Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable

is a Q&A with Aabria Iyengar, Matthew Mercer, and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Tips for session zero and character creation

 * Matt: They're recommended. They're not strictly necessary if you already know your group well, but even then, it's a good chance to make sure everyone understands the tone and setting of the campaign and reset expectations.
 * Aabria:Agrees, especially about setting the tone and expectations about safety tools/boundaries. She specifically mentions lines and veils.
 * Brennan: He first takes a moment to enthusiastically praise Matt for developing Exandria and allowing them to GM in it (Aabria joins in just as enthusiastically). Session zero is incredibly important for Dimension 20, as those seasons are short so a lot of work needs to be established upfront to ensure the season runs smoothly. In particular, railroading vs player agency is a false dichotomy: to handle a campaign with strict time, plot, or location requirements, use the session zero as a GM to ensure the PCs are thoroughly developed and then build your plot around that so the players actively want to be on the rails. This is much less important for a long-running campaign, where you have the time and space to figure out your characters, but for short campaigns, multiple session zeroes may be necessary and it may be helpful to do character creation as a group.
 * Aabria: Brennan used this method for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity's character creation and it meant Laerryn was well-realized prior to the series beginning and that Brennan knew how to motivate Laerryn through story.
 * Matt: When he GM-ed home games when he was younger, and when Vox Machina's campaign began, most people came to the table with their separately created characters, but even then, players building characters with pre-existing relationships (such as Vax and Vex) added something to the game. For the Mighty Nein, each player had a separate session zero with Matt to develop the character, and then group session zeroes with a few other players to see how they interacted and to explore the character. For Calamity, because it was so short and because the characters were established as knowing each other, it was vital to have those session zeroes to lay the intricate groundwork.
 * All the GMs note that for actual play specifically, a session zero that is not streamed gives people a chance to figure out character voices and otherwise get camera-ready, but this isn't important for home games.
 * Aabria: What is character creation like for the Critical Role main campaigns?
 * Matt: He doesn't tell players what specifically to play but rather tries to help them figure out what interests them, although he also keeps in mind the party balance. It's important to let people know they're not permanently locked in if they don't like the character or the character build, and that those things can be changed down the road.
 * Brennan: What do you do if you can't have a session zero for a last-minute one-shot, for example?
 * Aabria: Ask people why their character is here, and other broad questions to ground them in the setting.
 * Matt: If there's a little lead time but not enough for session zero, email the players and ask them a few key questions about their character background.
 * Brennan: Often when a player isn't having fun with a character, it's because the character isn't properly connected to the world or lacks motivations and history.
 * Matt: One of the first people he GM-ed for had a character with minimal backstory, but that character was still searching for power and didn't know what had killed his parents, so those were hooks that allowed him to find the character through gameplay. A huge backstory isn't necessary, though it's helpful for some people, but it's important to understand where the character is coming from in broad strokes.
 * Brennan: Agrees with Matt - in improv, this is called having justification for the character's behavior. The player should know why their character does anything out of the ordinary, and if they have that, it's often enough.
 * Matt: It's also worth noting that all backstory doesn't need to come up in the game, and it's important to ensure players are aware of that and that if they want something to come up, they tell the GM rather than assuming it will happen. In general, players and GMs need to communicate - most problems are simply a lack of communication.
 * Aabria: Regardless of whether someone wrote a massive backstory or if they wrote a minimal one or forgot to send it, a really good way to get to the heart of things is to ask players shortly before the first session what their backstory is. If they wrote a huge backstory, they will tell you what they think is most important, and if they didn't write much backstory, they will often provide some new information.
 * Brennan: Backstory is very helpful to the GM because, again, it lets them know what motivates the character and what plot hooks will be engaging without having to come up with everything on their own. It also helps in building out the world, if the game is not set in an already-built setting, because the type of classes or character backstory dictate what's necessary to include and what can be left out.

Using established settings

 * Matt: Started creating his own settings because he was intimidated by using existing ones and getting it wrong.
 * Aabria and Brennan: Sarcastically talk about how they definitely did not feel intimidated by running games in Exandria.
 * Aabria: More seriously, for any sourcebook, it's possible a player knows the setting better, but it's ok to call for a quick break and review the lore if you have to. People who watch actual play often expect that they have to be perfect immediately, but that's not true; players often try to explore weird and minor avenues, so be easy on yourself.
 * Matt: Part of the expectations you set at the beginning can be that you will not perfectly adhere to the canon of an established setting, and will instead make it your own, and you should.

Worldbuilding

 * For Aabria: What was it like creating Niirdal-Poc? Aabria loved it because she doesn't come from a background of high fantasy but has always loved the idea of deciding what hero you wish to be, and created Niirdal-Poc to represent the potential of all of your choices.
 * Matt and Brennan: The secret to GM-ing is to add a lot of vowels and apostrophes to place names.
 * Aabria: Having Niirdal-Poc added to the Tal'Dorei map was an incredibly emotional moment for her.
 * Matt: He rejects the auteur theory; Exandria was never built from a single dominating vision but slowly by necessity and accident, and he loves seeing other people add to it.
 * For Brennan: What was it liking building out the Age of Arcanum? Brennan actually found it less intimidating than what Aabria had to do with various locations in Tal'Dorei. Fantasy often doesn't handle the concept of time and past ages well; Brennan found Matt's depiction of Aeor really great at addressing this (vs. the classic high fantasy stories of a "lapsarian, Edenic" age that never address the stagnation since that age); it explains why ancient relics and dungeons of a bygone age exist without sacrificing the idea of ongoing progress, as well as why things were different and more advanced at that time. Brennan used those ideas to create Avalir and the plot of EXU: Calamity. It felt a lot easier to him, though, to set the story in an ancient city that no longer exists, rather than places that are embedded in the lore of Critical Role. There was some pressure, however, because while it was fun to flesh out Vespin Chloras and make him more sympathetic and complex, having known figures like Vespin or Purvan Suul meant there was a risk of contradicting existing lore so he had to create a world with elements that could be broken and elements that could not be. He also chose not to use Aeor as a setting because of the pressure of having it have to exist during the Calamity.
 * Matt: Matt has spent a lot of time building out the world alone, but he had collaborated before when he co-DM-ed and really likes having people to bounce ideas off of, so working with Brennan and Aabria has been a great opportunity from his perspective, not just theirs. He's excited to bring in the lore they created into the main campaigns.
 * Aabria: She did, as a player, try to break it things, but could not.
 * All of the GMs also point out that in a home game, feel free to stop the Calamity! You're not beholden to the lore in a home game, as discussed.

Quotations
Matt: I despise the auteur theory of world building and creation, in film in general, but you know, in this instance. The idea of one person is the author of a space and kind of domineers over what's right and what's wrong with that. This was, once again, all created kind of out of accident. And the necessity for it to build and as it kind of took on a life of its own, nothing has been more fun and more exciting than watching it grow beyond me.