Where To Begin (A Tabletop Game)?

15 Dec, 2025

     "The only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning. And the only way to begin is by beginning."
     — Sam Reich, Dropout's Game Changer

As I write this, it's still the season of Advent, the beginning of the Christian liturgical calendar; the link is a bit tenuous, but I'll use this as a pretext to share an anecdote and brief observation about how we might begin our games.

Source: "Dice," Rebecca Krebs, 2008, CC BY 2.0.

Setting the Scene

This past summer, when I visited my brother Nick and his family a few times, I ran some games for his 8-year-old daughter and him using his All-Out Apocalypse rules. During the first visit I came up with a short adventure concept based on the goals they gave me at character creation, and I decided to start off with the characters approaching Mister Hallywell's Caravansary as they sought the rumoured Midway Magician. (During character creation they decided they were both seeking magic, though with somewhat different attitudes about it; I made a villain to match.) This waystop was really five camper trailers arranged in a circle with a tarpaulin suspended between them, with a little sheepfold and some troughs beside them and chainlink fence surrounding all of it. Mister Hallywell was a floating armbot, which I played as the Mister Handy the armbots are based on; his three adult adopted children more or less ran the establishment, however. These were Jessie, the shotgun-toting jock who defended them; Preston, the prep who tried to make them place hospitable; and Niri, the nerdy mechanic.

Even before the PCs got in the gates, my brother recognized the caravansary for what it was, I think: a minor trading post and future quest hub with NPCs who can orient the players at the start of the adventure. My niece, however, was suspicious of the place and its inhabitants, her PC Ninja-man approaching stealthily and with extreme wariness. Two of the adopted siblings, Jessie and Preston, greeted them, and it took a bit of work to convince her that Ninja-man could let his guard down and stop trying to climb up onto the trailer roofs to hide. Then Jessie and Preston introduced their father, who was a robot, and she was suspicious all over again; my brother had to convince her that they weren't lying when they called the robot their father, because it is relatively normal to just call an adoptive parent your Mom or Dad. Later she would say she didn't know why she was so suspicious and, though I have some ideas, I don't really know, either.

Once she realized this was a safe place, however, and not an actual adventure site, she rapidly lost interest and wanted to get going. My brother did insist on doing some trading and information-seeking before they left: it made sense to ask the people who ran the caravansary if they'd heard of this Midway Magician who was rumoured to live in the area. But they left the trading post quite quickly, and my niece didn't seem to be very interested in its little tensions and dramas. (Granted, those tensions and dramas were more grown-up fare, to help me understand and roleplay them better.)

They then found the midway, defeated the Magician's holo-bots, and captured her; that was as far as we got that visit, though they indicated that they planned to force-march her back to the caravansary before figuring out what to do next. (I had given them a bit of a side quest: Niri wanted them to pick up parts to repair Mister Hallywell, and they got what they needed at the Magician's workshop.)

The next time I visited, we played again. I decided to introduce a raider gang concept I had: the Apothelyptics, who wear Hallowe'en masks modified with breathing filters and use various stimulants and pharmaceutical weapons.¹ Knowing the PCs were headed back to the caravansary, I figured they could come upon a small Apothelyptic crew assaulting Mister Hallywell's Caravansary. At the start of the first session of the next visit, therefore, I said that at a bit of a distance they could see smoke over the trading post; they tied the Magician (actually named Tricia) to a tree and hurried to see what was up.

Seeing the Caravansary under fire by unfamiliar raiders, they leapt into action and, after some of the usual shenanigans (Ninja-man was hit by a syringe-arrow filled with a rage drug), they dispatched the Apothelyptics. This time, after the dust had settled and the fury had worn off, my niece was very interested in talking to the people in the caravansary. She wanted to know all about what had happened, and who the gang were, and why the gang attacked them, and how everyone was doing. She also had all kinds of ideas about what they should do with the now-captive Tricia, and we spent a good deal of time on the various tasks and instructions to which my niece set her before the session ended.

Analysis

The difference between these two beginnings was stark. In the first case, my niece was suspicious and then restless. In the second, she was instantly and consistently engaged, and always had ideas about how to proceed. What can account for this? I don't want to go too overboard in my analysis, because it could as easily be her own mood as anything I did. It could also just be the case that the second beginning wasn't, exactly, a beginning; even if she wasn't all that interested in the caravansary at the start of the second visit, my niece at least knew its operators could be trusted and had some idea that she wanted to interact with them again. But I do think there is another difference that played a major role: the first session started quietly, with a social encounter, and then ramped up, while the second session started loud, with a combat encounter.

I suspect what happens is that, seeing one group of people attacking another, where it is fairly clear who the aggressors are and who the victims are, the players are confronted with a situation that in the context of a TTRPG invites decisive and immediate action. There's no time to play coy; if they want to decide the outcome, they need to act. When they choose a side and take risks to defend them, they invest emotionally in that side. And not only is there plenty they don't know about these besieged strangers, they know they don't know it: who are these people, and why are any of them doing what they're doing? When the dust has settled, they have a series of obvious questions to ask and are probably curious about the answers. Contrast this with the first opening, when they first approached the caravansary: they had plenty of time to be cautious, no real investment in the NPCs, and not much idea what there was to learn about them.

I also suspect that my niece is not fully versed in the tropes of tabletop games, or in the tropes of my tabletop games. She's played enough of them to know what she's doing most of the time, but she might have been expecting that any unfamiliar place is dangerous. That's not an unfair expectation, though it would be unlike me to start out with treacherous NPCs or to deny the PCs some kind of early orientation. However, if I had started with the caravansary under attack in the first place, she'd have known what she was seeing and after the fight she'd still have naturally been funneled into a social encounter that would orient her (and my brother) into the situation.

Of course, most of my players are not, and will not be, 8 years old. Most players will, like my brother, recognize the caravansary as a starting settlement rather than an adventure site. The benefits of starting out the adventure with the caravansary under attack aren't necessary for capturing most players' attention. But the benefits are still in fact benefits, and worth keeping in mind. If you don't have to give anything up to start with the orienting NPCs under attack, then I think it's not a bad idea. More to the point, here's what I'm going to try to keep in mind when I start games going forward:

1. The players could use a way to orient themselves early in the game.²
2. It's helpful if the players are interested in the NPCs or objects that orient them in the game.
3. Players are often most interested in the parts of the game they have invested in.
4. The players should feel that they can trust the NPCs or objects that orient them in the game.
5. Players are more likely to trust NPCs if they have interpreted them as "good guys" in some kind of conflict.
6. It can be helpful to start a game with orienting NPCs in a conflict against a clear antagonist, with the PCs in a position to immediately and decisively back the NPCs (or, if what you hope will orient the players is an object, it can help to put that object under threat, with the PCs in a position to preserve it along with some obvious valuables).

This is not, by any means, going to work for every game. Sometimes the demands of a particular campaign or a particular set of players will make this kind of start non-viable. Still, I plan to at least keep these considerations in mind for the next few games I start to see how it works. If I notice anything actionable, I'll report back with my findings.

Now if I could only figure out how to end a game in a satisfying way.

#All-Out Apocalypse #for GMs #storycraft