Most session zeros wander. The GM starts with twenty minutes of world-building flavor, the players make characters in real time, someone asks about house rules at minute seventy, and the session breaks at the two-hour mark with the most important questions still untouched. By session three the table has surfaced an incompatibility nobody named at session zero, and the campaign starts to feel rocky.

This template fixes that by trading freeform flow for a fixed agenda. Ninety minutes, five blocks, one short follow-up note. It is not the only way to run a session zero. It is a working baseline you can run as-is, or adapt to your table, or copy into your own notes.

This template is the version to run when you are already convinced session zero is worth the time. The longer-form recruiting guide that links here, How to Recruit D&D Players, covers the why.

The 90-minute agenda

Five blocks. Use a timer. The blocks are not equal because the work is not equal.

If you have less than ninety minutes available, cut the character block. Run it as a separate session. The boundary and expectation blocks are the ones that cannot be skipped.

Block 1: Logistics and schedule (10 minutes)

Run through these out loud. Do not assume the listing covered them.

• Recurring day and time, with the time zone.
• What "weekly" means at this table. Skip weeks for holidays. Reschedule rules when two or more players cannot make it.
• Session length in hours. When you stop, even if combat is mid-turn.
• Primary communication channel between sessions (Discord, group text, whatever).
• Attendance policy. How much notice you expect for a miss. Whether you run with three players or reschedule.
• Whether you play in-person, online, or hybrid. If online, which VTT and voice tool.

Five to ten minutes. If a player has a hard schedule conflict that did not surface in the application, you find out here, before character creation.

Block 2: Table expectations (20 minutes)

The norms that are usually invisible until somebody breaks one.

Walk through these as questions, not as rules you are imposing. Listen for the disagreement.

Tone. Where does this campaign sit on the dial between lighthearted and grim? Is it okay to make jokes during a tense moment? Is it okay to play your character earnestly when the table is in a joking mood?

Dice and rules. Open rolls, screened rolls, fudging. Whether the GM rolls in the open. Whether the players can re-roll on a clear misunderstanding of a rule. House rules on inspiration, critical hits, and death saves. Say them out loud now, not at session three when one comes up.

Metagaming. Where the line is. Reading the Monster Manual at the table. Discussing tactics during a fight. Sharing in-character secrets between players who do and do not know.

PvP. Whether characters can fight each other. Whether characters can steal from each other. Whether characters can lie to each other in ways that matter mechanically. Get specific.

Character death. Whether characters can die. Whether there is a path back into the campaign for a player whose character died. Whether you use death saves as written or run them differently.

Disagreement. What happens when a player and the GM disagree about a ruling at the table. How you handle it in the moment. How you handle it after the session.

Twenty minutes is enough to surface the real disagreements. It is not enough to resolve every one. The goal of this block is to name them, not to settle them all. The unresolved ones become talking points for the follow-up note.

Block 3: Content boundaries (25 minutes)

The longest block, because it is the one that matters most for whether the table holds.

Use the preference ladder: hard no, prefer not, fine, on theme, prefer. Walk through every relevant topic for your campaign. The GM goes first, naming the topics the campaign is built around or built away from. The players then mark their own preferences against each topic.

A working starter list (adapt for your campaign):

• Sexual content and on-page intimacy
• Sexual violence
• Harm to children
• Animal harm
• Body horror and graphic transformation
• Torture as a plot device
• Substance use and addiction
• Religious themes and faith
• Real-world political analogues
• Slavery and dehumanization
• Mental illness representation
• Discrimination themes (racism, queerphobia, ableism)
• Loss of a child, partner, or close family member
• Permanent character death
• Long-term debt or financial ruin
• Combat lethality and visible injury

Two notes on running this block.

First, the answer that matters most is hard no. If any player marks a topic hard no, it is off the table for the campaign, full stop. You do not negotiate, you do not litigate, you adjust the campaign. A hard no from a player is a contract you accept by running the table.

Second, prefer not is not the same as hard no. Prefer not means the topic can be in the campaign but not centered. The wizard's backstory can include the loss of a partner; the campaign does not need a quest arc about it.

Twenty-five minutes for a six-player table is tight. If you run out of time, finish the block as homework: send the list to the players, ask them to mark it asynchronously, fold the results into the follow-up note.

Block 4: Character and party (20 minutes)

Lighter block. The goal is not to finish character creation. It is to align on enough that the players can finish on their own and you can run session one without surprises.

Each player pitches their character in three sentences. Class, role at the table, one specific thing that matters about them. No backstory dump.

Then walk the table through the starting situation. Where the campaign opens. Why the party knows each other. The first beat of session one.

If two characters do not have a reason to be in the same room, fix it now. Twenty minutes is enough for that.

Detailed character creation finishes after session zero, individually, with you reading and giving notes. Send the green-light email at least twenty-four hours before session one.

Block 5: The off-ramp (15 minutes)

The block most session zeros skip. Do not skip it.

Say out loud, in front of everyone, how a player leaves the campaign. Not in apocalyptic terms. In ordinary ones. "If the campaign is not working for you, the expectation is that you tell me before the next session and we either work something out or part ways. Players who leave on good terms are welcome back to one-shots and future campaigns."

Then ask: "Is there anything we have not talked about that you want to talk about before we start?" Wait for the answer. Wait longer than feels comfortable. The thing somebody is hesitant to bring up is the thing that matters.

Close the session with the follow-up plan. "I will send a written summary of what we agreed on within twenty-four hours. If anything in that summary does not match what you remember, reply and we will fix it."

The follow-up note

Send within twenty-four hours. Plain text, short. Mirrors the agenda above.

A working template:

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

This note is the contract. If a disagreement surfaces later in the campaign, it gets resolved against this document, not against memory. Six months in, you will be glad you wrote it down.

If you can't get to 90 minutes

Sometimes the calendar does not allow it. A working fallback.

Run Block 1 (logistics) and Block 3 (boundaries) in a forty-five-minute session zero. Move Blocks 2, 4, and 5 to a separate session zero point five before session one. Send the follow-up note after the second session zero, not the first.

Do not skip the boundaries block. If you have to cut something, cut character creation. Character creation can happen asynchronously; boundaries cannot.

The honest version

A session zero is a job interview where everyone is interviewing each other. You are not selling the campaign. The players are not selling themselves. You are figuring out, together, whether the table is the table the listing described, and whether the table is the table the players want to be at.

Ninety minutes is enough if the agenda is fixed. The follow-up note is the contract. The off-ramp is real. The players who hear all three of those and decide to stay are the players who are still at the table at session twenty.

The right table starts at the listing. The right campaign starts at session zero.