Session Zero Checklist: What to Cover Before Your First Game

Session zero is the meeting before the first real game. Usually nobody rolls initiative. You agree on what you’re playing, how you’re playing, and when, so that three sessions in nobody discovers they signed up for a different campaign than the person next to them. An hour or two covers the list above. The sections below go through each group and what to watch for.

The Game: Genre, Tone, and Difficulty

Start with the big picture, because everything else depends on it. Say the pitch out loud in one sentence: “This is a campaign about mercenaries in a city that’s rotting from the inside.” If you can’t, the players won’t be able to either.

• Genre and tone. Dark fantasy, heroic adventure, comedy, horror? Serious with jokes, or jokes with the occasional serious moment?
• Setting. A published adventure or your own world? What do the players already know about it, and what should their characters know?
• Difficulty. Can characters die? How much of the evening is combat, and how much is talking?
• Campaign style. A main storyline, a sandbox, or monster of the week. Each asks something different of the players.

The Table: Boundaries and Expectations

This is the group most often skipped, and the one that causes the most trouble later. The paladin wants to negotiate with the orcs, the rogue has already put a knife in their chief, and the player who signed up for “a light adventure” has gone quiet because last week’s torture scene was too much. Nobody did anything wrong. They just never talked about it.

Lines and Veils

Lines and Veils come from Ron Edwards’ Sex and Sorcery (2003), and they’re still the simplest way to talk about content. Lines are things that never appear in the game. Veils are things that can happen, but off screen: the scene fades out before the details. Go around the table and collect both. Nobody has to justify an entry.

A Signal During Play

Boundaries set in advance won’t cover everything, so agree on a way to pause in the moment. That can be the X-Card (created by John Stavropoulos), a simple emoji in chat for online games, or a phrase like “let’s rewind.” What matters is the agreement that anyone can use it, at any time, without explaining why.

What Each Player Wants

Some people want fights, some want character drama, some want to explore the map. Ask each player directly, and settle PvP and secret goals here too: can characters act against each other, and will anyone have a hidden agenda? For what to share with the table and what to keep behind the screen, see player notes vs. DM notes.

You can send these questions ahead of time or go through them together:

SESSION ZERO · PLAYER QUESTIONS

1. What do you enjoy most about tabletop RPGs?
   (combat / roleplay / exploration / drama / puzzles)
2. What's your favorite scene from a past game?
3. What do you definitely NOT want to see in the game?
4. How often can you realistically play?
5. What should happen to your character if you miss a session?
6. Do you want your character to be able to die?
7. One word you'd like to describe this campaign a year from now.

Logistics: Surviving the Calendar

Most campaigns don’t end because of the story. They end because of the calendar.

• Schedule. How often, which day, and how long each session runs.
• Minimum players. Do you play if three out of five show up? What happens to an absent player’s character: do they fade into the background, or does someone else run them?
• Table rules. Homebrew, variant rules, who tracks loot, phones at the table.
• Notes and recordings. Who keeps track of what happened? Ask about recording directly. It should be the whole table’s decision, not the DM’s.

Characters: Build Them Together

Make characters at the same table instead of each at home. That way they have connections before the first scene, and you can spot two players building the same brooding loner.

• One shared past. Every player connects their character to at least one other: “We served together,” “He owes me money.”
• A reason to stick together. Why does this group travel together at all? “Because the DM said so” doesn’t count.
• One hook for the DM. Each player gives one detail you can use in the story: an enemy, a missing sister, a debt.

Write the Agreements Down

Session zero only works if the agreements stick. Three months in, nobody will remember whether you agreed to PvP or what that potion homebrew was. Put everything on one page that the whole group can find:

Once the campaign starts, the same habit applies to every session: what happened, who showed up, what changed. Our session recap template covers that by hand, and so do these other ways to remember what happened last session. If the table agreed to recording and you play on Discord, Kazkar can take the note-taking off your hands, turning each session into a chronicle and keeping the NPCs, places, and those backstory hooks in a shared campaign wiki.

Come Back to It Later

The agreements aren’t fixed. After three or four sessions, take five minutes to ask whether the tone feels right and whether anything should move onto the lines or veils list. People find out what they want from a game by playing it. And if you’re picking up an old campaign rather than starting a new one, our guide to restarting a campaign after a break works like a second session zero.

Frequently Asked Questions