Session Zero Checklist: Questions, Agenda & Safety Tools

A session zero checklist is the list of things a game master and the players settle before the first real session of a campaign: the pitch and tone, content limits and safety tools, the schedule and house rules, and how the characters know each other. The full checklist is right below, split into what to do the week before, what to cover at the table and what to send afterward. After it you’ll find the questions worth asking, a 90-minute agenda and a two-minute version for one-shots.

Most campaigns that fall apart don’t end in an argument. They fade. One player wanted a heist story and got a dungeon crawl, half the group assumed weekly games while the other half assumed “roughly monthly,” and by session six the group chat has gone quiet. Nearly all of that can be caught in one evening of talking before anyone rolls initiative.

What a session zero is for

A session zero is a meeting before the campaign starts where the GM and players talk about the game instead of playing it. Mike Shea of Sly Flourish describes the goal plainly: it helps everyone manage their expectations about what the game is and what it is not, ties the characters to one another and to the world, and defines the boundaries of play.

It’s worth running for a brand-new group and for friends who have played together for years, because a new campaign is a new promise and people’s tastes shift. The checklist works the same for a D&D session zero before a 5E campaign as for any other system. Only the rules questions change.

The complete session zero checklist

Copy this into your notes, or print it and tick boxes as you go. Not every line fits every table, but skipping one should be a decision, not something you forgot.

The week before

[ ] Name the tone in two words (“cozy mystery,” “grim survival”) and write a one-sentence pitch
[ ] Decide the system, the rules edition and which sourcebooks are allowed
[ ] Decide the starting level and how characters advance (milestones or experience points)
[ ] Sort your decisions into non-negotiables and things you’re happy to put to the group
[ ] Write a one-page campaign guide: premise, what makes this campaign different, a few factions, character-building advice, content and safety tools
[ ] Choose the safety tools you’ll propose, and make an X-Card (an X drawn on an index card is enough)
[ ] Send the one-pager and the player questions below to everyone, ideally five to seven days ahead
[ ] Book the evening: about 90 minutes of talking, plus one to two hours if characters get built at the table

At the table: the game itself

[ ] Read the pitch aloud, then take questions
[ ] Each player says what they want more of: combat, exploration, roleplay, mystery, politics
[ ] Agree how dangerous the game is: is character death rare and heroic or a real risk every fight, and is coming back from the dead possible?
[ ] Agree on campaign length: open-ended, a set number of sessions, or an arc with a planned end date

At the table: content and safety

[ ] Fill in a content matrix or a list of lines and veils (anonymously, if your group prefers)
[ ] Agree on safety tools and demonstrate each one with a quick example
[ ] Decide how romance between characters and conflict inside the party will work
[ ] Note phobias worth avoiding, such as spiders, drowning or body horror

At the table: logistics

[ ] Day, frequency, start time and a firm end time
[ ] Minimum number of players for a session to go ahead
[ ] What happens to an absent player’s character, and whether it still earns experience
[ ] How much notice to give when you can’t make it, and where to post it
[ ] Where you play: whose home and who brings food, or which voice app and virtual tabletop if you’re online
[ ] Where you coordinate between sessions: group chat, Discord server, shared calendar

At the table: house rules and etiquette

[ ] House rules in use (critical hits, resting, potions, and so on)
[ ] How rules disputes get settled mid-game
[ ] Dice: GM rolls in the open or behind the screen, and what counts as a reroll
[ ] Metagaming: how strictly player knowledge stays separate from character knowledge
[ ] PvP and stealing from the party: allowed, allowed with consent, or off the table
[ ] Phones during combat and big dramatic scenes

At the table: characters

[ ] Character concepts shared before anyone locks in their build
[ ] Party checked for gaps (no healer, nobody who likes talking to strangers) while choices can still change
[ ] Every character tied to at least one other character and to the world or a shared patron
[ ] Backstory hooks collected: someone they love, someone they’ve wronged, a secret the GM may use

After the meeting

[ ] Recap the agreements out loud in the last five minutes
[ ] Send a written summary within 48 hours: pitch, lines and veils, safety tools, schedule, house rules
[ ] Pin that summary where everyone can find it
[ ] Build the opening scene of session one from what the players told you
[ ] Put a check-in on the calendar for the end of the first arc

If you’d rather not retype all of this, the Session Zero Kit has a GM pre-zero checklist split into before, during and after the meeting, plus a player expectations questionnaire, a safety tools agreement, a content matrix, backstory and party connection sheets and a group covenant to read aloud and sign. It’s a print PDF with a fillable browser version, and it works with 5E compatible games or any other system.

A 90-minute session zero agenda

The checklist tells you what to cover. This running order tells you when. It’s built for about 90 minutes of talking, before character creation.

Time	Segment	Goal
0:00	Welcome and pitch	Read the pitch, hand out the one-pager, answer questions
0:10	Expectations	What each player wants from the game
0:25	Content and safety	Content matrix, lines and veils, safety tools demonstrated
0:45	Logistics and house rules	Schedule, absences, rulings, table etiquette
1:00	Characters and connections	Concepts, ties to each other and to the world
1:30	Wrap-up	Recap what was agreed, set homework, tease session one

If you’re short on time, cut it to about 30 minutes: pitch, expectations and the content conversation, with logistics handled in the group chat afterward. For a campaign meant to run for a year or more, stretch it to a full evening of around three hours, with party connections built together and a written covenant at the end.

Session zero questions to ask your players

These are the session zero questions worth sending ahead or asking around the table. You won’t need all of them. Short answers beat clever ones, and quieter players answer better on paper than on the spot.

Expectations

What do you want more of in this campaign: combat, exploration, roleplay, mystery, politics?
Which scene from a book, film or game would you love to play through at the table?
How do you feel about character death?
Do you prefer clear objectives, or a sandbox where you pick what to chase?
How much do you enjoy the rules, from “I want to build the perfect character” to “just tell me what to roll”?
What’s a tabletop experience that burned you? (The GM promises not to repeat it.)

That last one is the most useful question on the list. It surfaces the railroading GM, the spotlight hog, the campaign that collapsed into player-versus-player feuds. What your table is wary of often tells you more than what it wants.

Tone and content

Here’s the tone in two words. Does that sound like a game you want to play?
Which themes are you excited to explore, and which should stay in the background?
Is anything a hard no for you, so it never appears? That’s a line.
Is anything fine as long as it happens off-screen? That’s a veil.
How do we feel about romance between characters, and about the party falling out?

A content matrix makes this faster and less awkward. List common topics and let each person mark them Green (want more), Neutral (fine in the background), Veil (off-screen only) or Line (never). People will tick a box they’d never say out loud, and you get a map instead of guesses.

Never ask anyone to justify a line. “No harm to animals” is a complete sentence. If an edge needs clarifying, ask privately, later, and accept “I’d rather not” as an answer.

Logistics and table rules

How often do we play, and when do we stop?
How many of us need to be there for a session to happen?
If you miss a session, what should your character do: fade into the background, follow along quietly, or be played by someone else?
Which house rules do you want, and which would you hate?
When we disagree about a rule mid-game, is “the GM rules now, we check together afterward” fine with you?

Characters and connections

Where is your character from, and why did they leave?
Name one person they love and one person they’ve wronged.
What do they want more than anything, and what are they afraid of?
What secret are they keeping that the GM can use?
Which other character have you known the longest, and how did you meet?
Who in the party do you owe a debt to, and do they know?
What would your character do if the party split up tomorrow?

Go around the table for the connection questions so ties form in both directions. “My cleric pulled your fighter out of a river three years ago” hands two players a story at once. Shea suggests tying the whole group to a single patron, which is often an easy way to bind a party together. If a player loves long backstories, let them write one, but ask for the hooks separately: people, places and unresolved threads you can actually use.

Safety tools and where they come from

A content list covers what you can predict. Safety tools cover the rest. These are the ones most tables pick from, with the people who designed them.

The X-Card was created by John Stavropoulos in 2013, originally for convention games with strangers. It is an X drawn on an index card: anyone can tap it to remove content from the game, no explanation needed.
Lines and veils were first developed by Ron Edwards for his game Sorcerer. Lines never appear in the story, veils happen off-screen. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit adds two optional categories, “Ask first” and “Yes please.”
Script Change, by Beau Jágr Sheldon, borrows media-player language. Anyone can call Rewind, Fast-Forward or Pause, then Resume.
“Pause for a minute” is Mike Shea’s verbal version, which he calls a verbal X card. Some tables find a phrase easier to use mid-scene than a card.
The Open Door, credited to Eirik Fatland in the TTRPG Safety Toolkit guide, means anyone can step away from the game, for any reason, without being judged.
Check-ins are the simplest of all: a regular “everyone still good?” during heavy scenes or at the break.

For a deeper library, the TTRPG Safety Toolkit, co-curated by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk, is free and collects these tools with credits to their designers (it won the 2020 ENNIE Award for Best Free Game/Product, according to Wikipedia). Monte Cook Games’ free Consent in Gaming, by Sean K. Reynolds and Shanna Germain, includes a consent checklist you can hand out as is.

Two habits make these tools work in practice. First, demonstrate them, don’t just name them. Tap the card yourself during a made-up example: “Say the bandit starts describing what he did to the prisoner. I tap this. We skip it, the bandit stays menacing, we keep going.” It takes thirty seconds and everyone sees it’s real. Second, nobody discusses “why” in the moment. The scene changes and play goes on. If someone wants to talk about it, that happens after the session. Stavropoulos’s own framing is that the card’s presence tells the table the people playing are more important than the game.

The two-minute version for one-shots

A one-shot or a convention game still needs a session zero, just a much shorter one. Sly Flourish’s two-minute session zero runs like this, right before play:

Describe the adventure and the system in one sentence.
Ask who hasn’t played the system before.
Explain the goal and scope of the adventure.
Explain how the characters (often pregenerated) are tied to the adventure and to each other.
Describe your safety tools.
Start playing, and teach rules as they come up.

With strangers or dark material, step five matters more, not less. If you’re running something like a horror one-shot, name the themes on the table before the lights go down and agree lines on the spot.

After session zero: the recap and session one

Send the written summary within a day or two. It’s the document you’ll point back to months later, when someone asks whether you ever agreed on permadeath. Start the per-session recap habit at the same time. The Campaign Chronicle has dispatch templates for this, from a five-minute Quick Chronicle (three bullets and a cliffhanger) to a full in-world newsletter.

Then session one has to deliver on what you promised. Use the answers right away: if a player said they love mysteries, the first scene has a clue in it, and if someone’s character owes a smuggler money, that smuggler is on the docks tonight. Skip the tavern meeting and start in motion. Shea treats the opening like a film’s cold open, and the prep for it is often a single sentence. Keep the rest of your prep light, with a few secrets, a few NPCs and a location or two. Our guide to DM prep walks through what to write down and what to leave to the table. End on time, on a hook.

If you have energy left after character creation, Shea likes a short “session 0.5”: a small adventure with a challenge, some roleplay and a hook for what’s coming.

For a first-time GM, the First Session Playbook covers this whole stretch, from a 15-minute mini session zero to prepping in 60 minutes and running a first combat.

Mistakes that make a session zero useless

Turning it into a lecture. Forty-five minutes of world history and the players tune out. Pitch, then ask. Players should talk at least half the time.
Skipping the content talk because it’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable for two minutes; skipping it can wreck a scene six sessions later.
Ignoring the answers. If a line shows up anyway, you’ve taught everyone that session zero was theater.
Locking characters too early. Let players adjust builds after session one if a concept doesn’t click in play.
Never revisiting it. Preferences change. A ten-minute check-in at the end of each arc (“anything you want more of, anything to retire?”) keeps the agreement current.

If your table plays Daggerheart, the GM Companion & Campaign Builder, a Daggerheart compatible workbook, includes session zero and safety tool pages alongside campaign planning.

If your session zero is this week, do three things tonight: write the tone in two words, write the one-sentence pitch, and send the player questions. Everything else is on the checklist above.

Session Zero Checklist: What to Cover Before Your First Game

What a session zero is for