I guess technically this is part of a series.
This week we had a Session 0 for a new campaign, an idea we’ve had brewing for a few years, and the DM and I took no time to screw it up. Part of Session 0 is getting a feel for the campaign setting as much as players and characters are aware of it, including fitting player backgrounds into that setting. Usually we use it to build characters, though since we’d already discussed our builds and personalities most of us were coming into the session with a pretty decent idea of who we were and what we wanted. We just needed to iron out the details.
For me, one of those details was my family. I’m playing a member of a noble family in 1500s Venice, so the specifics of that family are somewhat important as they pertain to geopolitical maneuvering. I intentionally decided nothing about my family, including the name, because our position in the noble hierarchy really wasn’t up to me. I was waiting for information from the DM before I worked out specifics within the foundation he had built. He, however, was largely waiting for me to do the same thing. Our conversation went roughly like this:
Me: “What’s my family name?”
DM: “Basilio.” (which I immediately misspelled)
Me: “Where are we politically?”
DM: “You’re a lesser noble family who’s been in the city for several decades.”
Me: “So we’re pretty new.”
DM: “I thought I said you’d been there for several decades?”
Me: “Isn’t that pretty new? I mean, relatively?”
DM: “I guess?”
Me: “How did we come to power?”
DM: “I don’t know, how did you come to power?”
Me: “…”
DM: “…”
Me: “I’m going to roll a random profession. We can use that as a basis.”
DM: “I think that—”
Me: “Too late I’ve already rolled. Let me check the table…sheriff?”
DM: “As opposed to policeman, or…”
Me: “I see watchman, but not police.”
DM: “I mean, in some cultures the sheriff was the highest governing local body.”
Me: “Maybe. So we came to power via law or physical might or something?”
DM: “…”
Me: “Can our family motto be ‘mo money mo problems?’”
DM: “I’m going to say no.”
Me: “Well of course it would be in Italian.”
The moral of this story is that if a player and the DM each expect the other to come up with something and neither does, you get 90s hip hop in your Italian Renaissance. We were both waiting for information from the other to fill out the design space we had; I wanted him to figure out my family details so I could fit my character into the setting without forcing him to bend it around something I determined in my ignorance, and he wanted to leave that as open as possible so he didn’t step on my creative freedom.
Neither of these are, in and of themselves, bad. It’s good to not bungle into a campaign expecting the DM to instantly accept anything you way. It’s also good to give the players room to design whatever they want, within reason, and not limit them with sudden restrictions like “oh, there are no divine casters, you had no way of knowing this before just now, scrap all your exciting ideas”. It’s good that we were both willing and able to relax what we might have wanted so the other could have what he wanted. Where we failed was going too hard in those directions at the same time, leaving a big gap where neither of us was comfortable filling it.
At our table in particular this wasn’t as big a deal as it could have been. We’re pretty decent at building things extemporaneously and we can go from nothing to setting in about a half hour, especially with three and a half other creative minds at the table lending their inputs. It also helps that we immediately knew where we could find a table of random professions and did not feel so beholden to the dice that we wouldn’t reject a ridiculous result like “software venture capitalist” or “pope”. We ended up with something approaching worthwhile after a little back and forth and a lot of comedy. But in a perfect world we should have both come with with at least something we wanted so we had a starting point.
Our real problem, as is often the case, was communication. He told me “I want to know what your background is”, but not “I’m deliberately not going to determine anything about your family until I know it works with your character concept”. I told him “I’m waiting for setting information from you to come up with a character background”, but I didn’t say “I’m deliberately not going to design a single thing about my family because I think that would be better handled by a DM than by a player.” So while we said “we should share information”, we meant “neither of us is comfortable building this organization because we’re worried it will clash with something the other person wanted but didn’t enunciate.”
We did prepare some ideas, of course. We’re not completely hapless. I wanted to have my residence outside the city limits, and the DM was fine with that. He wanted me to have a relative with suspiciously bad magical power in a family of casters, and I was fine with that. But these are really low-impact points in the vast sea of what constitutes a setting.
What I ended up doing is building a loose family tree and history and sending it to the DM, giving him full veto power over anything and everything in it. It’s what I should have done a few years ago, and it gives us a baseline without investing too much time or emotion into a full, rich group of people we may never see or care about. It’s probably the plan that gives us the most balanced input: I sent him a rough picture, he refines some lifework, I refine it more, and we go back and forth until we have art. As long as we know who’s doing the first sketch.