I'm looking down the barrel of the first session of the first game I've run in years. I've never had a hugely successful GMing session before, primarily because I tend to lack any clear goals for the players, who are then largely left to their own devices and proceed to wreak havoc on hapless NPCs. While amusing, the games are short-lived when their momentum peters out.

This time, therefore, I made a point of getting the players to give me their character description before the game started, with the intention of the characters' own goals propelling the game forward without my having to do much in the way of railroading or hand-holding. I got a gold mine in response for my upcoming Arcana Unearthed game, with:

A fugitive human noble who doesn't like giantish rule and was framed for a murder.
A giant who wants to be a better giant and help people through his caretaking role.
A human who is obsessed and believes that the giants are vital guardians for all and "helps" their rule by ruthlessly suppressing all dissent.
A verrik who became an oathsworn after his brother betrayed their family and stole an artifact that he was sworn to protect.

Not only are there plenty of very strong goals in each of those characters, but those strong goals will bring the characters into interaction with each other, possibly fatally, once those goals come out into the open.

For these characters, I have a bevy of NPCs at the ready to plug in, the 'recurring villains', if you will, though not all of them are very villainous so much as at odds with the character. These guys should be ample for keeping the party on their toes without suffering from the one big bad guy cliche.

However, I'm currently suffering from three problems:

1. Two other players are involved with no character concepts. One has a character but no personality or history for it, claiming that he 'prefers to let a character define itself over play' which is a very pretty theory and all but gives me absolutely nothing to work with. The other simply hasn't even made a character yet, but odds are that it's going to be a headache when it's done; he has a weakness for playing characters who aren't team players and go at odds with the rest of the group. Without knowing what those two characters want makes it very difficult to put them in the story opening, which leads to:

2. Avoiding the generic 'Okay, you're all in a tavern...' start to a game. I'm trying and trying hard to find a good way to pull such disparate characters together and get them moving in the same direction. At the moment, my best idea is to start the game in the waiting room of a local underground information broker, since all of the ones with goals need information to attain them. And the broker, of course, will be my deus ex machina to gather them together and start them off. It still strikes me as a little contrived, however, and I'd like to find a better way to handle the things.

3. I don't have a big plot. I have no world-destroying menace to fight nor any big, nigh-invulnerable bad guy to cackle. While one one hand, I sort of hate the cliche of the world-destroying menace in RPGs, on the other I worry that things will grind to a halt if I don't have a large plot going on to keep them moving.

Those are my only real concerns at the moment, as I'm mostly pleased with the way things are turning out. The first game session is only a couple of weekends away, though, so I decided I'd see if anyone has any advice before things kick off and are too late to change.

Kitsune, may I begin by welcoming you to the Forge and congratulating you for taking the plunge into running a game.

Having read your post, I have a few ideas that might help in a small way.

1. The sooner the the two get some sort of a concept, the better. To aid them in the development, throw them into socially hazardous situations that will force them out of mediocrity.

For example:
You come across a husband and a wife fighting. The man says she's been sleeping with other men. The woman says that he doesn't pay much attention. She hits him very hard. She slaps her back. They enter a fight and she pulls a carving knife.

In situations like these, they are forced to have an opinion and to take a side. Also, you could offer the difficult players some starting concepts. I have a lot of success in this method because they can still develope a unique character but with this, they have a place to start.

2. I agree that the tavern meeting is so generic that it is more a point of comedy than anything else. May I recommend that the team find themselves in some point of strife. Perhaps they go to bed one night during heavy rain and wake up in the middle of the night to find the town is flooded because the damn broke. Their first task would be to stay alive and reach higher ground. This would require teamwork. Plot hooks could then be added by the effects of such a disaster. If the players are experienced, they are unlikely to expect this (unless they read the Forge!).

3. You don't need a big plot to make the story big. Your team could be working towards enacting some social change. Perhaps making the giants and humans communicate more. The overall impact on the world of this sort of story would be massive but the final event wouldn't be earth shaking.

I hope these few comments help. Good luck with the game!

Why not just require that the players write up two local, living people in their characters' lives that have been powerfully important and why and then have the players provide a Kicker for/to their character? (See Sorcerer for Kickers.)

And if Mr. Bland doesn't want to play, then he doesn't have to.

Chris

MEETING IN A TAVERN

Why do the player characters have to come together in the first session?

You could easily run separate scenes for some or all of the players, until you know more about what they're doing. Then start weaving the separate player concerns together.

This is what I've been doing in my Riddle of Steel game. It's taken two sessions to get to the point where characters share concerns and spend time in the same scenes. And in these cases, most of them aren't actually "working together" in the old D&D party sense.


NO CHARACTER BACKGROUND

About the player who wants to develop his character in play. This is a perfectly valid approach. He can define his character based on how he (the player) responds to elements of the shared fantasy as it develops. Since you've already got enough input from other players to create a starting situation, just go with that and let him hook into it.


KICKER

Rather than ask for background, it might be more effective just to ask each player to describe an event that "kicks" his character out of his everyday life. It should be something that has just happened. It should be something that _the player_ wants to do something about.


SYSTEM

What game system are you using? Many of your player-centric objectives will be supported or ignored depending on what the game's resolution and reward systems are.

Kitsune:

1. Two other players are involved with no character concepts.

2. I'm trying and trying hard to find a good way to pull such disparate characters together and get them moving in the same direction.

3. I don't have a big plot.

I would in fact recommend all of the (defined) characters to actually know each other. Have them discuss and briefly describe how they've all been together for a while, as a group, and describe the last 6 months of activity, and more importantly, the interpersonal dynamics they've already worked out. (My analogy would be jumping if the first Episode of Star Trek already had McCoy and Spock bickering over humanity, and Kirk jumping in, describing the good times McCoy and him had at Spock's expense or whatever; the infrastructure is already grown out, but it still have major room to change.)

As for the big loner badass-wannabe: not to be to cocky, but perhaps try to have him watch some of Jayne from Firefly? Not to be a fanboy, but I actually think he's a decent example of how the loner bastard SHOULD be played - amusingly self-interested, but never distruptive to the overall scheme, reflecting that even if the character is a loner the PLAYER has to subconsciously be commited to keeping a consistent and fun narrative. "Mein Character Concept!" not being a good enough excuse, and so on.

And the undefined guy: maybe just give him a single archetype/stereotype to work with, and a promise or some carrot enticing him to retroactively reveal/define one secret of his history in-character during play. Many stories begin with a streotypical-seeming character, only to tear apart your assumptions over time.

Kitsune wrote:
2. Avoiding the generic 'Okay, you're all in a tavern...' start to a game. I'm trying and trying hard to find a good way to pull such disparate characters together and get them moving in the same direction.