There’s no point in playing Dungeons and dragons if you don’t have a good enough story. It needs to be something to compel the players into finding out more. People will get bored of they don’t have something they can focus on, whether it be a common goal or person, or a single goal that they are working towards in secret. Bit first let’s talk about how you make your player characters meet.
Now you have quite a lot of option in this you could start with all your Pc’s knowing each other, or they meet in a tavern, or maybe one of your Pc’s or Npc’s are looking for people shall we say, to go on an adventure. Either way you need a good strong reason for your group to be together staying together is the next part of the problem. Once you’ve formed the beginning of the story you need to form a sort of anchor point that will hold your characters together this can be as simple as them heading to a new city to be paid for services they completed, or they are hunting someone down or just that they became friends and decided to travel together. Now you have them together and staying that way you now have to get a goal for them to work towards, now they don’t even have to know this is what this is or even when it’s happening they could take the wrong path one day and lead them to this or someone within the group is leading them into this encounter, but you can decide that for yourself. Now what you can do is link this into one or a few of your Pc’s back story, this can give a good way to round off certain story lines if you get to this point and it feels very unfinished.
Now one of the hardest things to deal with as a GM are back story’s you’re never going to remember them all so take good notes and refer and update them constantly because players add things all the time even little snippets of information that could always come in handy or contradict a whole situation it’s always best for you to make your players give you all the updates they make to their character, they will anyway because the will write something interesting that will have them giddier than a 4 year old on Christmas day, just keep on top of it and give them chances to develop it. In the next post, we’ll be talking about player engagement and how to help people who may struggle with the role play aspect of the game.