Session Zero

When preparing to embark on a long campaign that will tell the story of a group across months or years, it’s important to get everyone on the same page and set expectations as early as possible. If you were creating an epic fantasy tv show, you’d do this preparation work via the pre-production process, with the creator and showrunner building the writers’ room, working with the producers and heads of departments to develop the look and feel and vision for the series, and so on. If you were writing an epic fantasy book series, you might do it by worldbuilding and developing characters, by outlining and making a mood board or whatever else helps you find and maintain your vision for the project.

Many tabletop roleplaying games do this via a session zero. This term means different things to different people, but for Daggerheart, it’s the way you plan for success in telling your fantasy epic together as a group. Before making characters, before deciding on your setting, the group talks about what you all want from this campaign and this experience.

The GM facilitates session zero, but all players in the game should be active participants, advocating for what they do and don’t want from the campaign.

There are many tools for structuring your session zero. If everyone in your group has played together before, you may already have a method for conducting your session zero. If you haven’t done session zero before or don’t have a method you prefer, here are some suggestions.

Laying the Groundwork

An essential part of session zero is choosing your game’s content calibration and safety tools. These tools ensure players know they can avoid material that would be hurtful or triggering—and beyond that, safety tools empower players to explore challenging material everyone has signed up to engage with to be what we’d call “comfortably uncomfortable”). In addition to deciding on content the group does and doesn’t want in the game, these tools assist players (including the GM) in communicating during play; for example, you might use a safety tool if something unexpectedly painful or troubling comes up, or if you want to help each other remember what elements the group decided to avoid or keep “off-screen”.

We recommend tools like the following, though you can use whatever works best for your group.

CATS

One of many frameworks for discussing content and safety is the CATS Method, created by Patrick O’Leary (See: CATS Framework). This framework presents four elements to discuss with your players to decide what the group wants from the game: Concept, Aim, Tone, and Subject.

Concept

Discuss the concept for the campaign - what’s the big picture pitch? If this campaign was a book series, how would you talk about it to a friend you know would love it? Getting yourself and the group excited about the concept for a campaign is a great way to set a guiding star for your creative discussions throughout Session Zero and beyond.

For example, you might pitch one of the following concepts:

Childhood friends reunite at the funeral of their village elder and uncover a secret that could break the world…or save it.

A science-fantasy romp across the realms with a party of misfits who tries to find their origins but ends up finding a family in one another.

In a world wracked by powerful disasters, a group of treasure hunters is hired to retrieve the five lost elemental shards sto restore the balance of nature .

However, you might not know the campaign’s concept at the beginning, and that’s okay. Feel free to return to this conversation at the end of session zero or throughout the first couple of sessions as necessary.

Aim

Aim is about what you want from and for your campaign - your creative, social, and other goals. Do you have a specific creative agenda you’re looking to pursue? Do you mostly want to spend a few hours with friends every week making things up together and blowing off steam? Aim is both about format and aesthetic agenda.

For example, an aim might center on one of the following:

We’re going to play a weekly campaign from level 1-10 with strong individual and group character arcs.

Our aim is mostly to hang out and chat while kicking butt and getting new powers and cool items.

We want to tell a story that explores the relationship between grief and community through an action-fantasy in a world recovering from a near-apocalypse.

Other ways to decide on or describe your game’s aim might be to reference touchstones for your campaign or for the kind of character you want to play, drawing from books, films, comics, music, etc. You might create a mood board to help define the aesthetic of your world or a soundtrack to form an aural soundscape for the vibe you want.

Tone

While playing Daggerheart, you and your group will build a world entirely your own. Even if you’re using an established setting, your version of that setting will be distinct and grow through your creativity. An important element of defining a world and a campaign is agreeing on tone - the emotional landscape and tendency of the campaign. Establishing the tone of your game helps align players’ expectations and ensure that everyone has a good time.

A quick way of picking a tone is to list the following tones on a piece of paper or note card, then circle tones everyone is excited to focus on, and cross out any tones someone wants to avoid:

For example, a new group might want to use the provided list of tone options to discuss the following:

Josie nominates Dramatic to be highlighted and everyone agrees, so that option is circled to signal that it will be prominent in the campaign.

Kyle says he’s not interested in a Goofy tone, and nominates it to be crossed out. Dani is possibly interested in Goofy, but since Kyle’s not, Dani is willing to cross it out—but in exchange, she asks that the group consider circling Romantic.

Sita isn’t interested in Romantic being a central tone, but doesn’t want to cross it out. She nominates Heart-Pounding for a major tone, and after discussion, it gets circled.

The group agrees that they don’t want a Gritty game, so it gets crossed out. They also cross out Whimsical. That leaves the group with the following list:

In other words, they’re interested in a game that will be especially Dramatic and Heart-Pounding, sometimes Adventurous, Inte nse, Funny, Intimate, Romantic, and Scary, but not Goofy, Gritty, or Whimsical.

Subject

Discuss things you and the players actively want in the game as well as subjects anyone wants to avoid. For subjects to avoid, this can be big, broad things like bigotry and torture, or very specific elements like avoiding spiders or a particular name that carries big emotional weight for a player.

When discussing challenging subjects, it’s important to center the desires and needs of marginalized players who are personally affected by those issues. In heroic fantasy games, some players ﬁnd it empowering to face oppressive forces as part of the evils of the world—allowing those evils to be directly fought and overcome—but that should be a choice actively made by the players who are impacted by that oppression outside the game. Many marginalized people play TTRPGs to escape the everyday frustrations and pains of bigotry they experience in their daily lives, and they shouldn’t be forced to struggle with them in a game. Those choices should be made primarily by those most impacted by the subject matter. For instance, if your group includes LGBTQ players, prioritize their preferences on whether to include or exclude homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression against queer people.

This is a good time to pick any speciﬁc safety tools you want to use during the campaign. We recommend choosing a tool for managing content to include and avoid; the following “Lines and Veils” section suggests one such option. Additionally, we recommend choosing a tool to support players in pausing or redirecting play during the session, such as the X-Card presented in the upcoming “X-Card” section.

For more information about various safety tools and how to use them, Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk have an award-winning collection available for free at ttrpgsafetytoolkit.com.