DM: As you walk away, you feel a slight tingle in the air before a flash as bright as a thousand suns blinds you for an instant before... nothing. A bolt of lightning has vaporized your body. Miraculously, nobody else in the vicinity seems to have been harmed in any way nor even do they seem to have noticed what just happened, including the fact that you just disappeared. It's as if the Gods themselves, for no particular reason, have arbitrarily decided to smite you out of existence entirely. Ready to roll a new character?

Fun fact: The Expanse books (and eventual TV show) were started as a unique role-playing campaign where the person running it (Ty Franks) would write a prompt, the players would explain their character's reactions. He'd then write a story section incorporating that and the players would say how they reacted and so on. There was a core group of characters who were the "survivors" early on, but one of the players had to drop out early-ish, so in the next bit of story that character died. That was carried into the books and TV show, which is why after the core group of characters is established, there's a sudden, shocking death.

Everybody plays RPGs differently, but it's funny how some people don't get the term "roleplaying" and are constantly, relentlessly playing their real selves in the game.

You're missing the entire point by what I mean by "effectively the same" and the point of my argument. There are only ever two choices: your characters know each other beforehand, or the don't. Being forced to work together or working together by choice is irrelevant to what I'm talking about. if the party is not planned together to be a cohesive group that are all guaranteed to have a motivation to play the written campaign AND have at least a reason to trust the party members, regardless of if they have personal history or not, is my method for avoiding the inevitable player who wants to bitch about not belong allowed to play their "edgy loner". As I said before, even with literally using the threat of death forcing the character to work with the party, there is ALWAYS that one dipshit who wants to bitch and moan about how I'm "railroading them/preventing them from roleplaying their character" by doing so. Or, they waste time trying to argue for some loophole to go off and do their own thing, separate from the party yet somehow still "technically" doing the job. I am speaking from personal experience of over 10 years as a DM. > The other key thing about in media res is that you don't have that "inevitable round of introductions that feels like that time at the start of school when everyone had to stand up to say their name and one interesting fact about them". You're thrown into *doing* things before there's any chance for that. You get to know each other not beforehand, as in case 2, but *as the adventure is going*. Yes, the characters are. The players, on the other hand, are all just sitting around a table rolling dice with no sense of urgency. They roll their dice, the encounter is over, and then the customary introductions start cause everyone is wondering what the other players have created for their character. Like, either you have been incredibly lucky with groups or have let Critical Roll give you rosey glasses about the role-play capabilities of the average player if you think doing things in *media res* makes a difference here. I avoid all of this by just doing it in Session 0 with the afformentioned rules about character creation. It works. Ever since, I've never had to deal with it or any of the annoyances I have talked about. Also, no, BG3 is not a good example. It is a video game that doesn't have to deal with fumbling IRL people who all have differing expectations and preferences. > In media res will require players be cooperative enough to care to act, but it doesn't require they trust each other or know each other immediately. It *definitely* doesn't require pre-written specifically-designed characters. See, the problem I have been talking about is that my method guarantees that players are cooperative enough to care to act that's the entire point of why I do it how I do it. Again, I am speaking from direct personal experience across 10+ years as a DM. Problem players will find a way to be a problem. So I nip it in the bud with a method that doesn't have to rely on the good-faith of the player, cause I've been burned by it more times than I can count.

Also accept that you suck at making characters

> even with literally using the threat of death forcing the character to work with the party, there is ALWAYS that one dipshit who wants to bitch and moan about how I’m “railroading them/preventing them from roleplaying their character” by doing so This is an out of character problem that should be addressed by talking to your players at session 0 (and at any other time it arises). The manner in which you create characters is irrelevant here because it's an interpersonal issue, not a mechanical or narrative one. > either you have been incredibly lucky with groups or have let Critical Roll give you rosey glasses about the role-play capabilities of the average player I don't watch actual plays. Never have. Tried Critical Role for a few episodes and didn't see the appeal. I don't think it takes an awful lot of roleplay skill to accomplish. Because I've seen it work many times with very ordinary players. Ordinary, but participating in good faith, which is the bare minimum. If you don't have good faith, you shouldn't be playing.

Maybe your char bumbles around the room doing goofy things instead of working hard and logically to crack the puzzle and the dm can make your bumbling uncover extra clues that advance the plot.

"I perform a history check to see if there's any historical significance about this desert."

Obviously, I'm probably missing some context here, but reading the way you've described this, I don't think you were at fault here. If the GM's decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler's ship like "Yo, I'm the jedi, let me in," that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction. If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget "Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law", basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That's not a jedi, that's an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord. Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying "This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him," something like that. Not just "Yo, I'm a party member, lemme in." Real life doesn't work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it's so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.

Why is it always a jump to "Overly Paranoid to the point of seeing everything moving as a spook" instead of just "reasonably cautious but otherwise still level headed"? > If the GM's decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler's ship like "Yo, I'm the jedi, let me in," that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction. Do you forget that this is almost literally what Obi Wan and Luke did to recruit Han and Chewie? They just walked up to the pair in a bar and had a polite discussion about requesting some discreet passage aboard Han's ship. Last I checked, no one bitches about that part of A New Hope.

> Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.” Oh, that reminds me of a 4th way campaigns can start (in addition to the 3 I said in a different reply) that I've been in before and quite enjoyed—though wouldn't want to be overused. The MCU method. Where each player individually gets a 1 session (maybe 2 at most) solo session introducing them and getting them to the right place to start the campaign.

It might be your least favorite part of DnD, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who enjoy meeting a new group of characters and finding out about their particular ticks and specialties.

This shouldn't be the GMs job btw, players, roleplaying and backstory are YOUR department, write a reason why your character would end up with the others. Work together.

Disagree. The DM should provide some sort of reason for the party to come together. Some sort of external influence, to bring in any characters that don't start the game together. But it is the duty of the player to roll with it. Don't fight the plot hook. What's the point?

No, Obi Wan and Luke found Han through contacts Obi Wan had at Mos Eisley having lived on Tatooine for years and gone to the trouble of maintaining underworld connections knowing he was on the run from the authorities, and they didn't just rock up and say "Yo, we're buds now," they employed Han and Chewie to smuggle them somewhere, that being the job of a pair of smugglers.

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