Session 0 Questions

 Poker Night (from A Streetcar Named Desire) by Thomas Hart Benton

Another post that's been done 10,000 times before, and better, but hey, I'm writing the list, I might as well post it. Somebody might find some use in it!

 

* * * 

 

LOGISTICS

• When do we meet? How often?
• Where? Same place every time?
• How long will each session be?
• Snacks/drinks before? After? During? Spend 15 (or 45) minutes shooting the shit or just jump straight into the game? Roll it into a dinner party?
• What if people can't make it? When should they alert the group? If people can't make it, should we skip that session, try to reschedule, or play without them? Is there a threshold (down one person, we go ahead; down two or more, we reschedule)? Do people want to play one-shots of other games, or with other characters, when we're short-handed?

VIBES

• What do we want from this game? What kind of experience does everybody want to have—is this about challenge, system mastery, self-expression, storytelling, some combination of these, something else?
• What tone do we want to strike? Gritty, serious, immersive, and earnest? Zany, ironic, humorous, and light-hearted? Something in between? Something else?
• Relatedly: What subject matter is too dark/serious (or just too uncomfortable) for the game? Does anybody want to veto any particular kind of content? My inclination is to include dark subjects (torture, sexual violence, violence against children, etc.) in the setting, as warranted, but not in the gameplay. You might have to bring a torturer or rapist to justice, you might interact with his victims, but we're not going to witness his crimes. Similarly, seducing NPCs is a classic RPG shenanigan, go nuts with that, but we'll always just tastefully “fade to black” before anything sexual happens. No sex among PCs. No game-mechanical incentives for PCs to pursue sexual relationships.
• Relatedly: How much conflict among PCs are you comfortable with? Should characters keep secrets from one another? Should players? Are conflicting agendas acceptable? My inclination, at least for a typical D&D-ish game, is that intra-party conflict should not go beyond PCs preferring different paths to similar goals. No highly antagonistic actions among PCs (sniping at each other and pranking each other is fine; robbing each other or physically harming each other is not).
• How should the game be structured—episodic vignettes, one continuous epic narrative, chapters of a story? How much narrative continuity do we want from session to session? Should we have a fixed length or clear objective in mind for the game, or just run with it as long as it's fun?
• Are we most interested in individual characters, a group or community, or the setting as a gestalt? How much character continuity do we want to have across the course of the campaign, if we're doing a longer campaign? (Will characters die often? Will they retire or become NPCs? Will we rotate PCs among a larger cast of characters?)
• Do we want the characters and adventures to be heroic, antiheroic, picaresque, or some combination of these?

SYSTEM AND SETTING

• How central to the gameplay do we want combat to be?
• How much mechanical customization and differentiation (i.e., “build optimization”) do you want for your characters? Conversely, how little thought and effort do you want to have to put into their creation and/or advancement?
• How comfortable are you with a lack of “balance”? Is it fine for some PCs to be have significant mechanical advantages over others?
• What game system do we want to use? Do we want to play it by the book, hack it from the jump, or play things by ear? 
• How much do you all want to collaborate in developing the setting and story? This could be “There's a world I invented with a bunch of stuff for you to discover” or “We make it up together as we go along” (canon vs. anti-canon). How much control do you want me to have over your own inventions (like character backstories)? How about the other players? Do I have, or does the group collectively have, a veto over stuff that doesn't “fit”?
• Roughly how long will the campaign be, and what should be the pace of character advancement (and what will advancement look like)?
• Are there particular themes we want the campaign to foreground, and if so, what are they?
• What kind of impact do you want to have, or to be able to have, on the setting?
• What campaign setting do we want to use, or what kind of campaign setting, if we're going homebrew?
• What kind of goals do you as individual characters and as a group have? How goal-driven should the gameplay be?
• How did or will the PCs meet? Why are you, or how do you become, allies? Why trust each other?