My Take Aways Since Holding My First Session Zero

So, I’ve been a DM for several “campaigns.” I put campaigns in quotes since the vast majority fell apart after anywhere between 1-3 sessions. However, I have had a couple of campaigns last longer. It may sound crazy, but I had never heard about running a session zero before a couple of months ago. I’ve never been a part of a campaign that held one before. However, a month ago, I decided to hold one before running Curse of Strahd for my friends. It has made a giant difference and I cannot recommend it enough. The best part is that you can use a session zero with any game system.

So, what is a session zero? Well, if you ask different people, you tend to get slightly different answers. The core tends to be the same though: a discussion about the upcoming campaign. This typically includes information about the world as well as player expectations. I was able to have my players all together and break down these things to make sure everyone is on the same page. This allowed players to raise questions and get answers before the campaign as well. One piece of information that is helpful to address is how everyone knows each other. In some instances, the players won’t know anyone else, or only some other party members and then the DM can make things happen to introduce them to each other. For my group, we found ways to have everyone meeting together.

To contrast, the same group of friends were part of my previous campaign set in a homebrew world that I had just messaged people a description of. In the world, magic and religion were taboo, but one of the players missed that memo and created a character who was overtly interested in religion and constantly looking for temples. She wasn’t even a cleric or paladin, she was a monk. It didn’t really mesh with the world.

As I mentioned earlier, expectations are another topic to talk about. This is one area that I have failed as a DM on more than one occasion. In my previous group, I really should’ve done this. After months of playing, when we decided to switch to a premade, I found that one of my players who was new to Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t digging the heavier RP situation. He was wanting more of a dungeon crawl adventure. Now, since he was new, I’m not sure that a session zero discussion would’ve helped there, but it is something that can help with veteran players.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you to start running session zeroes. Here are some recommendations of things to talk about:

• The Campaign

  • Homebrew or Pre-built

  • The World

  • What classes/races are (not) allowed if any

  • What level characters will start at

  • What kind of campaign is it? Heavy RP? Dungeon crawl?

  • How players may know each other

  • Character concepts

• The Table

  • What is expected of the Players

  • What is expected of the DM

  • How to let the DM know if something is making a player uncomfortable

• Character Creation

You can really have these conversations in any order you think works best for you. I would recommend that you save character creation for last though as people will take different amounts of time to complete their characters. Spellcasters can take considerably longer since they have to go through their spell lists. That’s why I recommend talking about character concepts as a separate step. If players have concepts of what kinds of characters they want to run, they can do that without creating the whole characters and use those concepts to answer all the other questions such as how they might know each other.

What have your experiences been with session zeroes?