Getting PCs Together for the First Time

[JohnWFox]

Hello Everyone:

How do you get the PCs (their characters not the actual people) together for the first adventure?

I have heard, they all met in a bar (why?).
I have also had GMs say, they were all hired by a patron. (OK? why is my person doing this job)
I have also had them through the PCs in jail and have them be allowed to leave the planet if they did a "favor" for someone. (Can you say RAILROAD?)
Others have just said, you hired on as a crew of a ship.

Looking fo some way to start the game reasonably.

John W. Fox

 

[smiths121]

As the core rulebook suggests, not everyone is a "Traveller". For most campaigns the players will need to decide why their characters have given up the safety of their home-world to take odd jobs. Spend some time before the 1st session getting the players to think "why" their character is doing this, regardless of how you get them together.

Remember all the players are between jobs living off their savings as they have mustered out. Not a great situation to be in, so getting that first job is about, uising their contacts and connections.

For a very open style of adventuring....
The connection rule and ship shares is a great way to start some of the party together. The characters are looking to buy a spacecraft, why not pool their resources? Contatcs can be used to feed unconnected characters with ship shares towards this. Other characters can sign on as crew positions recommended by other contacts.

For new players that need a bit of structure to start with, as some time to come up with "why".

Start with an adventure such as "One Crowded Hour", that uses a disaster to throw the players together. Why are ex-marines/navy/army on a luxury yatch? Obvious reasons are they are on their last flight from A to military base to muster out. Others are on their first job after mustering out "babysitting" against pirates, they can vouch for the other PCs after the adventure to their patron to feed everyone into a 2nd adventure.

 

[Golan2072]

It depends on the campaign at hand. As a gaming group, what do you want to play? A military campaign? A free-trader one? Exploration? Odd jobs?

Military campaigns are the easiest to motivate PCs in - they're simply assigned to the same unit/ship/base. The difficult part is fitting odd character background into the game: while Navy, Marines and Army characters (and probably also Scouts and Agents) would be very easy to fit into a military game, more civilian or criminal careers would be more difficult to fit into the game. So, if you want a military game, you should probably decide on advance on it as a group and make appropriate PCs.

Free traders are pretty easy to organize. If every PC has ship shares, maybe they've just met on a Spacers Seeking Spacers online forum on some world or in a ship-share exchange where they were looking for business partners. If one PC owns a ship, maybe he's hired the rest as a crew (or took them as business partners).

As smiths121 has already said, use the Connections rule. Maybe they already know each other from their previous career, and have decided to go on a join venture in their next job.

Also as smiths121 has said, Travellers are people who seek interesting, dangerous and (hopefully) well-paying interstellar jobs. Maybe some of them are tired of their previous desk job (i.e. their chargen career) and want something more challenging/better paying/less restricting. Maybe they have a lot of space or military skills that would get wasted in whatever desk job offered to them planetside. Maybe (especially if they've mustered out after a lot of terms) they have finished the career phase of their lives and they want to see the universe in their retired years. Maybe some of them are running away from something or someone and want a job on the first ship heading to distant stars.

It also depends on the character backgrounds. If everybody is ex-military, for example, maybe they've served in the same unit or in different units participating in the same operation; maybe they've met during the long, bureaucratic mustering-out process.

 

[rust]

How do you get the PCs (their characters not the actual people) together for the first adventure?

I go the easy route. 8)

In my setting the characters all signed on for a colonization project, and
because of their skills and experience they were chosen as members of
the advance team.

 

[CosmicGamer]

It's a good question to ask JohnWFox.

There is nothing worse than starting the game out on the wrong foot by having players who have trouble getting into character.

Some people start out with 'you wake up and' where all the characters mysteriously wake up in the same situation.

As mentioned, the MGT connections rule is very useful.

Also as mentioned, it depends on the adventure you are starting with and will help if the GM gives general guidelines for the type of characters that are needed. Ships crew, scoundrels, colonists, or whatever.

When letting players roll up any type of character they want and then throwing them together without a preplanned adventure:
- Have them all start with the same home planet. They have all mustered out and have a good reason to all be at the same location at the same time looking for work. If you need a strong hook to tie the group together, they grew up in the same location and some calamity has occurred that draws them together - natural disaster, war, disease, political turmoil, or some "A Team" (old TV show) scenario where the characters need to help out their hometown.
- Work with the players to come up with the reason, but tell them their character is on a ship heading for the XYZ system. Taking a holiday, just passing through on their way elsewhere, heading home, heard of a job there, promised a dying comrade that you would bring their ashes home when you muster out, tracking down an old lover, they work on the ship, there are many many possibilities. Then something happens, miss jump, pirate attack, stowaways, deadly disease, escaped creature from the cargo hold, crash landing...

Have fun

EDIT: Another thing to do is ask the players to give a couple of their characters short term and long term goals. Once they have identified some goals, it will be easy to give the characters choices and not have the players feel railroaded. Because you will be able to drop the right breadcrumbs, you should be able to keep the characters on the path needed for the adventure you have planned.

 

[alex_greene]

Start them all off with a Patron rounding them all up, one at a time. The Patron uses an agent who is authorised to speak on her behalf, and who waves a numeric figure under their noses that they really cannot resist.

Once they're all together for the first time, you can pretty much do what you want with them then. Otherwise, roll 1d6:-

1: The job goes as stated. As Referee, you may send them off on the first adventure you have planned for them.

2: The agent turns out to be secretly working for the Government, and she has a side job for them in addition to the one the Patron has for them.

3: The "agent" is actually the Patron; officially, she is surrounded by a crowd of yes men, and she wants somebody to be able to do something for her quick without them even being aware that she is absent their company.

4: The job is a front. The Patron wants to see if the characters can do something and keep it quiet. If they can, they have a whole lot more interesting and lucrative jobs lined up for them - jobs requiring the utmost discretion on their behalf.

5: The Patron needs accomplices to frame in a hustle she is pulling off.

6: The agent disappears; the Patron is found dead with one of the characters' melee weapons, e.g. a K-Bar, buried in her back; half a billion credits are missing; and the police are already on the way ...

 

[Infojunky]

Getting the characters together is butt easy, especially if they are all generated together. The connection rules in character generation in the TMB are great for that.

After that I generally try to figure out some other external reason. And well there have been several tossed out here; but it really depends on your players and style of play.

 

[Mithras]

In my latest game, one of the PCs was a rogue who mustered out on his homeworld, a desert world. He bought an APC with his money, and then we created backstory of him trucking out supplies to farmers and miners. The other players were an injured/crippled scientist and a disreputable scout who was kicked out of the service. I figured they work with our ATV driver in a dead end job on a backwater planet, shipping dried rations and beer to mines in the middle of nowhere .ie dead end.

So the first time they hear a rumour or are offered a job a little bit different by the cargo master at the port or the mine owner, they jump to it!!

Its workd so far.

 

[BP]

I really like MGT char gen - and it makes startup a little easier.

The Connection Rule is great for associating the characters - but mostly for giving them extra skills at their own choosing to match the role they want to play.

The Events, Mishaps and Life Events give them a reason to be connected - and can even form the basis of the plot! (Currently involved in my first online game (Yeh!) where we basically have done just that!)

 

[Marchand]

Have 'em all wake up from low berths, with an alarm pinging.

 

[alex_greene]

Have 'em all wake up from low berths, with an alarm pinging.

Have the alarm pinging just as they are all getting into the low berths.

Then tell them, quietly, "You're too late. It's here."

 

[Infojunky]

Have 'em all wake up from low berths, with an alarm pinging.

With their last memory of starting out for a night on the town.

I swear one game I was in was just one really long lost weekend from the point of view of at least a couple of the characters.

 

[FreeTrav]

I seem to remember one adventure that opened with the PCs waking up in a medical facility of some sort, and the patron - whom they remembered meeting, but nothing since - thanking them for their assistance. They had some props, including a contract that specified that they would agree to a memory wipe after the mission was completed. The "real" adventure was for the PCs to try to figure out what they had done, where, and why - and whether they were going to be in trouble for doing so.

 

[BP]

Total Recall

 

[BP]

Hmm.. this discussion of beginnnigs has got me thinking of endings...

The players are anxious to finally meet their patron and get paid. They approach the site of the meet - a rundown establishment on LaFayette street with a falling down sign proclaiming it to be The Rabbit Hole...

Inside they find a large, fairly dark and mostly empty lobby. Across from them is a large sofa facing a low table and a high backed chair. The table appears to have two open jars on it.

From the chair comes a man's rich deep voice, "Sit..". An arm, clad in black leather, reaches out gesturing to the couch.

As the players take a seat at the couch, across from the large seated man in mirror shades, they notice that the jar on their right appears to contains red pills, while the jar one on their left identical blue ones...

 

[alex_greene]

- Ten years after a lethal war with an alien species at least TL 16, the characters are the command staff of a five mile long space station orbiting a planet in neutral territory.

One of the alien species tells the station commander that there is a hole in his mind.

- Your first trip out, to the very edge of the Galaxy. As you near the edge, you encounter an old - style beacon, containing log tapes (yes, tapes!) describing how the ship went out to the edge, encountered some sort of force field, got thrown back into the Galaxy, and was self-destructed. Your ship encounters the same energy barrier, and on return back into the Galaxy, two of the command staff develop Psi 15+ and a whole lot of weird Talents.

- You encounter a strange old man who lives in a blue box in an old scrapyard.

- Please, no references to farm boys, crazy old psionic men and a search for a wayward robot that turns into a fight against a corrupt Empire, or I will display that Family Guy image again.

 

[BP]

Nice list, but no mention of a blue (circa mid 20th century) police box?

 

[rust]

- you command the first spaceship to land on the moon, where you dis-
cover an alien starship with a technology that is thousands of years ahead
of everything you know, and after befriending the aliens you use this tech-
nology to unite Earth under your leadership, become immortal and create
an empire that controls the entire galaxy and meddles in the affairs of se-
veral other galaxies

 

[alex_greene]

Nice list, but no mention of a blue (circa mid 20th century) police box?

See my post immediately above your last one. The one with the scrapyard.

 

[alex_greene]

Your life is lived in monochrome, in a kind of retrotech 1920s vision of the future. The Earth is in grave danger every week from Doctor Chaotica, and only Captain Proton can come to the rescue - but just as you're getting to the good bit, the holodeck goes off and you're stuck back in a reality where you and your starship are marooned 70,000 light years away on the opposite side of the Galaxy, facing a monstrous collective of cybernetically-enhanced drones flying in cube shaped vessels ... because nobody ever foresaw that Dilbert could evolve ...