The first step is to identify what your goals are for a good first session. In this case there are four major goals you should be seeking to accomplish. You need to establish the background that has led up to this point, the main plot, each character’s primary motivation, and the group dynamic. We can reduce these to four simple questions that the first session needs to answer:
• Where?
• What?
• Who?
• How?
Where
Let’s start by looking at the background, or thewhere question. This isn’t just a geographic location, but a cultural, political, and metaphysical one as well. It is especially important in the first session to establish the narrative conventions of your game, so this is another point where all of those decisions about tone, dramatic flair, and morality that went into the campaign outline come into play. The first session is where you really want to show these elements off and drive home for the players exactly what kind of game this is going to be.
If this is a grim world where the good guys only break even at best, then you need to have some bad things happen right off the bat. Maybe murder a few children, let a corrupt politician get away with crimes, or have a bunch of innocent people be horribly eaten by zombies. You need to show the players throughin-game events that this is a world where bad things happen to good people.
If this is a game about the power of magic, you need to display the impotence of mundane power. If it’s a game about 4-color superheroes, you need to have a colorful criminal rob a bank in a blimp with his face painted on it. In short, you need to strongly establish in the minds of the players what kind of world it is and what kind of things happen in that world.
If you’ve ever studied creative writing, you may have heard the phrase “Show, Don’t Tell.”
It’s the same deal in a roleplaying game. You can’t just tell the players “this is how it is.” You have to show off the narrative conventions of your world in unambiguous detail in order to impress upon them what those conventions are.
In addition to establishing the tone of the game, this is also the moment to include background story information. Just dumping information on the players is a good way to get them to tune out. However, players are very good at sniffing out the Chekov’s Guns25the GM leaves laying around. Usually it only takes a little bit of seeding to get the players interested enough to start asking questions.
Everyone has probably seen a movie that starts with an establishing shot in which there is a television on in the background with a news report that just so happens to be highly relevant to the plot. There’s a reason they call those “establishing shots.” They hand out background information that will be important later. You should be doing this too.
While you’re planning out the first session, have a list of critical pieces of information about the world. Think of ways that information can be slipped into the background of the adventure.
If there’s a warlord causing trouble to the north who’s going to be an antagonist, have some people talk about how odd it is so many people are coming south, bringing their foreign ways with them. Perhaps there’s a holiday going on commemorating some important historical person or event. Maybe a criminal organization has just pulled off a major heist, andeverybody is talking about it.
Using NPCs as mouthpieces is a good starting point and easy to do. But if you can, try to incorporate the information into the background itself as much as possible. Maybe the local village is having a festival to honor an ancient king whose acts will play some future part in the story of your campaign.
Letting the players do the leg work of investigating this information instead of just dumping it on them will make the players feel immediately more engaged in the story.
25A literary technique of introducing things early on which become relevant later in the story. The classic example is a casual reference in the first act to a gun hanging over the mantle. Since the author has explicitly established that the gun is there, it can be assumed that the gun will be fired by the end of the third act, or else it wouldn’t be important enough to mention in the first place.
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What
The next goal is to introduce the plot. This doesn’t have to be a blatant exposition dump, particularly since much of the plot will only develop as the game moves along. Depending on what kind of pace you want your game to have, it could be very subtle. The beginning ofThe Fellowship of the Ring is a great example. (I’m thinking specifically of the novel, which lacks the opening sequence with Sauron and the armies of elves and men; so just edit that part of the movie out of your mind for a moment.)
It’s the first session. Your players have rolled up Frodo, Merry, Sam, and Pippen. It’s Bilbo’s birthday. There’s some talk about his old ring. Gandalf is acting like it’s very important, but you don’t know why. There’s whispers of dark riders in the Shire. It’s not until session two, when Gandalf comes back to visit, that you start to get a picture of the greater plot, and the players won’t get the whole picture until several sessions later, when they arrive at Rivendell. However, the GM subtly introduced the major plot device of the campaign, the Ring, in the first session.
Whatever your plot is about, you want to include at least one thing which references that plot in the first session. Something which the players will be sufficiently interested in, which they will remember well enough for it to be a dramatic reveal later on.
Keep this next bit in mind, because it’s especially important: Knowledge which is earned is always more interesting than that which is given. By foreshadowing the plot in this way you make the players more interested than they would be if you just dropped it in their lap. The goal is for them to feel as though they actively took part in discovering something.
Who
The third goal is to define who the game is about. “The party” is the obvious answer, but we are talking about identity on a deeper level: the PCs’ personal motivations, both as individuals and as a group. Thanks to your group contract, this part is easier than it might otherwise be. You already know what the group’s motivation is, and the players each know what their individual motivations are. Most of the work for this step is already done. What needs to happen in the first session is to establishwithin the context of the game how those individual motivations form a group dynamic.
Let’s pause for a moment and explore that last statement in greater detail. The phrase “within the context of the game” is critical here. There exists a significant gap between how things are stated in a character background or on a character sheet and the way they actually play out on the table. You can talk the talk about this character or that event all day long, but it’s what happens at the table that really truly matters (and what the players will remember). Like I said at the Where step, “Show, Don’t Tell.”
It’s important that you back up the statements you made in the campaign outline and the group contract about who these characters are with actual in-game events. You therefore want to include something within the first session that strongly establishes who these characters are, both as individuals and as a group. Since all of the players should have generated characters that fit the group contract, you can begin the game with the assumption that the players have assembled into a party. You don’t need to waste time with the “everybody meets at the inn”
scene, because that work is already done. It’s a foregone conclusion anyway, so why bother going over it again?
Instead, you should be focusing on giving the players a task that allows each of them to show off (and try out) their particular abilities while learning to work together as a team, and that drives home who these people are. Which brings us to the last bullet point. . .
How
Specifically “how the group operates.” Their dynamic as a team. The players need opportunities to interact with each other in a safe(ish) environment, both on a character level and on a game-rule level. There’s a learning curve for both the players and the GM in understanding how a game system works, and how your specific party works together, both in and out of combat. So you want to include a number of simple conflicts for the players to resolve.
These are situations that may need at most 3 or 4 rolls. A quick social situation, like talking your way past a doorman, or a combat that includes a distraction and punching out a thug in an alleyway. You want to give the players a chance to stretch their muscles and work together in different circumstances, so that when they start confronting real danger they already have some idea of how their characters work together as a group.
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