Tips for your First Session

One of the more common questions we hear from newcomers to the Reclaim the Wild community is, “What should I do for my first session?” Novice GMs are often overwhelmed with thoughts of grand designs, and cowed by the great GM’s they’ve watched or played with in the past.

Today, we’re going to take a break from creating new Reclaim the Wild content, to help you create yours – and discuss some tips for preparing and running your first session.

Check it out below!

Writing your First Session

Writing your first session’s adventure can be a daunting, exhilarating task. You may have read, watched, or played in some great adventures before, and feel that you need (or just want) to rise to meet their quality bar.

But the truth of it is, the best first sessions are pretty simple, and get you into the game quickly. Your goal is not to write the next Tolkien-esque epic, with a living world and a complex, intertwined plot – rather, your goal is to have a fun game with some friends.

As such, we recommend you have a relatively simple problem for your players to solve in their initial session, with a villain to thwart, a few obstacles to overcome, and a solid moment of “heroic success” for the players at the end. If you already know what you want your campaign to be about, you can sprinkle in leads and hints towards that greater goal in your first session – perhaps the villain was working for a bigger bad guy, or his minions are whispering about a great evil coming over the horizon.

In any first session, both the players and the GM are still getting their feet wet. Even players who are experienced with the system will still be getting a feel for their new characters, and the GM might be getting used to new players at their table. In either case, newcomers are still learning the rules, no matter how much they’ve read the rulebook before.

As such, we recommend your initial session have “a little bit of everything,” if you can. This will let your players see their Heroes in different lights, and have an opportunity to try out everything they can be and do – and for you to see what kinds of activities your players enjoy most, so you can try to do more of those things in the future.

• Have a combat against some simple Rank 0 or Rank 1 foes, so everyone can get a feel for how the Heroes work in a fight. (We suggest this initial fight be against a number of foes equal to the number of Heroes, and consist of at least two different types of foes.)
• Have a social situation, so players can roleplay as their Heroes, and exercise their more social-oriented Traits.
• Have an obstacle that can’t just be walked around, such as a broken bridge, locked door, or heavy block and switch. This lets the Heroes stretch their muscles an their minds, and use their Spells, Techniques, and Tools to solve problems.

If you know what kinds of Heroes your players are bringing to the table, you can tailor the obstacles in your adventure to better match (and be bested by) their skillset. For instance, if one of your players’ Heroes is a wizard who knows much about the ways of nature, perhaps the ‘broken bridge’ instead becomes overgrown with poisonous thorns.

Remember, one of the main goals of a first session is to get players to want to return for the next session! Make sure you reward your Heroes for accomplishing their task and completing their first adventure. This reward, much like the obstacles they overcame, should come in a variety of forms: not only loot (weapons, materials, rupees), but also the gratitude of the people they’ve helped, and the anger of the villains they’ve thwarted.

Playing your First Session

No plan survives contact with the players. Whatever obstacles you set in their path, players will either be more clever, or less clever, than you might’ve expected. So, don’t be surprised when someone tries to do something you hadn’t planned for! That’s part of the fun.

If you don’t know how to handle something, we suggest saying the following: “You can try it! Give me a Trait roll, and let’s see how it works out.” If the roll is sufficiently high, let the crazy plan work! (For a first session with fresh Heroes, we recommend a Difficulty Check of 10 for reasonable ideas, 13 for the kinda-out-there ideas, and 16 for the truly ridiculous ideas.)

One of the most important tactics for keeping your players entertained, as a GM… is to be entertaining. Put on a show, and put some energy into it! Put some oomph into your depiction of NPCs, giving them voices, accents, quirks, and habits. Describe the actions of your monsters in combat with gusto – don’t just say “the Bokoblin takes 5 damage and is defeated,” say “you slam the Bokoblin into the dirt, burying his head, leaving his legs kicking for a moment as he tries in vain to pull himself free.”

After Your First Session

If you can, try to give the players a choice of ways they can continue the adventure for the next session. Maybe they hear rumors of different problems in the world, and they can choose which one to track down and solve next. Alternatively, perhaps they have just one lead to follow up on, but they have a clear variety of ways they can follow up on it. By having this choice, you’re giving the players something to talk about between the end of the first session, and the beginning of the next – and that helps keep them engaged and focused on your campaign, eager to see what happens next! (And be sure to remind them to tell you what they want to do for the next session, so you can plan it ahead of time.)

Take notes about what your players did (and did not) enjoy in your first session. Maybe some plot elements weren’t as engaging as you thought they’d be; maybe one particular bandit was a favorite punching-bag, or performed surprisingly well. You can bring those things that the players loved back in future sessions, and you can avoid the things that didn’t work well.

Once you’ve got some experience under your belt, you can start making larger, more ambitious plans for your sessions and your campaign overall. One of our favorite frameworks for building a session is the “Five Room Dungeon” method. We might get further into using that framework for making fun sessions in a future article, but for now, know that it’s a useful tool for structuring a session, adventure, or even a whole campaign.