Title: A promising start.
It's a player-driven campaign system, I thought. Just get the players to give you their character ideas and it'll be super easy to just weave them into a beautiful 'choose your own adventure' style campaign narrative, I thought. I'll just supply some macguffins, a couple stock bad guy archetypes, and colour in the backgrounds (so to speak) and the players will take care of the rest!
WRONG.
My awesome happy fun time ride of fantasy experienced its first bit of turbulence when my players sent me their character ideas... and not a single person mentioned being able to use a weapon. Don't get me wrong, the characters were all cool, unique ideas, complete with special talents, a hint of backstory, and chock-full of delicious gameplay-enhancing personality. But NO ONE even MENTIONED being able to use a gun, or having a history as a soldier or mercenary... Not even being able to throw a punch! These people were so far away from a Jayne or a Zoe that they came out the other side. Seriously, a petty thief, a spoiled city girl, a skinny nerd, and a freaking 10 year old, and then the one guy who kind of at least sounded like he SHOULD be able to hold his own specifically included in his description that he was non-violent. Le sigh.
So, Note to Self #1: Zelda, not World of Warcraft. I was going to need to focus on detective work and puzzle solving rather than 'random encounters' - or even being chased by mysteriously violent mysterious bad guys - to move the plot along.
I decided for the beginner session to focus more on putting all the disparate characters into a roughly believable setting and situation, one where I wouldn't need to handwave too much shared backstory among them but which would naturally funnel them all into running into each other naturally. So where would this weird bunch of miscreants all looking for a new ship end up? Well, on Beylix, of course, home of the DIY ship for cheap. Once I'd decided on that, it wasn't too much of a stretch to come up with an event that would be sure to draw our ragtag bunch together: a junker's hiring fair complete with ships for sale. Vera's Chop Shop was born.
In the end, I did handwave Molly and Todd knowing each other, and sort of "placed" Cale and Wren where I needed them to be, but all in all I'm still slightly proud of how this first session went. The players got to play their characters and make decisions, but because the 'prize' I'd invented (the chop shop job fair) was big enough, the decision to go there was still essentially theirs. They all came together from different areas, they all had a reason to interact with each other and test out their character-acting chops, and by the time the session ended we had 5 characters in the same place at the same time for roughly the same purpose - without me having to narrate to them what I needed them to do. Not bad for a first try, right?
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