Running a session 0 can be the difference between having a long-running campaign with friends and a halting, awkward campaign that withers after a few uncomfortable weeks. This pre-campaign checkpoint can be a quick, breezy calibrating of expectations before your game starts, just like a video game might ask you to calibrate the brightness of your monitor before you start playing to ensure a smooth gameplay experience.
So, let's dive into what a session 0 is and how you can run one with your group!
- What Is Session 0?
- Session 0 Checklist
- Setting and Managing Expectations in Session 0
- Establishing Hard and Soft Limits
- Character Creation
- What To Do if the Social Contract Is Broken
What Is a Session 0?
Covered in chapter 4 of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, session 0 is a time for everyone in a D&D group to express what they want out of the campaign. During this session, every group will cover something different based on how well they're acquainted. Some groups that are more familiar with each other might discuss what they want out of the game’s combat, storytelling, and characters. On the other hand, groups that are just starting out will often go more in-depth into the campaign's rules for social conduct.
Session 0 can take fifteen minutes or three hours, depending on how many topics you want to cover and how deeply you end up talking about them. We cover examples of topics in our session 0 checklist below.
Session 0 Checklist
When participating in a session 0, you're joining a social contract with your other players. D&D is a game, after all, and games are supposed to be fun. When you discuss boundaries and expectations for your D&D sessions, the other players put their trust in you, and you put your trust in them to uphold these guidelines so everyone can have fun.
The following topics are just suggestions of what to include in your session 0, but you’ll probably come up with more topics as you read this article, talk through your session 0, or even later as you’re playing your campaign.
General
- Experience: What’s everyone’s D&D experience level? Who’s never played, only watched, only played a few times, or has only played an older edition?
- Type of Campaign: Do you want the players’ actions to drive the story? Or do you want the characters to get caught up in a larger whirlwind plot?
- Level of Lore: Do you like worlds with deep lore and Tolkienesque histories? Or do you prefer fantasy worlds with a more fairytale-like simplicity?
- Schedule of Play: When and how often would you like to meet?
- Meeting: How will we meet? (Video call, Discord, in-person, etc.)
Gameplay
- Combat: Do you like tactical combat with maps, minis, and meticulous counting of movement and spell ranges? Or do you prefer more free-flowing, narrative-focused combat without such granular attention to detail?
- Genre: What genre of game do we want to play? And what level of emotional intensity (romance, horror, etc.) are you comfortable with? What movie rating would you like the campaign to be?
- Roleplay: What level of roleplay is everyone comfortable with? Is out-of-character discussion allowed? Can decisions be retconned?
- House Rules: What rules will be used that differ from the official rules?
Characters
- Character Creation: Will we be creating characters and writing their backstory together? What level do we start at? What ability score generation methods are allowed?
- Character Limitations: What species, classes, spells, feats, and backgrounds are allowed?
- Magic Items: How common are magic items, how can the party acquire them, and are there any that are disallowed? Also, is there any specific magic item your character wants at some point in the campaign?
- Progression: How and when will characters level up? What level is the campaign expected to reach?
- Alignment: What character alignments are welcome in the campaign? Under what circumstances could an alignment change?
Safety and Comfortability
- Hard and Soft Limits: Are there any topics you don’t want to come up at all in this game? Are there any topics you are uncomfortable with but can handle in small doses or as a background element?
- Safety Tools: What safety tools should we use?
- Table Restrictions: What's allowed or not allowed at the table? (Phones, alcohol, etc.)
- PvP: What happens in a player-versus-player scenario? Can players steal from one another? What happens if an argument breaks out between two player characters?
If a topic comes up that you don't have an answer to, "I don’t know" or "I don’t know yet, but I’ll let you know" are perfectly acceptable responses.
It’s also okay to have multiple session 0s. If there are ever big questions you need to talk to the whole group (or even just more than one person about), it’s worth saying, "Let’s have a quick session 0 before today’s game, please."
Setting and Managing Expectations in Session 0
The most important aspect of session 0 is to manage expectations. D&D is at its best when everyone agrees on certain things. Not everything, of course; some fun moments in D&D are the result of a bit of platonic disagreement between players.
But be careful when your players come to the table, and all blithely agree they want to play a campaign like The Adventure Zone. One player might mean they want all the jokey, brotherly fun of early The Adventure Zone episodes, while someone else means they’re excited to break hearts with a campaign full of the teary-eyed drama of later The Adventure Zone episodes.
If you don’t set clear expectations upfront and manage them throughout the game, someone is going to walk away disappointed.
Accommodating Different Expectations
If players want different things from the campaign, it doesn't mean you have to break up the group and find different people to play with.
One campaign can do many things. Just like an adventuring party works best when it’s made up of several different classes, your campaign might work best when it has a flexible tone, peppering stories full of darkness and drama with bits of levity and lightness.
As long as what one player wants doesn't encroach on another's hard or soft limits, your goal is simply to make sure moments of one tone don’t spoil moments of another.
House Rules
D&D is a game that's played differently at every table. Part of setting expectations during session 0 is mentioning house rules that players might not be familiar with. It’s important to make those changes clear to everyone upfront so that no one is blindsided when the DM says, "Actually, I have a house rule that says…"
Establishing Hard and Soft Limits
One major safeguard for your campaign’s success is establishing boundaries. Hard and soft limits are a type of safety tool, something that can let you roleplay freely and explore dark, emotionally rich topics without fear of accidentally hurting one of your friends.
Hard limits are lines that absolutely should not be crossed for any reason. Soft limits are topics that are explicitly uncomfortable for a player but should be okay, either as long as the environment feels safe and welcoming or as long as they’re explored lightly or in moderation. Some examples of common limits are:
- Sexual relations, be it between players or NPCs
- Violence towards children or animals
- Racism
- Slavery
- Gratuitous violence
- Drug use
- Phobia triggers, like spiders or deep water
People will have different limits, and it's important for each player and the DM to know which sensitive topics to be careful with and which to avoid completely. If you or your players aren't comfortable discussing limits openly, you could have an anonymous method of conveying them, like using Discord or index cards.
Drawing the Line
It’s important that your group have a set of safety tools you can use if someone, accidentally or otherwise, crosses these lines. Safety tools make it easier and less intrusive to tell the group, "This is starting to get uncomfortable for me," without the social awkwardness of bringing the whole game to a halt to say so. Hard and soft limits are a great start to using safety tools.
One common and popular safety tool is the X-Card, created by John Stavropolous. This is maybe the most useful RPG safety tool out there. It’s an easy way to "tap out" of a situation. You can use this instead of hard or soft limits, but you can also pair them together to make tapping out easier. If you’re interested in including other safety tools, check out the freely available Tabletop RPG Safety Toolkit, curated by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk.
Character Creation
Character creation is the fun part of session 0. Collaboratively creating your characters and their backstories can provide tons of benefits for a fledgling campaign. You can use this time to make sure your party's composition is right for the type of campaign you'll be playing and establish if you have any connections with your other party members before you start the game.
This is also an excellent time to discuss your player character's place in the campaign setting with the DM. Different campaigns need to cover different topics in session 0, as evidenced by our guide to running a session 0 for Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. This will give you the time to ensure your idea for your character fits in the game world and you can even begin to discuss potential plotlines for their future.
Showing New Players the Ropes
Every new player’s needs are different. Some new players have never been exposed to fantasy in their lives. Some may have never played D&D before but love Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, Dimension 20, or any number of other actual play D&D shows.
If you’re starting a D&D group with even a single new player in it, it can be greatly beneficial to take the time to help them create their first character with the rest of the group during session 0. D&D is a group activity, and creating a character from scratch can be a great early bonding exercise.
If you’re the DM, you might take it upon yourself to make sure that the new players’ ideas aren’t being talked over by the veteran players. On the other hand, if you feel like a new player isn’t "getting it" or is treating the entire event too jokingly while the more experienced players are ready to get serious (or vice versa), then you can use this time to say so.
What To Do if the Social Contract Is Broken
Ultimately, session 0 is when you form your first impression about a gaming group. You can have a great session 0 that gets you hyped for a campaign and then have promise after promise be broken in the first session or two.
If you find your gaming group has broken your social contract, you’re faced with a decision. You could speak up and let the other players know that what they did broke the rules set in your session 0. Or you can make a quiet exit and look for a different group of people to play D&D with. The decision is yours, just don’t jeopardize your emotional well-being for a D&D group you're unhappy with, even if there are moments of genuine fun sprinkled throughout.
On the other hand, if you like a group of people but for one reason or another you don’t think that a long-term D&D campaign is the right fit, try suggesting another thing to do together. Maybe you have a weekly board game night instead. Or maybe you try a different game. Or you could even set up a D&D one-shot series with a new Dungeon Master every week, round-robin style.
Now, On to Session 1!
Session 0 is the perfect time to set expectations with your gaming group to ensure everyone has a good experience. What's better, it doesn't necessarily have to be held before your first session. If you missed a session 0 in your current campaign and find that there are things you'd like to discuss with your group, it's perfectly viable to hold a session 0 any time between sessions.
D&D is meant to be fun for everyone involved. Making sure everyone is comfortable and their expectations for the game are being met is the first step to ensure a long, successful adventure for everyone!
James Haeck (@jamesjhaeck) was formerly the lead writer for D&D Beyond. They have contributed to a number of D&D releases, including Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep. They are living their best druid life in Seattle, Wash., with a veritable jungle of houseplants.
Mike Bernier contributed to the reporting of this article.
This article was originally published on January 8, 2021, and was updated on March 11, 2024.
so uh have the EotWs and the new Homebrew Horrors ended? Pretty sure spell spotlights come only like once in a while and i think monster guides have died already
I think this example works really well for demonstrating the need to have some away from the table discussion about expectations. Obviously I don't have all the context, but given what you described there, your players could have been looking at it like this: "We're trying to save these villagers from the dragon, but aren't really sure how we can do that. Now the dragon is here, so it's too late to do anything else, we have to try and fight it off or distract it while the villagers escape. Oh, the DM just had the dragon avoid us and kill everyone. Guess there was nothing we could have done to stop that, so whatever, I shouldn't get invested."
In the game that I've been playing in over the last few months, there have been a couple times where the DM has commented to me about our previous session, something like "I don't know why you guys didn't try to get that NPC to help" or "You guys didn't really search that building!" When he's said that, I've been taken aback, because it is usually related to a scenario where one person did try to do those things, and the party just went with the result of that person's attempt. The DM was expecting that everyone would try to do it until we succeeded or had exhausted all options. That's something where we just have different perspectives on how to approach situations, and what seems like an obvious option from one perspective is not necessarily so from another. Sure, the paladin could just shove the druid out of the way and reiterate the druid's point with overwhelming charisma, but that basically cuts the druid out of the roleplay, so the paladin didn't do that.
Basically, to offer advice, I would suggest you ask the players why they went with the plan they did, and figure out where exactly everyone's head was at. Perhaps you offered them clues on alternative approaches, but they didn't notice. Perhaps they're the sort of group that dithers endlessly with planning if they're given too many options, and you tried to create a sense of urgency, but instead they felt like you locked them into combat as the only choice, as well as punishing them by having 'forced' them into a losing scenario. The reasons why they chose the path they did are very important to know if you want to try and avoid it in the future, and the only way to know is to ask.
I will say this about safety tools. I normally play with my family, and we can really handle anything that anyone else does. But when I did a campaign with people from my school... we could have really used it. When one player thought she was being funny, it caused the DM to end the session early, everyone else annoyed with her, and me getting off the video call and crying. It was not a good session. However, after the session, we talked about it in our group chat and figured out a way to fix it. And the next session was great!!! But I think it would have all been better if we had used safety tools from the start.
really helpful
I have been DM since 1989 and for most of that time it was the same group or subset of that group. We all knew there were not really any thing that would freak out another player. So no real taboo topics, but then again we never went there. There was no need to. The most outrageous thing was when one of the ladies in the group playing a male PC picked up a barmaid for a night of fun. There was teasing, but she didn't have a problem and said that had we not she would have teased us.
As that group drifted apart, I made a few new groups at the different game stores. New players and one or two from the old group. There was never any real need to call out a players actions or my own. As part of being a DM, it's my job to be reading the table during the game to make sure that 1- everyone is engaged, 2- not cheating, 3 - not looking uncomfortable. Even in the mid 90's my groups have always had female players (the oddity I have come to find out) and if any of them ever seemed bothered, it was usually from a player's personality IRL and not anything in the game.
In all my years I have only asked 3 people to not return to my table. The first was for a rule I have and the only one that I will not bend on..No Drugs at my table. The other two were for the fact that they just would not mesh with the rest of the table. Their PC's always had to try and get to the loot first and would lie about what was there. Before I switched to an even party XP divide, would run around to get a hit in all the monsters to get some of the XP for each kill. (I got away from that one early in my DMing) The last player was fine in game, but was just rude in person and while we are tried to over look it, after a while he had rubbed every player, including me, wrong. When the group had gotten back to town the players informed him, after getting the okay from me, that the party was disbanding and retiring. They also told him that he would not need to make a new PC for the next campaign as he was not welcomed at the table. I told him we would talk after session, when we did I informed him of the vote they had and then approached me about. He had been asked multiple times to watch comments and insults. After 4 sessions of this the group decided they had enough. He was of course POed and had words for me for allowing it to happen. I reminded him of the 3 times I had asked him to watch his words and actions to the players out of game. He left and that group stayed together for another year before drifting apart.
My current groups, two, are made up of people I have played with for over a decade with in one group and for just over three in the other. The new group was a random table that I got placed on at my game store. It was mostly new players and a new DM. The adventure that I got dropped into was a bit weird and the players even mentioned it a few times. As this was that DM's 1st game outside of his house with family, I get where he may not have felt the need for boundaries. Also the age of the DM probably played into it as well. After getting a feel for the table and group, I offered to DM the next rotation. Just offering up a game that was run by a experienced DM was all it took to show them what a campaign could look like and not needing odd moments to make it memorable. (Let's just say I am glad it was his girlfriend's PC involved in the setup, which I won't go into here, and not another player)
After my turn ended he offered to run again with a new campaign he had worked up. An improvement of the Nth degree over his last one. Realizing that the story can be amazing and not needing for shock value encounters and events to get the player reactions was great to witness. Nothing was said before hand, no Session Zero, and the table had a great time. He is currently prepping up the 2nd half the of campaign which we hope to be able to return to when we are allowed to return to the table.
I understand that not all groups can have the advantage of a seasoned DM who is capable of reading a table to help keep the table in the world and comfortable. A lot of this that I see comes from the influx of new players and the need for one stepping up to DM. Now you have a table of new and inexperience, those are the tables I see benefiting from the Session Zero. Alot of them I think come into the TTRPG from the video game side of gaming and the two worlds are not always easy transition. If the DM creates his game like Zelda and his players are treating it like GTA, I can see where there is going to be some tense and awkward moments that could end a game real quick. Likewise could so put off the DM that they quit DMing and the hobby loses what could have been a budding amazing DM due to a bad table match up.
As the community grows with new players, I think it is the job of the DMs out there to help foster the next gen of DMs. Not in a way to promote any type of Old Guard stereotypes, but to show and teach them it is not hard to get behind the screen. Encourage the table to have a mix of all genders and race. Give them the foothold to rise up to the challenge and know that if all are having fun, everyone wants to come back for more. So give them a showing of what can be and help spread the good that can be at any table, Players have a great time and wanting more.
nice article. It helped me a lot.
In a case like that I'd like to point to James' comment on the topic of the "Bad game group". I think that fits very well to your situation.
"In the case of the former, the legendarily bad gaming group (or even just a somewhat uncomfortable and mediocre group!), you’re faced with a decision. Do you stay and hope it gets better? Or do you make a quiet exit and look for a different group of people to play D&D with? The decision is yours. It’s entirely up to your judgment. But let me share a bit of advice I learned when I first started playing: bad D&D is worse than no D&D. Don’t jeopardize your emotional well-being for bad D&D, even if there are moments of genuine fun sprinkled throughout. It’s just not worth it."
In the end it is your decision but personally I find that DMs are always in short supply. I'd recommend that you politely excuse yourself from the group, personally.
Yeah, generally articles seem to have slowed down a bit, which is a shame, and I think James is writing most of them, so writing 5 or 6 article series at once would probably take up a lot of time.
I totally get this- There are plenty of dynamics where clear communication is easy, and groups where everyone knows is eachother, is super comfortable with eachother, or is otherwise comfortable voicing their needs. I've also never played in a group where if I felt it super important to raise an issue, I'd be too afraid to do so. (Or at least, not played in a group for long).
After 13 years of play, it might feel a bit OTT to suddenly bust out this system when everyone's happy enough to say what's going on. I think I'd use them with a new group, people I didn't know too well, bringing new players in without as much connection established, or, honestly, if I had a player that I knew was shy &/or sensitive and had a problem speaking up.
That said, I think in general I'd advocate for trying them out on any group (No shame to anyone that doesn't), especially new groups, even when people know one another, just because there's no harm in it, but the benefit could be really great as it opens up a conversation around boundaries, and helps put guard rails on improvisation that could really go anywhere.
this was very informational and i hope i can implement this to my games to create a better overall experience for my players.
There has to be some consequences to their characters based on their actions. Such. Word gets back to the local lord or the next city about or the local hag/druid enclave hear about what happened in the village. A dying villager curses them or a ghost haunts them either physically or in one characters dreams. The city refuses to let them in or merchants refuse to deal with them. If a character has a god or patron then they take notice, restricting spells