There was a time when my “session zero” was about fifteen seconds of nervous throat-clearing followed by, “Right, you’re all being hunted / fighting some gobbos / on a job for BigCorp. Go.” No discussion of tone, no boundaries, no sense of what anyone actually wanted out of the game. We just hurled ourselves at the first scene and hoped the rest would sort itself out.
That was just about workable when I was running lighter games for people I already knew. Once I started running more horror, more serious campaigns that weren’t D&D, and more games online with people I’d never met, the cracks showed. Misaligned expectations, uncomfortable moments nobody quite knew how to flag, characters built for entirely different genres. It all turns into chaos.
These days, after running games online for total strangers, close friends, and that awkward middle category of “people I kind of know from Discord,” I’ve learned that everything goes better when I invest in a proper session zero. The careful planners relax because they know what sort of story they’re stepping into. The chaos gremlins get clear guidance on how far they can push things (you know who you are). The anxious first-timers understand the tone and the safety nets. Whether the campaign turns out tightly focused or gloriously messy, it simply runs smoother when we’ve spent a bit of time at the start agreeing what we’re doing and how we want to treat each other.
Session zero is not a meeting where everyone sits through Google Slides about the deep lore or encumbrance rules. It’s one concentrated conversation about what we’re about to make together. It’s especially important with new players, but even with people I’ve played with for years, I’ve hit enough mismatched expectations and quiet discomfort to know that skipping it is a false economy.
What session zero is actually for
Session zero does a few jobs at once. It sets the tone, aligns expectations, sorts out basic logistics, and asks: “What do you not want in this game?” It’s where we agree that this isn’t just “my” story or “your” story; it’s something we’re going to co-author, with some guardrails.
When I’m running for new players, session zero is about making the whole enterprise less mysterious. People don’t know what they’re allowed to do, what the tone is, or whether it’s okay to be silly in a bleak horror game (or rather how much sillines is ok). Getting those questions answered early makes them braver later.
With players I already know, the value is more subtle. We all arrive at the campaign carrying assumptions from the last game we played together. If the previous campaign was knockabout nonsense and the next one is grief-soaked folk horror, we need to deliberately turn that dial together. Session zero is where we do that turning.
Safety tools: honest pros, cons, and why I still use them
Safety tools have become part of the standard conversation around session zero: X-Card, Lines & Veils, Script Change, the big community toolkits that summarise them all. The short version is that they give everyone at the table a way to say “no” to certain kinds of content, or to fast-forward past something that has gone from “fictionally intense” to “actually not okay.”
The X-Card, for example, is a card with an X on it; anyone can tap it and the group rewinds or skips the content that’s causing discomfort. On our Discord-based games, its typing “X card” in the text chat rather than a physical card.
Monte Cook’s free booklet Consent in Gaming lays out some of these ideas in more detail, along with a consent checklist that lets people quietly flag topics they want excluded, veiled, or handled carefully. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit does a good job of collecting a whole range of these tools in one place so you can pick the ones that fit your table.
But being honest, in my games, these tools don’t get used overtly very often. In fact, in the past 4 years of playing online no one has ever slammed down the X-Card. Lines and veils are great for setting expectations but they’re usually sensible stuff or phobias we can work around and not feature.
So why bother?
Because their presence sends a signal. It tells people, especially new or quieter players, “Your comfort matters. If something goes sideways, we have a shared language for fixing it.” That’s worth a lot, particularly in horror and serious games where we are deliberately flirting with unsettling material.
There are downsides. Some players find formal tools awkward or performative. Some groups treat “we filled in the form / put stuff in the shared Google Doc” as if that were the entire conversation. I try to pitch them as options rather than mandatory rituals, and I keep the explanation brisk. I’d much rather say “We’ll have Lines & Veils written down, and we’ll use a simple pause/rewind if anything feels off” than spend twenty minutes reading tool definitions at people.
For me, safety tools are not about wrapping the game in bubble wrap. Rather, they create enough trust that everyone feels free to play hard, knowing there’s a brake pedal if needed.
My session zero agenda
What follows is my typical agenda for a new campaign, whether it’s investigative horror, cosmic mecha tragedy, or something lighter with talking potatoes. I don’t stick to this rigidly, but these headings cover most of what I need.
Welcome and campaign overview
I start by welcoming everyone, introducing myself if anyone is new, and giving the shortest possible answer to “What are we doing here?”
The overview is essentially a film trailer in words. I sketch the premise, tone, and scope of the campaign: haunted Silk Road journey, grim salvage mecha, melancholy urban fantasy, whatever it is this month. I make it clear whether we’re closer to “pulpy fun with creepy bits” or “lingering psychological dread and people crying in the rain.” New players in particular need a mental model of what they are signing up for. For example, “Call of Cthulhu” means very different things to different people.
I also state up front whether I see this as a finite arc or an ongoing series. If it’s “6–8 sessions with a beginning, middle, and end,” people calibrate their character arcs differently than if we’re aiming for “as long as it stays fun.”
Expectations and table culture
Then we talk about how we want to be with each other. This is where safety tools live, but also basic cultural stuff: interrupting, spotlight-sharing, joking, phones, rules arguments, and so on.
I explain what tools we’re using and how. For horror and serious games, that usually means written Lines & Veils everyone can see in a Google Doc that doesn’t say who wrote it (to help with courage), and an agreed way to pause or rewind if content crosses a line. I’m explicit that nobody has to explain why something is a problem; “no” is enough.
I also talk about tone and buy-in. If we’re playing doomed investigators in 1920s Tibet, that’s different to goblin heists in a comedy dungeon. I ask people to help keep the tone roughly where we agreed. I don’t mind humour in horror games (it’s a survival instinct) but we talk about not undercutting every emotional beat with a meme reference. Most players get this anyway but saying it out loud helps reassure people everyone at the table is here for the same thing.
With groups I know well, this section is shorter, but I still do it. People’s boundaries change; people’s lives change. Someone who was fine with body horror last year might not be now. I’d rather ask the “are we all okay?” question one time too many than one time too few.
Character creation
Next we make characters. This is the most obviously “game” part of session zero, but it’s also where a lot of social calibration happens.
I like doing character creation together, aloud, even for crunchier systems. That way I can spot weird gaps (“We have four academics and no-one can drive the lorry”) and clashes (“You’ve built a clownish chaos gremlin in what everyone else thought was a sober tragedy”). It also gives people the chance to hook into each other’s backstories as they are being invented.
In more open-ended campaigns, I encourage players to state, in one or two sentences, what their character wants from life and what kind of scenes they think would be fun. This means that when I’m improvising later, I know who might be tempted by forbidden knowledge, who is likely to throw themselves between the monster and the child, and who is absolutely going to pocket the cursed amulet.
For online games, I explicitly ask quieter people if they want help navigating the options. Character creation is a brilliant place to catch people feeling lost before the stakes go up.
System basics
Once characters exist, I walk everyone through how the game actually functions at the table. This is the high-level “what do we roll, when, and what happens next?” part, not a tour of every special case. The core mechanic is usually all that needs to be told to veteran RPG players but for those newer to RPGs more needs to be said. I might speak out a typical GM/Player interaction in this game.
For narrative-forward games, I’ll talk about how moves trigger, what a mixed success feels like, or how stress and consequences work. I often have to be explicit that triggering moves is often about doing the thing and fitting the move rather than looking at a menu of actions like a toolbar in an computer game.
For investigative systems, I’ll reassure people that the rules are designed not to stall the game just because they rolled badly on “spot hidden”; I want them concentrating on interpreting clues, not agonising over whether they found any.
I often calibrate players understanding about lethality here by pointing out how squishy their characters may be, how much progression they can expect and how powerful the things they might encounter might be. If you play horror or OSR style games with players who’ve come from D&D this is going to be important. And honestly, it may be a deal breaker for them. Better to find out now than when they ragequit in session one because the PC they poured their heart into dies when they stubbornly refused to run away.
I keep examples short and tailored to the campaign. “Sneaking into a cult meeting” is more immediately helpful than “generic door kicking example number three.” My goal is that everyone can answer the question “What happens when I try something dangerous?” without needing to have memorised the rulebook.
Gear and starting equipment
I handle gear in a very practical way. Some players care deeply about exactly which rope they’re carrying; others would happily tick “Adventuring Stuff” and move on. I try to accommodate both.
If the system has equipment packages or starting kits, we use those to avoid decision paralysis. For horror and serious games, I call out anything particularly relevant: who’s got the car, who has the heavy weapon, who has the weird occult supplies. The point is less “perfect simulation” and more “we all have a shared understanding of what’s plausible to pull out of a bag later.”
Online, this is also the moment where we check character sheets are actually filled in correctly. Try to avoid finding out mid-session that no-one wrote down their armour or recorded their sanity score.
Intro to the setting
At this stage, we know who we are and how we roll; now we talk about where we are.
I try to give just enough setting detail to fuel play without turning into a lore lecture. That usually means the immediate location and its tensions: the town, the spaceship, the mecha scrapyard, the monastery, the city block. I focus on what’s wrong with it, what’s fragile, and what might change. People remember “the city where the river is slowly turning to black glass” more than “it’s called Blorgas Prime and it has three moons.”
The thing to remember is that human beings can comfortably handle 3-5 things in their working memory and they remember descriptive names more than arbitrary ones. So what 3-5 things do you want them to keep in mind? Highlight those, skip the rest. Want them to remember the name of the key NPC? Add a descriptor. “Ivanakos” is more memorable when he is “the Terrible”.
Sometimes I ask players to help populate the setting. Who else do they know here? Who do they owe money to? Which place do they go to when everything falls apart? This crowdsourcing of detail not only saves me work, it makes the world feel like something they already have a stake in when the first scene opens.
This only works with some players though. Some players really expect the GM to give them a cooked meal rather than help with the prep. This is useful to work out early especially if you’re trying to run a more collaborative, fiction-forward campaign rather than the traditional D&D / OSR game where players just worry about their PCs (and maybe not even that deeply about them). If you encounter such a player, you’ve got to try to gently coax them into being an active participant rather than a passive content consumer. It doesn’t always work out.
Group norms and practicalities
Then we do the unglamorous but necessary bits.
We agree how long sessions will run, how often, and what happens if someone can’t make it. We talk about cameras on or off, muting etiquette, and where we’ll chat between sessions. For online games that’s usually a Discord channel or two for that particular game.
We also talk about how we want to handle rules lookups and disagreements. My line is generally: I will make a quick ruling to keep things moving; we can look up the exact rule afterwards and adjust next time. If someone is particularly invested in a rule, I invite them to be our “rules scout” and look things up quietly while the scene continues. I tend to favour systems that encourage “rulings over rules” in any case but I also appreciate some players love game mechanics and want to get them right. I let them have their fun too if it doesn’t disrupt the game.
This is also where I talk to people about their tech situation. If someone’s microphone sounds like it’s broadcasting from inside a tumble dryer, I’d rather let them try to sort it out before session one than in the middle of an emotional confrontation on a mountain ledge.
Session one setup
Finally, I try to leave session zero with a clear opening situation for session one. Not every detail, but enough that everyone knows where we’ll start and why their characters are together.
That might be:
- “You’re all on the same caravan crossing the desert when things go wrong.”
- “You’ve been hired as a salvage crew and your rusted mech is being loaded onto the dropship.”
- “You’re all friends of the deceased, gathered in a country house for the reading of the will.”
I like to end by asking each player one or two grounding questions about that starting point. How do you feel about this job? Who here do you trust least? What rumour have you heard that makes you nervous? Their answers give me immediacy for the first scene and help everyone imagine themselves already in motion when we reconvene.
Sometimes I’ll even play a tiny vignette: the first five minutes of “session one”, if we have time. It’s a nice way to test the system basics in practice and send everyone away excited rather than buried in admin.
A 15-minute session zero for one-shots
All of that is great when you have an evening to burn. If you’re about to run a one-shot or a very short campaign, you do not have that luxury. You still need session zero; you just need the speedrun version.
Here’s how I condense it into roughly fifteen minutes, still mostly as conversation rather than lecture.
First, I give a very short scenario overview: two or three sentences of premise and tone, like a back-cover blurb. Then I immediately move to expectations and safety. I say something like, “This is a tense horror one-shot with some nasty imagery, but not torture or cruelty to children.If anything hits a boundary, just say ‘let’s skip that’ or type X-Card into chat and we’ll rewind.” I keep this to about three minutes, tops.
Next, I explain the system basics in the most practical way possible using the pre-generated characters. I show them where their main numbers are, how they roll for risky actions, and what happens on success and failure.
Then we do the fastest possible character intro round. I like to integrate this into the opening scene and give each PC a chance to introduce both who they are and what others see when they meet them. If there’s an obvious way their characters know each other, we quickly agree it. This makes sure no-one is a total stranger and has to work out why in the fiction they’re working together.
Remember and this is important: giving PCs motivation to be on the adventure / in the scenario is not the GM’s responsibility. Its on the players. They signed up to play so they need to work out a way to get their PCs motivated to do the fun. If they can’t do that, invite them to sit this one out as their PC goes back to their old accountancy job or takes that safe position as the chef in the tavern.
Finally, I give a one-paragraph hook for the opening situation and ask one small question each to anchor them in it: “You all took this job for different reasons; what’s yours?” or “You were all present when the first bizarre event happened; what detail stuck with you?” That tends to kick off more in-character thinking than another five minutes of me explaining setting detail.
Then we start. The rest of what I’d normally do in a full session zero (deeper setting lore, longer talk about arcs and advancement) simply doesn’t matter for a single evening or short campaign. What does matter is that everyone knows the vibe, knows the basics of the system, understands how to say “no”, and has at least one reason to be on the adventure.
Parting Remarks
I’ve been an early cheerleader for session zeroes and I am still refining how I do them. I’ve absolutely had ones that turned into awkward monologues, or that skimmed past important topics too quickly. But every time I’m tempted to skip it, the memory of those evenings where unspoken expectations came back to bite us is enough to keep me honest.
If you’ve never run a session zero before, start small. Steal whatever you like from my agenda, shorten the rest, and adjust as you go. You don’t need to get it perfect; you just need to open the conversation.
Your future self and probably your future players will thank you.
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