What do you ask your players before starting a new game?

Role-playing games
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I have a regular Wednesday group - we’ve been playing together for about 3-4 years. I’m one of the two regular GMs, and we’re just about to swap over, so I put together a list of the games I’d quite like to run for the group next for us to discuss.

But that made me wonder - what do you discuss before starting a new game?

Tone? Game? Genre?

Or do they just get Hobson’s Choice?

(As an aside, I once left a long-standing group when the next person who was GMing wanted to run AD&D 2nd Ed. for 1st level characters - a style of game I particularly hate because you have almost zero tactical choice for the first 3 or 4 mindlessly dull levels. When I politely expressed a preference not to play that style of game, I was met with ‘but this is what we’re playing next’ with a barely hidden ‘like it or lump it’.)

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Not that I discuss anything currently, not having a gaming group, but as both a player or a GM, the three main things I consider(ed) are genre, tone and weight.

Genre is clearly defined; like most I have preferences and know what themes I would enjoy and be more immersed in. Tone is where it sits on the light-hearted to serious scale, and what appeals to me in relation to the genre. Weight refers to the complexity of the rules and mechanics, and somewhat would be adjusted by my familiarity with those rules and how I believe they would suit the tone of the game.

Balancing those three factors are key for me. As a whole, I want to be certain that I would want to invest my time and involvement in any game, especially one that I will be running (and preparing for) and/or is likely to be a long campaign. I played and GM-ed a lot of different systems and styles in the 1980s that covered most of the genre and weight spectrum but using different tones, and know that I can enjoy most games with the right match of these factors.

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Generally, what do we want to play next?

I sometimes have suggestions and might give them a choice of several prospectuses, anything from the Golden Age of Piracy with voodoo and ritual magic to Cold War espionage with otherworldly entities seeping through tears in reality or a modern campaign where the PCs are top occult troubleshooters to a billionaire Patron and self-appointed protector of the Caribbean from supernatural threats.

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I write a set of proposals, a prospectus describing the things I feel I might like to run. I name the system and give a description of the theme or the base idea of the game. The current game for the Wednesday Night group (I have one too!) is ‘a magical school story, using GURPS and set in the CIty of Aegis, a setting they have played in before.”

We then had some discussions about the sort of magicians they might like to play and I answered questions about the setting and how it had changed for this campaign.

I have used more detailed questionaires abouit their personal limits but mostly for ideas that I think might be controversial or horror games where I really should check out people’s limits.

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Basically what Michael said.
I also like using Google Forms.

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To be perfectly honest, I’ve done the formal prospectus thing less often than I’ve just verbally described different campaigns I’d be willing to run and discussed them with prospective players, often coming up with variations on initial ideas or entirely new ones during conversations about what to play next.

Ordinarily, my players are my friends and while it’s never happened that all of my friends who play RPGs have been in the same campaign, all of us occasionally have conversations about campaigns and if we come up with an idea we like, I’ll check who’d like to play it and has enough free time to commit to the schedule we agree on.

Even more often, players will ask if we can play a campaign about X or Y, and in case that X or Y does not appeal to me enough, I will say that the concept is not something I am enthusiastic enough about to run a campaign in it, but if they were to run a campaign like that, I’d be willing to be a player in it, help with rules mechanics and campaign preparation as needed, or both.

Agreeing to GM a campaign is a huge commitment of time and attention. I wouldn’t do it for any concept which did not appeal to me enough for me to enjoy the research, writing and creative work associated with it. In comparison, being a player requires much less time and effort, so I might agree to play in a campaign just to support a friend who really wants such a campaign and is going to try running it.

I have proposed a campaign to play with a friend, who agreed to play in it. Because we’re in different countries, we’re going to play it over Discord. Someone on Discord noticed our conversation about the upcoming campaign and asked if they could play. We said yes. Now that the game was no longer a sole protagonist campaign, I asked other online people if they also wanted to play.

Playing online is not, technically, new for me, as I’ve had friends who lived abroad for a few years turn up as a face on a tablet at the table through Skype in our regular campaign, which continued while they were away and once they came back. Playing online with strangers is new and we’ll see how it goes.

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I’m very much the school of ‘This is the game I want to run - are you in?’. As GM, I put in all the work - if I don’t enjoy or fully engage with the system and the campaign, its going to run out of steam because I won’t want to run it. I don’t want to be miserable while prepping and running a game. So I kinda respect your ex-GM @jfs. As a player, you have the option to engage in that or not, which you did.

I suppose I might offer a couple of options if I have them but only if they’re something I’m excited to run.

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I know what you mean @Griffster77 - no one should run a game you’re not enthused by.

OTOH, I was surprised that there was basically no option as a player to discuss - we were a group of 5 and 4 of us rotated the GMing, usually running short campaigns. So not the same commitment as saying something like “I’d like to run Pirates of Drinax / Murder on the Orient Express / The Great Pendragon Campaign / (insert properly long campaign of your choice)”.

Anyhow - apart from losing a good group, it made me much more mindful of understanding what my players were looking for in a game - in my current group we had an issue where we nearly lost a player because he really valued niche protection in certain crunchy games and had never needed to make it explicit because as a group we naturally did that. New player came in and broke that unspoken rule … luckily we caught it in time.

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As a forever (until the last couple of years) Forever GM I am with @Griffster77 . I have flat out refused suggestions of adventures from players that I have no interest in running. However we have tended to play published campaigns that take us a year plus to work through, rather than homebrews as discussed above, so people tend to know the vibe (but never the rules, despite having played for years (which can be frustrating but actually kind of suits me!)).

More recently I have had the itch to play shorter runs to try out different rules (hence my experiment with Scurry, currently on hiatus, on these very forums), and I am slowly coaxing my long term (many decades) players to try them out. Pirate Borg next I hope, after the current Cthulhu comes to a probably messy end.

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I suppose this is where the “Session Zero” approach comes in, which comfortably post-dated my RPGing. I had two main gaming groups - the scout group being more into serious rules-heavier games and the school group being into lighter sillier gaming - and also did a few games with my brother and his friends, more on the lighter side. We had known each other for years so had a good idea of what would go down well, but also had those “someone has bought a new game so shall we try it?” moments, which most of the time only lasted one or two sessions.

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When I’m intending to run I usually produce a list of possible games, maybe with a short blurb. Often with some pros and cons. Like:
Terminator RPG - pro is I own several published scenarios; con is its a crunchy system.
Ecopunk 2044 - pro is it’s an interesting setting; con I’d have to write all the scenarios.
Last Fleet - pro is PbtA and it is Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers filed off; con is the PCs absolutely HAVE to be movers and shakers (no watercolour artists, deaf ballerinas, or estate agents).

Other GMs sometimes just list the games, without telling us anything other than the title.

A year or so ago when the Tuesday group were choosing a new game, I put in these requests:

  1. We are not bad guys and not working for the bad guys.
  2. Not to play in any campaign setting where players constantly turn to each other and say “Hans, are we the baddies?” (Reference: the Mitchell & Webb sketch about Nazis).
  3. For the PCs to be able to make a difference.
  4. Under no circumstances for the PCs to be constantly bullied into doing the bidding of overpowered NPCs. (Vampire and WH40K I’m looking at you here).
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I have refused (sometimes multiple times) suggestions from my players that I really don’t want to do. “No, I am never going to write GURPS Glorantha.”

I have taken no for an answer when I have suggested things to my players that they have rejected before. (One of these days looking pathetic and whining is going to work.)

I have taken suggestions out of the cycle when it has been firmly rejected enough… and then when, in desparation, I put them back in again got told that the last time they were rejecting it because it was too similar to a recent game and the time had come round again.

“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”

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I got started on doing that, but my players turned it down.

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I’d prefer to be surprised, but then I’d only have myself to blame when it turned out we were in a heist game set in a cyberfantasy world with half-elf hackers…

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… and you’re playing a Victorian butler.

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Note that this is a bit retroactive for me. I don’t really have the GMing energy I used to. Also please don’t assume I think I always get it right; I know I don’t.

I found it useful to write up a paragraph or so about each game I’d be offering to get my own thoughts in order. If there are multiple potential GMs, so much the better to compare offerings side by side. (Even for in-person groups I always set up a mailing list so that we can discuss things like this while not actually in the same place.)

I want the players to feel enthused about whatever they’re playing, so I like to give them options. Like the thing in Trail of Cthulhu where you’re invited to come up with a character motivation for going back to the horror, even before play begins, I think having made an explicit choice helps to increase a player’s feeling of involvement.

Of course I’ll also entertain suggestions for tone or emphasis. I may have my own vision for the game but again I want the players to be involved. And absolutely there will be a session zero - in fact for me it’s more like a session zero plus session ½, because I mostly play games with fairly involved character generation. For example at the start of the Bayern campaign (audio on this site) we were talking about the setting, and the sorts of character who’d fit on this mission, in between the actual mechanical generation process.

For GURPS I go further and treat the first adventure as a “pilot episode”. I try to make that as much like my long-term vision for the campaign as possible, and if players feel they want to tweak or even replace their characters afterwards to be a better fit, that’s just fine.

When it’s the same group that’s going to be playing, whatever the game, it’s trickier, as @jfs says. I’ve known games clubs that worked on a 6 or 12 week cycle: every short campaign would end at the same time, and players and GMs would shuffle around into the new ones that appealed to them most. But while I like short campaigns a lot, I wouldn’t want that to be my only gaming.

As a roleplayer and boardgamer, I look at a four hour convention RPG slot and think “I could be playing multiple boardgames in this time, most of which I know I’ll enjoy, and if there’s one I don’t it’ll be over soon”. I’ve had some very good convention games but I do find I’m getting risk-averse.

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I created a survey for my next campaign, and one of the options was “Mystery Box” for those who like to be surprised.

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