At 8:26, the way that you transitioned into the text from taking a drink? I loved that. It made it feel more intimate and chill.
I think the advice is great!! I like how Daggerheart does this, like you mentioned.
I've just realized that every time I've done this, it has been loads of fun. I'm going to try my best from now on to suggest this to other players. Great video!
that's an amazing advice, that i've been using for a while now!
i think that my favorite example is when i ran a oneshot inspired by EXU: Calamity - where i made each player some important figure in a very powerful city. regardless of backstory, i tasked every player to have some relationship and preexisting opinion over at least 2 other players, and the RP was magnificent. when introduced, each player already had someone to interact with, and a role in the catalist event of the oneshot, leading to a already existing dynamic and a very quick way to get to the heavy tones of the oneshot.
This is one of my favorite rp tips! As a GM i implement it every time we do a session 0, and as a player i’ve had many games where i’ve chosen to be tied to another pc. I’m an only child irl but i’ve had fantasy brothers in two long-term campaigns.
Our current campaign had us started with all characters being in some way tied to my character (because main plot reason only the DM and I knew). Three players are her adoptive children, one knows her through her through her late mentor and the last party member met her through delivering mail to her on the regular. Even our newest player made it so that their character knows her (a fey creature always recognizes his queen as they put it)
It's created such a fun dynamic and stuff hits different. PCs dropping during combat is more dire, rp moments and reveals are intense, the main story where everyone is pulled in a different direction contrasts the family dynamic really well, it's so good. Even if not to this level, I highly recommend playing from time to time that characters already know each other/someone in the party to some extent.
Great advice! I had a fantasy campaign that in session zero we created short adventures involving each of the PCs and NPCs. I then bonded those characters throughout the first adventure. In another game I created archetypes that already knew one another but left details to the players.
This was a thing in the first 5e campaign i played and has been a staple of every game our friendgroup does since then. Some were sisters, some friends, others battle buddies, the newest crew is one who gets hired occasionally to go hunt monsters who picked up a guide and a few muscle men on the way to the campaign start. This is an absolutely glorious tool that I wish more people embraced because having it as a standard in most games I don't know how people lived without this.
This is amazing advice. My best friend and I joined an existing group of 4 rl strangers. We made Goblin Warlock brothers with rival patrons, and we riff new backstory lore every game that makes the other players ask us lots of questions, leading to deeper party friendships.
In my groups we have done a version of this. In one we learned before session one that we would all be arriving on a new continent on the same ship. This allowed us to play by post how our relationships developed throughout our sea voyage. In the group I DM for they were all part of the same organization and had been training and travelling together extensively already. Both versions worked really well, I am happy to say. Oh, one thing though: this kind of pre-excisting relationship in game is even more important if the players don't know each other from earlier.
I always liked the way that the cypher system does it! It gives you a lot of neat little seeds for connecting to other PCs pre-campaign, both flavorful and mechanical!
Good advice. I have found my games go way better when players do this on their own, and even better when we do it as a group in a structured way. Kids on Bikes is my personal favorite format for this. The depths of emotion and connection I got in the 4 campaigns I ran were amazing
just realised all my favourite campaigns are the ones where another player character immediately attached to another/mine. implementing this at the start is such a cool idea!!! I have a player who (and by the way, it was basically their first time playing a roleplay game) in the first session of the campaign (a oneshot set 50 years beforehand), immediately improvised a tragic connection to the two other players -- a 'i was secretly in love with you' subtext (that became text) and a 'what happened after highschool, we said we'd be friends forever' conflict that drove the story and it was so crazy and plot thickening!!! I'll deffo be carrying this forward, as usually I just make everyone work for the same company/etc. awesome advice!!!!