Session Zero 2: Profiling
be your own CIA
This post is part of a series of posts on session zero. First post can be found here.
As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary.
Today I’d like to present an interesting technique for organizing your notes regarding what types of fun players find engaging. I’ve found this technique on this blog, unfortunately currently only available on the internet archive.
The basic idea is to keep a profile on each of your players (and, as I’ve mentioned multiple times before, yourself), like in one of those police dramas. I think that one of the easiest ways of doing this is to keep a google doc for each of them, and put all the information there. So what information goes on this dossier?
Name, contact information, etc - the basics.
Fun Types: What types of fun does your player engage with?
Unfun Types: Same for the unfun.
System Experience: List of all PNP RPG systems you know your player has played, and their experience with the purely mechanical side of them on a 5 point scale. If the player has different levels of experience with different parts of the system - e.g. lots of experience with magic, little with melee combat - write it separately.
No experience
Played once or twice, understands the basics, struggles with more complex rules
Solid understanding of all core rules, can deal with non-core or very rare rules, but might need to look up the book
Perfect (within human limitations) understanding of the rules, easily recalls interactions between pretty obscure rules, finds interesting unforeseen interactions, knows key issues with the system
Something beyond 4; Maybe write this if the player is writing quality homebrew that fits into the core rules, or proposes thought-out fixes for problems within the rules
Setting Experience: List of all PNP RPG settings you know your player has experience with, and their level of experience with them. If the player has different levels of experience with different parts of the setting, also write them separately.
No experience
Played once or twice, understands the basics (tech level, magic basics, ambient threats like wherever wilderness is dangerous, races, maybe major factions)
Decent understanding of the setting, doesn’t get confused by conflicts between different factions, knows major players, knows limitations of technology and magic
In-depth understanding of the setting including fairly obscure factoids
Something beyond 4
Preferred tropes, character types, story beats
Any technique that seems to reliably engage this player if you need them engaged
Spotlight preference: some players want more time under the spotlight, and some less. A very important thing to keep in mind.
How much spotlight and of what kind this player has had recently: check every session.
Key information about their current character: any kinds of rivals, status among powerful groups, key magic items or artifacts, appearance, what weapons do they carry on their person, etc: anything that you want to remember and that may be important at a moment’s notice. You don’t want to forget that someone is carrying a huge sword around when planning a stealth encounter for the party (and you don’t want to forget to check this with the party if they decide they want to take a stealthy approach themselves), and you do want to keep in mind who dealt the killing blow to the lieutenant of the Big Bad of the campaign, in case you want to make that relevant later.
Previous characters they have played, especially ones that took part in the same campaign and died/retired. Tying previous characters of the player into the narrative is a pretty neat way to get the player more engaged in the game.
Any other information you want to keep track of.
How much information goes on the dossier is a balancing act - you want the dossier to be easy to look through, but also comprehensive enough to cover as many cases as possible. My advice would be to split it into two parts - first, a short part with all the essential information, and then a part where you write as much info as you have available. Latter is there so that you always can go back to the original unprocessed information, in case you need it.
Ideally from the perspective of information analysis you would record the sessions in some manner, so you are sure you have a record of absolutely everything. However, this is likely - rightly! - to make your players disturbed as this is a very unusual thing to do. I would certainly question the motives of someone who wanted a record of everything I discussed with them. Furthermore, there may be concerns about data leaks - what happens if the recordings are stolen or leak online? Say that one of your players complained about their boss in one of the sessions - this can be a big problem for them.
Only do this if you have discussed the idea and the reasons behind it with the players, and all of them are okay with it. Do not do this at all if someone is not okay with it. Besides being a very easy way to instantly ruin your relations with that person if you are found out, recording someone without their consent is a crime in a lot of jurisdictions: let’s stay on the right side of the law for this one.
On the other hand, if you can not be bothered to keep track of even a couple pages of written information, this is not too bad either. Dossiers are a tool meant to help you, and to correct for the limitations of human memory: if you don’t need as much information for whatever reason, then you don’t need it.
Advantages of a dossier approach are pretty obvious: if you stick with the same group for more than one campaign, you can drastically cut down on time spent in session zero, because you will already have all the relevant information available in front of you, in a format that is easy to process and analyse. Of course, you will also already have most of this information within your mind: that is just a natural outcome of being around the same group of friends for a long time.
The core difference between dossiers and memories is fidelity: text doesn’t change over time, while your memories do. For example, imagine that your player tells you a long story about one of their adventures in a previous game. A month later, you may only remember some core points from the story, if you will remember it at all. Say that originally you reflected on this story, used it to figure out the core fun types of this player, and wrote those down. Your job is done, right?
Well, not quite. Imagine that later on, you get some new information that puts the tale in a better context - for example, you find another player who played at the same time as them, and can give you a second perspective on the events. If you didn’t write down everything the first player told you, then you will have to rely on your faded memories to cross-reference the two accounts. Any new analysis will be necessarily hobbled by this.
Alternatively, imagine that your players have played dozens of games with you, and dozens more on the side with other GMs. You want to run something novel for them. But you don’t remember exactly what they have seen already! If only you wrote all that stuff down.
Or say you want to make a deliberate reference to one of your past campaigns - e.g. make one of the towns have a statue of the previous party of the players. Do you remember the names of all their characters exactly? How about appearances?
Don’t trust your memories. Be your own CIA and keep a file on your players... and use it to bring them more PNP fun than they thought possible.
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I like the dossier approach! I should make this for our group