What is a Session 0 Suddenly, you hear a muffled grunt. You risk a glance away from your dark elf opponent and see Geriman go down. Enraged you yell, “Nooooooo!” and you rush the dark elf in front of you, he feints left but you don’t fall for it, choosing to rush him and lift him up, smashing him to the ground. You take advantage of the brief moment he lies stunned on the ground by sending a quick 1-2 punch to his head with your spiked gauntlets. After a moment he lies still. You get up to run towards Geriman. You have a healing potion so you should be able to save him. As you turn to look at your fallen companion so stop in your tracks, the battle raging around you. Standing above Geriman’s unconscious form is the drow elf who downed him. He looks at you and smiles, and then rams a sword into Geriman’s chest. Geriman’s eyes open briefly and a sharp grunt escapes his lips, followed by a slow sigh that slowly fades into nothing.  You don’t remember what happened next. Instead you come back to consciousness with a dead drow at your feet, torn into two parts. Next to the elf is the body of your slain friend, a slight trickle of blood escape his unmoving mouth and his eyes staring up into nothing. What would you like to do? Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM. I’m your host Justin Lewis and together you and I will learn how to tell great stories as we DM sessions of D&D 5e.

When getting a campaign started, you might have heard the benefits of starting with a session 0.  But what is a session 0?

Well, I’ll tell what you it is not.

A session 0 is definitely not the session where you and all your friends get together to create your characters. Some people define session 0 as the character creation session, but it specifically is not because you haven’t played your characters yet. If you haven’t played your characters yet then you haven’t played D&D yet, you’ve just had fun making characters. That’s totally fine, but it’s not a session. It might be just semantics but I stand with my definition.

A Session 0 is essentially play-testing those characters that you made. You can choose to include the entire party or just a few people here and there. Generally the story isn’t heavy or at least it’s introductory to the heavy. Some people combine the session 0 with their character creation. They’ll take an hour or so getting their characters set up and then dive right into a scenario with their characters to see if they life what they chose. Often, session 0 can be playing out a part of the backstory of one or more of the characters. A session 0 is also a nice way for the DM to playtest their players. Maybe one of the players isn’t gonna mesh well with the table. Session 0 is a nice way to identify that and then nip it in the bud early on.

A session 0 can really be seen as a warm-up for the entire campaign. It’s a wonderful option for people who aren’t sure about what they want for their character. I suppose you could even play the level 15 or 20 version of your character so that each player knows what they’re getting into rather than just picking a class they think would be fun and hoping for the best. After I would then dumb each character down to the level that you’re starting the campaign at and then go from there.

A couple things you’ll want to keep in mind for you session 0: You don’t want to overcomplicate things. 

Your players are just getting used to their characters and really seeing if this is the character they want to be with for the next 6 months to 22 years (overexaggeration). They don’t want to have to worry about extremely difficult plots right at first. Be patient

As I already said, your players are just learning their new characters. Some players will have an easier time than others. Your job is to help all of them. Help the characters meet each other or get into their relationship roles

One of the hardest parts of starting a new campaign is having...