Zoe's Reflections: Session 0

[This is the first of a few updates that are "Zoe's Reflections" -- gaming discussion written from the perspective of Zoe in character. This will be the only ZR (Zoe's Reflection) post with this explanation. I definitely would appreciate comments, and note that I will try to do any responses 'in character' from Zoe's perspective.]

Hey gang! 

So, there's lots of things that are tricky in having a weekly gaming session. So, I thought I'd talk a bit about how I'm handling my current game.

When trying to talk about gaming, it's hard to decide where to start, but I think one interesting topic is the idea of a "Session 0." Now, for this game, I didn't have a conventional session 0, but I did take a few hours of prep before the game started to set things up with the players that acted as a kind of abbreviated session 0.

That in itself is worth thinking about. Scheduling is hard, and for a lot of people, the first session makes or breaks whether a game happens at all. So, I absolutely understand when people say they don't want to commit to a full-blown "session 0" because they just want to get into the game.

And honestly, that's fine! If you're having good games, and you don't do session 0s -- it's not like you're doing something wrong!

So, when would you need a session 0? Session 0s, to me, become more important:

-The more complicated the game setup is going to be.

-The world you're running is more unique or unconventional.

-You're aiming for a specific tone or style of play.

So, in a game where you see the game as "conventional high fantasy," perhaps drawing off campaign sourcebooks (and loosely Tolkien-esque), the better you know your players, and the more you are okay with the 'spontaneous/camp' vibe that a lot of tabletop games lean into, the less important a session zero is likely to be for your game.

My campaign for Seb, Malik, Sandy, and Patty, is fairly conventional in some ways*, and that's one reason I didn't want a full session zero.

(*maybe a big asterisk for some. . .)

As it happens, I also only knew Sandy among my players, and that's why I took a few hours at the beginning of our first game to sort out the world and my tone.

Tone is huge for me. With a group of adult players, some of which knew each other well, I wanted to establish early the level of 'romantic tension' players expected and were okay with. It seemed like this was a fairly open-minded group, and that's why I wanted to explicitly talk about limits beforehand -- not because I plan for this to be a particularly "erotic" game, but because I wanted to know what players were comfortable with well before those questions arose. (As it so happened, the players drifted in that direction far faster than I anticipated, so it's good I had that conversation early!)

I think discussing tone in session zero is hard, because players don't really understand your world yet and thus also don't fully understand their characters, and so don't know what they want. But, although many games can become 'good' by finding deep characterization inside initially flat characters, I think one trick of the current surge in popularity for tabletop gaming is that expectations have changed for certain groups of players. I think some players want a more dramatic, cinematic tone, whereas others are more comfortable and used to goofy fun -- but when different players have radically different expectations in tone, that is one thing that can make life harder for a game master in managing the group dynamics. That's one reason I think session 0s can be useful -- they can align player visions before dice hit the table.

There's other opportunities in session 0s as well. You can use them to set up character connections. For instance, since the dark elves and the high elves have historical conflict in my setting, I thought it was interesting that two members of my group had one dark elf and one high elf. Instead of having lingering conflict from the get-go, I thought it'd be more interesting if the characters already had a strong connection to one another.

There are of course risks as well, although I think it's easy to overstate these. Although it's pretty rare, there's some players that actually much prefer talking about their characters over actually playing -- I think some players would rather be writing an individual novel, not doing collaborative storytelling, and if they really want to drag you down into pre-planning every story beat, that might be too much. But even though this may seem like a risk, I think establishing a problem with a player like this early might still be a benefit.

Another challenge is that some players feel like they want everything their character does to feel spontaneous. They want to provide you the game master with enough 'tools' in the form of their backstory, and then to have the confidence to do their own thing. But I think, for me, those players also sometimes will push story tones in directions that make me uncomfortable. I've had players that go very hard into brooding, grimdark directions unexpectedly. And while I definitely don't want to micromanage how a player sees their character arc evolving, I do want to know enough about their character that if their character's story starts to go in a direction that is interfering with my sense of fun in the game, that I know what sort of prompts might adjust things back in a direction that is more fun for at least the both of us.

So, basically, I see this as an argument in favor of session zeroes -- when they are appropriate. That being said, I'm curious about your experiences! What works best for you in playing and running tabletop games?