If your table is more into roleplay and storytelling, a slow burn party build up could give the campaign a more epic and authentic feel, instead of defaulting to the gamey trope of everyone randomly meeting at once or skimming through the party's shared history. For instance, the campaign could open with three PCs out of five and the other two would be introduced over sessions 2 and 3 as the heroes venture into the world. To occupy the players who have yet to appear, you could give them supporting roles to play as and let them change certain details to their liking - name, gender, appearance, personality, etc. That way, they get invested in the story from the start while also preparing their own cool introduction scenes where their PCs' skills and personality shine. However, while this approach could work for fast-paced and rules-light campaigns, it might get frustrating when playing slower and crunchier games.
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Viral did it in a couple of Dark Tower games he ran that I was in.
didn't read your wall of text, idea sounds like shit though
This is how my current game is going, this was partly due to some players not being available for session 1 and it's been an organic way of introduction.
We had one player join because no one could move this big boulder from a cave entrance and our big brawler player came mountain man climbing down the rock face to help.
Do people really want to "prepare cool introduction scenes"? I've been playing for a couple of minutes and I've never had a player want to be introduced in a "cool way". We come up with an excuse, act it out if it's in their interest, and then play the game.
Decent idea on paper for a long and narrative focused campaign, but only if you have a VERY dedicated and regularly meeting group. From my experience campaigns tend to die out way too quickly to waste time on 5 session long prologues if you want them to actually get anywhere
sometimes this just happens organically because of scheduling, and yeah it can work. players drop in and out of long campaigns so having mechanisms for characters to do so too just makes sense.
there's also the very underrated approach of having characters know each other before the campaign starts (painting in a backstory of previous adventures). not every character needs to know every other, but in a party of 4 or 5 if each character knew 2 or 3 others from before, it makes it way easier to hook them in to the adventure. it doesn't need to be positive past associations either.
If you are doing this because some of the players can't make it on your initial start, then OK. Otherwise you are being an butthole to the guys who don't get to play for a few sessions because you think you are some clever writer.
Even having a player sit on their thumbs for a few hours because you "can't find a reasonable way to introduce your character just yet in the story" means you are wasting their time so you can jack yourself off.
>So much pointless projecting
>While also utterly missing the point
Thanks for making it clear you never played a single session in your life and aren't even a secondary, but a fricking tertiary on this hobby
NTA but what the frick are you on about? How that post and your post even remotely related?
>What is playing with an open table with a continuous campaign
Pain. That's what it is
Your pic is The Wizard of Oz. The movie is 101 minutes and introduces four characters and resolves their arcs in that time. Even the entire audio book is just over 4 hours. How long are your gaming sessions, 20 minutes? You're a fricking idiot.
>Didn't even read the OP
>Just eye-balled the image
Zoom zoom zoom
>stopped reading a reply 6 words in
Happened accidentally with my campaign. Started with 3 and then over the course of the next year I recruited 3 more, one at a time. That combined with one PC abandoning the party and another dying it has formed quite a tumultuous year for the party. They’re finally starting to settle having dealt with most of their issues.
>a more epic and authentic feel
Introducing characters piecemeal isn't about making stories more epic or "authentic" (what the frick does that even mean in this context?) It's about the viewers/readers not being able to keep track of more than a couple characters at a time, so you slow-drip the who-the-frick-is-this exposition.
RPGs don't have this problem unless you have an awkwardly large group anyway, and everyone is already pretty invested in at least one character.
This is absolutely a good way to introduce important npc factions and whatnot, so you don't dump a whole lot of exposition at once, but you're just boring your players and inventing busy work for them for no reason if you actually go with this idea. Slow drip character intros aren't any more epic or authentic than anything else, for every Avengers you have an X-men that starts with a team already in place.
Plus, having everyone randomly meet is a lame-ass introduction anyway. Start in medias res, or at least at the closest point to the start of the actual story, then ask the players why the PCs are there.
This seems like a LOT of work for questionable narrative and fun benefit. Player and DM time is valuable.
An introductory adventure integrating the new guy in a long running campaign makes more sense, as well as letting it happen organically with people arriving and leaving.
At most you could have an one-shot with each player (a sort of "prologue") which then converges into the proper Session 1.
Even then you would need a bit of railroading/plot reasons to make sure that everybody ends in the same place so they're an actual group.
How about writing a book but nobody can read the first 3 chapters.
It's called in media res.
mentioned it.
Imagine a session starting with " You're propbably wondering how I got into this", with the focus character in a death trap or awkward a frick comedy political RP situation, or a weird start point for a pitched battle.
>Your charcter starts off in a wedding dress in a cart driven by the BBEG's left handg oon, that everyone else is attacking.
And then the "how did you get there" can be emergent, or tied into the plot, or whatever.
This only works well with certain players. About 70 percent of the random pickup types can't improvise beyond their fanfic their way out of paper bag.
Even then, it's less exposition, more action, which is usually good.
Not over the course of several sessions, no, but for Tomb of Annihilation I was playing a character actually native to Chult, and so sat out of the initial first session until the other PCs stumbled across me and hired my services as a guide around Port Nyanzaru and the local environs around it. Although first I had to survive my execution. And also I say "hired" but really I mean "bought".
I can see it work over the course of a session, but multiple sessions just sounds needlessly exclusive towards most of your players and sets one guy up as the "main character". Why do campaigns need to feel "epic"? Unless you just mean "epic" as a generic catch-all positive term like "cool", I don't see why an interactive medium needs to be treated like a narrative one. The stuff that is happening is happening immediately. There doesn't need to be a narrative barrier, so there doesn't need to be an attempt to be narrative.
>We introduce characters 1 by 1, kinda like a movie
>You're scheduled to be #3
>Attend session where we meet Number One, doing his heroic thing
>3 hours later it is time to end it for the night
>Good session today, next week we'll introduce Number Two!
Quite legitimately anyone at that table should consider themselves lucky to live to see another day.
Not on purpose. I've had campaigns where some of the players only joined a couple sessions in.
If you were playing a rules-lite game though, then there's even less of a reason to split it up over several sessions though, since a rules-lite narrative system is even more suited to skipping between several 'scenes' in a single session.