Now that you’ve gone ahead and had a session 0, your players have bought into your world and made characters that make sense, and everyone is excited to get started in your game. You now get to start your adventure with your hooks, NPC’s, cities, and bad guys. The first session always has a couple of problems that you have to address.

Firstly, how does the group know each other. An elf, a dwarf, and a human walk into a bar sounds like a joke, and not a good one. Do you just have them start in a bar and hope that they all act like heroes when you send some goblins into the town? Do you say that they are already an adventuring team, even though the dwarf’s backstory says that he hasn’t seen the sun ever before in his life? Or maybe they are all knocked out and wake up in a dungeon together, even though the elf is a princess, and people would probably be much more concerned if she went missing?

Seems like it could be a lot of extra work for you as the DM to come up with their story for them.. So a tip that I’ve learned and haven’t used yet, is to have them explain how/why they know each other. Maybe two of them are brothers and are looking for their father who was lost in the mountains of the grey keep years ago, they have gotten the help of the Elven princess after she ran away from home looking for adventure, and the dwarf knowing that she has run away from home and it’s very dangerous for her out in the real world has taken it upon himself to become her bodyguard to make sure she gets back safely to her kingdom, some day. Let the players come up with what ties them together, and just in that little example, you now have some fun roleplaying things that have come from it, the dynamic between siblings, and between the dwarf trying to get the elf home, and elf wanting to adventure. But you’ve also gotten a great story hook that they will latch onto when it shows up. Where is the brother’s father? Are there rumors that he might still be alive, what was he doing in the mountains, was he looking for a treasure?

Second thing that is important for the first session is getting the players hooked onto the adventure and into the story that you are trying to start telling and that they are going to be shaping. If they are in a tavern and there is a goblin attack, why is there a goblin attack? Are the goblins not really attacking but running away from something through the town? If so, you’ve now dropped a hook for the players. What are the goblins running from? What would be scary enough to get a whole village of goblins to leave their woods. Coming up with a good story hook that makes the players interested and want to follow the strings that you are laying down is tricky, but important.

Now, you don’t want to force the players to do anything. Maybe the goblins attack and run through the town and instead of tracking down what was chasing them, your adventurers decide to track down the goblins and capture one of them to see what is going on. Either way, your adventure progresses. Now they are learning about this scary monster that you can build up as much as you want from what the goblins are saying. Maybe it scares the players so much that they decide to run away from the bigger bad guy as well. That’s also okay, your adventure and the world are always progressing. And even though the players haven’t bought into your overall story as you expected, you get a fun adventure turning the heroes from just normal folk who are scared of whatever was chasing the goblins into an adventuring team that is confident that they can beat the bad guy who scares all of the goblins.

These are the two things that I would try and do in a first session (or have in place for the first session). Have the players explain and roleplay out why their characters are together. And once that part of the session is done or winding down, throw hooks for the adventure at them, and see where they go with it.

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