Why Your Session 0 isn't Helping

In 2014, our corporate overlords at Wizards of the Coast released the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (really it’s more like, the 11th edition but who’s counting?). Due to a variety of cultural circumstance and a sort of return to form for the brand, 5E has continued to be ludicrously popular and has served as a great on ramp to the TTRPG hobby.

Unfortunately, while 5E does a lot of things well, one thing it doesn’t provide is very good direction for new players and DMs to actually run good campaigns. And so YouTube became filled with new channels trying to fill that gap and provide an onboarding experience to new players.

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One of the most repeated pieces of advice surrounds the mythical session 0; the idea that before you actually start a campaign, you should sit down with your players, hash out expectations for the game, talk through character builds and backstories, and generally make sure everyone is on the same page. This in itself is great advice and everyone should do it if you’re running more than a one shot. The problem is that beyond the idea that you should HAVE a session 0, most advice on how to actually have that conversation is nonexistent or functionally useless.

Why does the advice suck so much?

Fundamentally just telling someone to sit down with their players and talk to them without any sort of framework becomes incredibly unhelpful for the average group. For one thing, this assumes every player is going to be equally engaged and honest with their responses, which is almost never the case. Some of your players will require a great degree of coaxing to get them to open up about their wants and expectations, and still other players will straight up lie or hide things because they don’t want to rock the boat or upset other players with a difference in opinion.

Secondly this advice almost always assumes that a session 1 will immediately follow a session 0, which means the campaign is assumed to be happening regardless. You should not be walking into a session 0 with that assumption, having that idea in your head means you will be encouraged to push through disagreements and ignore red flags in order to have your game happen. This is really just passing the buck, or what I like to call being short term nice at the expense of long term mean. Ignoring problems in the beginning is only going to cause you all more stress and disappointment further on down the line.

Instead of running into these traps and pitfalls, let’s build out a framework that will let us run successful campaigns. I’m going to be using my day job experience as a corporate salesperson to help frame all of this and organize it. Your first thought after reading that might be “Ew, gross, sales”, but fundamentally sales is the process of uncovering pain and need, and then trying to match a solution to it. This will make more sense as we go on, I promise.

The Core Conceits

Before we get into the framework itself, let’s set some ground rules for how we’re going to approach this as a DM for an upcoming campaign. You’re going to want to keep these in mind as we go forward through this framework.

1. Separate yourself from the outcome—No longer are we going to assume a session 1 immediately follows a session 0. Instead our goal is to determine fit between the kind of game we want to run, and the players we want to run it with. That means this session 0 should end 1 of 3 ways. Either you all agree it’s a fit and move on to character creation and planning your first session, you agree that it isn’t a fit and go back to the drawing board or agree to part ways, or you agree that this warrants further discussion and you plan another session 0 to address concerns and find common ground.
2. As the DM, your job is to pitch and sell the game you want to run. An easy way to think about this is by creating a simple one sentence pitch and running that by your interested players before you even have a session 0. A simple framework for that is “I want to run a game about [NOUN][DESCRIPTOR] in [PLACE] using [RULES]”. For example, I want to run a game about former lab experiment humanoid mice in a cyberpunk city, using Shadowrun. This helps you identify what interests you and also weed out players who aren’t a fit before the session even starts
3. Understand yourself—You are going to be asked to compromise and meet players halfway through this process, but remember that you are a player too and you should be having fun! Therefore, it’s important for you to understand what your non-negotiables are and where to draw lines. Not every negotiation ends in success.

Now with that in mind let’s get into the framework itself.

The Framework

Part 1—The Prework

Before we even sit down in person (or virtually) to have this session 0, you have some important work to do as a DM. Let’s break this part down into some easy to digest steps.

1. Create your pitch—think about the kind of game you want to run, and condense it into that 1 sentence framework we talked about above.
2. Recruit players—put feelers out about your pitch and see who’s interested and who isn’t. Maybe this is among your friends, in a discord server, or your local game store or library!
3. The question—once you have your players, begin scheduling, but also ask them each this one very important question; “Based on the pitch, what are 1-2 things you are most excited to do during this campaign?” This will help you come to the session 0 with an basic understanding of who your players are and help you frame the conversation in a much more productive way.

Part 2—The Agenda

To steal a bit more corporate jargon, all effective meetings should have an agenda, and everyone should have that agenda in advance. There’s two major reasons for that; firstly because it helps your players mentally prepare for the session 0 themselves, but secondly because it gives them an opportunity to provide feedback and present potential changes to the agenda.

With that in mind, let’s break down a basic agenda here. I’m going to frame this as a message I might send to my players in advance of a session 0

Hey all! Excited to meet soon for session 0 to discuss the possibility of moving forward on this Rat Punks Cyberpunk Shadowrun game! Wanted to lay out how I expect this session to goIntroductions and past TTRPG experienceScenario based questions to get a feel for play style and chemistryOpen ended play style questions, expectations around things like roleplay, combat, and other rules interactions.Ground rules discussion, establishing hard lines and triggers to avoidDiscussion around the Shadowrun rules, what edition we’ll be using, what house rules we’ll be adding, and what options and splat books will be allowed.

At the end of this discussion, we’ll decide as a group to go one of 3 ways. Either we will…Decide this campaign sounds great and then begin working on making characters and planning our first actual sessionDecide that there’s been enough concerns raised or conflicts in playstyle that we need another session 0 to revisit those points and work towards common groundDecide that the differences in expectations are too vast, and go our separate ways or go back to the drawing board with an entirely different campaign idea

Come prepared for a healthy discussion, time with friends, and some good snacks!

If this seems like a lot of work, don’t worry, it is! This is what I call sharpening the axe; you are doing work now to save yourself work and trouble later.

Part 3—The Meeting

Okay so we’ve done our pre-work, we’ve set our agenda, the snacks are out, the table is set, and it’s time to actually meet. Your job here is to moderate and guide the discussion, and uncover enough information that everyone can make an informed decision.

It’s important to note that this is a dialogue; you of course are going to be asking a lot of questions of your players, but they can and should be asking questions of you as well.

To start off we want to go around and ask your prospective players scenario based questions to understand how they might approach the game. These should be based off of common play examples they should encounter during your game. These questions should also be open ended; we want to understand how our players think through and problem solve. Here are some examples;

• You’re playing a hacker character and your party is trying to infiltrate a corporate HQ; what’s the first action you try to take?
• The party has recently gotten a big windfall in credits from a mission; what’s the first thing you buy with your paycheck?
• An NPC your character is particularly close with has gone missing, and you’ve received an anonymous ransom note; how do you approach the situation?

What we are trying to understand is how our players *think* about gameplay. Do they think purely in mechanical terms, are they more narrative focused, how do they want to solve problems? Once you’ve done a few of these questions for each person, you should have enough information to at least present a hypothesis on how that players likes to engage with the game. Now is your time to present that hypothesis to them, and ask for feedback.

Hey, so based on these questions it seems like you really favor tactile interaction with the world and creative problem solving rather than relying on what’s on your character sheet or in the rules. Does that seem right? Anything you would add or clarify?

Once we’ve clarified these, we want to move on to a more group discussion here. We want to ask open ended questions about expectations here; how much in character roleplay do we want, do we talk in funny voices or in third person, is the group aligned towards a common goal or is everyone working towards their own agendas? Here you want to be a great listener and use those hypotheses you created earlier to chime in and call people on their bullshit. If the guy who loved doing tactile problem solving is suddenly nodding and saying he loves crunchy combat, now’s a great time to challenge him on that and remind him what you just talked about. We want to avoid people agreeing just to seem agreeable, and create compromise where it makes sense here.

Next, we need to move on to the all important content and safety discussion. Here is where we want to be really really clear about people’s triggers, what areas of narrative are dangerous or off limits, etc. We’ll want to introduce safety tools here like X cards, talk about and agree on how to handle situations where the boundary gets pushed too far, and really make sure everyone is agreeable on content going forward.

Finally we have to talk rules and mechanics. We’re not going to do a detailed reading of the book here, but we will talk about basic mechanics, an overview of character creation, what splat books we may or may not be using, and any house rules we plan to use. For more inexperienced players this will help prep them for how the game works mechanically, and for experienced players this will let them know what level of bullshit we will or won’t be allowing in the game.

Once this is all done, you should open the floor for any final questions from your players, and then move into your recap. Recap the discussion so far, and make a recommendation on how to move forward based on everything you’ve heard so far. DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING. You will not move forward here until you have everyone’s unanimous buy in. Remember here that no is more powerful than yes, do not be afraid to recommend that the group doesn’t move forward with this game based on what you have heard, and make sure you have given everyone explicit permission that it is okay to say no!

Wrapping Up

Congrats for making it this far! If everything has gone well you’ve hopefully run a much more effective session 0, and hopefully you’re starting to prep your epic campaign. A friendly reminder that these are guidelines, they can and should fluctuate depending on your group and specific situation, and you should make them your own!

I hope this was helpful to folks, feel free to leave a comment down below if you have any questions and if you do use this in your games I want to hear how it went!

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