"You wake up and find yourself in a cell with three strangers. The last thing you remember is being attacked by a group of thugs ..."
"The bartender tells you that the hooded man at the corner table is looking for a few good adventurers. It looks like three others have already found their way to his table. He noties you looking, and beckons you over ..."
"As a member of the local adventurer's guild, you have been given an assignment to work with three other apprentices ..."Just throw the party together on the first day, and they'll get along fine--each with his or her own agenda, each optimized to survive alone. If the party doesn't get along, you penalize the players for not acting like a team. Except, they aren't a team--they just met, and know nothing about each other. While I have often use this method in the past, I would like to repent of my ways and move on.
The system presented in FATE is a great way of not only conceptualizing characters, but also unifying a party. So, I figured I would adapt something like it as "Step Zero" in the character creations process in my games of 5th edition. To do this correctly, the entire player party should be present without having yet created characters. Players should have an idea of what they want their characters to be, but should not have put anything to paper yet. For the party to be cohesive, every element should be fleshed out together.
