"Dear JB" Mailbag #16

[okay, one more and then...I think...I'm done]

Dear JB:

I kind of just need to just get this off my chest.

So nearly two months ago, very early in january my six players and myself had a talk about starting a campaign and did some session zero stuff like talking about what kind of style we want for the game, boundaries, how often we want to play etc.

I gave them the jist for a campaign idea I had and we agreed on a starting date which was even rescheduled to be even later. It was already relatively far into the future, because many of us had exams and needed to focus on that. Two weeks after our initial talk I send them a more detailed description of the campaign prompt, the world, which races would be playable, a map, even some bullet points about which character options might be thematically relevant and easy to tie into the story.

Now we're supposed to start playing on monday and 5/6 players haven't told me anything about their characters other than what classes they might play and many of them are really stressed because their weekend is full. They nearly had two months of time and I now and then gave some updates in our group chats, offered to help with character creation...

All of them say they're excited to play but I'm just not buying it. I'm so disappointed that they had so much time and nearly all of them procrastined character creation like it's some kind of homework. I was so excited to play and to hear about their characters, try and build their backstory into the campaign plot and world.

TL,;DR: players had almost 2 months to create characters, still didn't deliver even though campaign starts in 3 days.

I'm Disappointed With My Players

Hey, Disappointed:

Ah, college days. I can still remember being asked to run Vampire the Masquerade for a bunch of young nerds living in the campus dormitories (I did not live in the dorms, though I spent many a night there). VtM is a game that has an extensive, point-buy chargen system and recommends that the first session of a "Saga" (VtM-speak for "campaign") be conducted as a "prelude" to actual game play, detailing each character's origin story as well how the PCs have come together. In the terms of today's RPG lingo, it is a very "trad" game.

When I was asked to run VtM for these eight or nine players (of whom I only knew one or two), I showed up to our first session with my books and pre-printed (blank) character sheets. I passed these out, explained the basic system was an additive dice pool and gave them the numbers they needed to assign to create their characters. I can't remember exactly how much time was spent that first session...probably a couple hours getting to know people, answering questions, and doing the actual chargen as well as discussing how each PC would fit into the campaign ("preludes," short and sweet, were folded into this). And then we made plans to meet the following week...at the same time on the same day in the same place...in order to have our first session.  And when I ran/played other "trad" games in college (Ars Magica, for example) this was pretty much the standard procedure.

These days, though, I run only D&D (specifically AD&D) and it's nowhere near as complex a procedure. If I'm playing a con game or one-off, I come to the table with pre-gens. If we're playing in my home campaign, we spend the 10-15 minutes making a character for whichever player(s) is lacking one. And then we start playing.  

Because we are playing D&D, and D&D isn't rocket science.

Disappointed, if you couldn't play till after your exams, you should have just told your players "Hey, I'm going to run some D&D after exams...anyone interested?"  Once the exams were complete, you send out the email saying "hey, we're playing at this place at this time on this date; please RSVP by [whenever]" and then you wait to see how many people respond by the cut-off, and you plan an adventure for that number of PCs.  And you might even give yourself a little extra time to make characters on that first session.

Because that's how you run a D&D game. Dungeons & Dragons already has a concrete premise that provides a justification for different players to be together with a common goal/objective. Players are bold adventurers in a fantasy world who face dangerous perils together in the hopes of acquiring fame and fortune. That's the game!

Why are you drawing all this out? Even if you're playing 5E (or 5.5 or One DND or whatever), we are talking about college educated veteran players in their 20s (at least)...why the hell do they need months to create their characters? Just what, exactly, are you expecting from them? Term paper length backstories?

Wouldn't you rather just, you know, play D&D? Instead of reading and waiting and incorporating and collating and....I don't know, whatever it is you're doing instead of playing D&D? Wouldn't you rather do that instead of whining and complaining? 

As the Dungeon Master, your job is to world build and prep adventures. You don't need the players' characters to do that...certainly not when starting a new campaign!  YOU ARE YOUR WORLD...what the heck do you need from the players?  Even if you're playing 5E with its thousand and one different player species and character classes: you just tell the players what's allowed and what's prohibited and away they go.

At the first session. Right before slapping 'em upside the head with some adventure.

But you want...what? Updates? "Thematic relevance?" Something?

Man, it is JUST D&D. That's all it is. You are not a director putting on a play. You do not need to write scripts or have players practicing their lines (or their accents). All you should be focused on is designing that first dungeon that's going to kick off your (hopefully awesome) game! It is still called Dungeons & Dragons, right?  Why do you insist on making things so hard?

Sincerely, 

JB