Session Zero

When to Run One (and When You Can Skip It)

A Session Zero is worth running whenever the table is stepping into unfamiliar territory — unfamiliar people, unfamiliar system, unfamiliar themes, or a campaign long enough that misaligned expectations will eventually become a problem.

Run one if any of these apply:

• This is a longer campaign, not a standalone night
• Anyone at the table is new to the group, the system, or both
• The campaign touches heavier or more personal themes
• The players have not played together recently enough to have a shared baseline

The rest of this page assumes you decided to run one.

This Is a Conversation, Not a Form

Everything on this page looks like a checklist — questions, topics, structured prompts arranged into neat sections. It is not a checklist. A good Session Zero is a conversation, and the best ones come out looking nothing like the document they started from. The questions below are prompts, not obligations. Treat them as an excuse for the table to start talking.

Good Session Zeros are fun. Players riff on each other's character ideas. Someone says "wait, could my character be your character's cousin?" and then spends five minutes building out the cousin's entire personality. Someone else says "I've always wanted to play a character whose hands shake when they lie" and another player says "oh — mine could be the one person who has noticed." A relationship gets proposed, argued about, laughed at, and kept. That is the table making the campaign, not consuming it.

The GM is in the conversation too. Players can ask for things. "Is there room in the world for a character who grew up in a traveling circus?" "Can I be the daughter of a minor villain you mentioned in the pitch?" "I want one scene, early, where my character has to make a bad decision they cannot take back." These are not demands — they are contributions to what the campaign wants to be. The GM can say yes, no, or "yes, and here is what that means."

Players should be telling the table not just who their character is, but what they want to play. The character is a role. The quirk is how they are going to enjoy playing it — the habits, the tics, the small pieces they are already looking forward to. "I want to play someone who never takes off their coat, even indoors." "I want to play a character who lies about small things but not big ones." "I want to play someone who is very good at one thing and laughably bad at everything else." That is the table telling the GM what kinds of moments to write toward.

Session Zero is also where house rules get agreed on. If you are tweaking combat, changing how healing works, bending an optional rule, or inventing something new — this is the time to name it. A surprise house rule in session three is a recipe for resentment. A house rule agreed on in Session Zero is just part of how this table plays.

A table should leave Session Zero energized, not exhausted from answering questions. If you finish the session tired, you probably did it wrong. If you finish it excited to play next week, you did it right.

Start the Session Zero with "The Pitch"

Start by reading your pitch aloud. If you followed the advice in Planning a Campaign, you already have it — a paragraph that covers where, when, what is wrong, and why the players care.

Read it. Then stop talking.

Let the players react. Ask questions. The pitch is the shared starting point — everyone should leave the table with the same picture of what this campaign is. Find misalignment now, before you have prepped five sessions around it.

This is not a contract. The campaign will drift. The pitch is an orientation — something the whole table can point at when things get complicated and ask, "Is this still the game we wanted to play?"

Campaign Alignment

After the pitch, get concrete about what the campaign will look like from the inside. These are questions the GM brings to the table — not a survey to fill in, but a conversation to have.

• What do you want to achieve as a group by the time you reach higher levels?
• Does the campaign have a level cap, or does it run until the story ends?
• What overall tone are you after — drama, intrigue, mystery, comedy, combat, or some blend of all of them?
• How lethal should this campaign be? Easy, normal, hard, or godlike?

There are no wrong answers, but there are mismatched ones. One player who wants punishing lethality and another who is not prepared to lose their character will have a bad time at the same table. Better to find that out here.

Who Are You as a Player

This is a different kind of question set. Not about the characters — about the people playing them. Ask each player in turn.

• What is the coolest thing about roleplaying games for you?
• Name a moment from a past campaign where you thought, "That was it. That was the thing." What made it memorable?
• What role do you like to play? Leader, support, chaos, something else?
• What are your strengths as a player? (Other players can name each other's strengths here — often more honest than self-assessment.)

Then — and this one is load-bearing — ask each player to name something they explicitly do not want in a campaign. Not a preference, a hard pass. Fart humor. Unnecessary fetch quests. Gratuitous cruelty with no narrative purpose. Long negotiation scenes that go nowhere. Whatever it is, name it now.

This question tells you more about a table than any of the others. Players rarely volunteer this information unprompted, and a GM who finds out four sessions in that one of their players hates a thing they have been building toward has a much worse problem than one who asked at the start.

Tone, Themes, and Safety

Agree now on what is on the table and what is not. This takes ten minutes and saves arguments later.

Two tools worth knowing:

Lines are things that do not appear in this game. Not on screen, not implied, not referenced. Off the list entirely.

Veils are things that can exist in the world but happen off screen. Referenced, not shown. The event happened — the camera just cut away.

These tools are not about fragility. They are about playing harder without guessing. A table that has mapped its edges can push the fiction further — because everyone knows where the ground is. A table that never had the conversation spends sessions pulling punches instead.

About Your Character

Ask each player to sketch their character in a sentence or two. Not a backstory — a hook. Who are they and what do they want?

Then go a layer deeper with a short set of questions for each character:

• What is your character's role in the story?
• What makes them special in this group — not what they can do, but what they bring that nobody else does?
• Do they have many friends, many enemies, or a careful balance of both?
• What is their biggest fear?
• Who inspired them — a mentor, a rival, a story? This person can be an invented NPC if no one famous fits.

Take notes on everything that comes up. These hooks are free plot threads the players handed you. Every backstory detail is a seed waiting to become an arc — and the players will care about those arcs more than any you invent, because the seeds are theirs.

If you can avoid the "strangers meet in a tavern" opening, do it. Characters who already have ties to each other are pulling on each other from the first scene.

The Group

Individual characters are only half the picture. The other half is what holds them together as a party. Work through these questions as a group, not one player at a time.

• Do you have a common cause? Something all of you care about, or are working toward?
• What is the glue — the thing that keeps this particular group together when things get hard?
• Do your characters know each other from the start? How?
• Are there shared acquaintances, friends, family members, or enemies who connect two or more of you?
• Is there a shared experience that shaped all of you — something that happened before the campaign begins?

Once you have the broad strokes, try this move: invite the players to ask each other questions whose answers will deepen the ties between their characters. The GM does not write these — the players do. A few examples to get the conversation started:

• "What activity do our characters do together every Thursday night?"
• "Why have you never thanked me for saving you?"
• "Has your bard noticed that my character gets a little emotional when he plays?"

Questions like these are where a party stops being a collection of individuals and starts being a group with a history. The answers do not have to be long. The conversation around them usually is.

Table Agreements

The practical stuff. Nobody wants to spend Session Zero on logistics, but every group that skipped this conversation had the same argument three sessions in.

Cover the basics: when you play, how often, how long a session runs. What happens when someone cannot make it — whether the session continues, what the absent character does, how decisions that affect them are handled. The at-the-table mechanics for actually running a session with a missing player live in Session Flow, but the policy belongs here.

Then the smaller things: phones, food, side conversations, how you call for breaks. None of this is exciting to discuss. All of it is easier to handle now than mid-session.

Who Does What

A short division of labor, stated once, prevents a lot of confusion later.

Nobody here is the adversary. The GM is not trying to kill the party. The players are not trying to break the world. Everyone is collaborating on the same story — they just have different jobs.

What It Looks Like

Here is what a filled-in Session Zero might look like. Three players, one GM, about two hours of notes. Answers are kept short on purpose — the point is not to write a novel. The point is to capture enough that the GM can come back to the document three sessions later and remember what everyone wanted.

The whole thing, in writing, is about two hours of table time. What the GM walks away with is a set of threads they could not have invented alone.

Session Zero Check-Ins

You are not locked into one Session Zero per campaign. It is a tool, not a ritual.

If a character dies and the party has to rebuild around a new member, call one. If the group feels split — half the table wanting to pursue one arc, half another — call one. If there is building tension about where the campaign is going, or if the tone has drifted far enough from the original pitch that it is worth naming, call one. It does not have to be formal. An hour at the start of a session, before you roll dice, is enough.

Campaigns drift. That is not a failure — that is the table doing its job. A mid-campaign check-in is just asking the same questions you asked at the beginning: is this still the game we wanted to play? What is working? What is not? It keeps the table aligned without anyone having to voice a complaint.