Where did the concept of “Session Zero” come from?
There’s two parts to this:
- The concept of a “pre-session” where you hash out character creation, etc.
- The specific term “Session 0” for this.
Let’s start with the latter. One way you can track terms like this is to search online RPG forums by date to see when they first crop up.
On RPGNet, one of the very first posts to use the term unambiguously in the desired sense was written in July 2003. Cam, the author, is clearly not anticipating widespread understanding of the term there, as he spends a paragraph explaining what he’s talking about.
Here’s an even earlier 2003 post.
Intriguingly, however, the term is not used again on RPGNet until 2007, and then not again until 2012. It is being used over at the Forge, however, in 2005 and 2006.
What’s the conceptual history of this pre-session, though? And I would say we’re specifically looking at the idea of an entire session dedicated strictly to character/campaign creation with no actual game play. (Character creation has obviously existed as part of the game since before D&D was written.)
I know that the earliest example that I, personally, saw in a published RPG for a full session dedicated to campaign set up was Burning Empires in 2006, where half of the first session was explicitly group world building and the other half was explicitly group character creation.
Earlier than that, similar concepts existed in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game PBeM community in the ’90s: The system’s group auction mechanic for character creation required players to create their characters together and, due to the immense influence this would usually have on the setting, it typically meant the auction session would also involve development of the milieu.
Related to this is the concept of the group contract, where the group explicitly discusses and lays out mutual expectations. This became heavily popularized in the rec.arts.sf.advocacy Usenet group in the mid-’90s, but those discussions originated from Aaron Allston’s Strike Force, which was an incredibly innovative and insightful product from 1988… that made virtually no impact and was almost completely forgotten except for a few enthusiasts who eventually convinced people it needed to be looked at. The concept made the leap back into a published game with Nobilis in 1999. This concept is picked up by the Forge designers from both sources, and by 2002 you can see it expanding to include Session 0-type tasks in games like Universalis. This is the design thread that eventually gives you a full session dedicated to such tasks in Burning Empires in 2006.
Bottom Line: Given what my research is turning up, I don’t think we’re going to find a specific ground zero for the “Session 0” terminology. It seems to have evolved in a fairly organic fashion as a natural way of describing “the session before the first session” or “the stuff that happens before the first session”. Oddly, I think it actually became heavily popularized in the PBeM community first, although that may only be an artefact of PBeM games leaving clearer documentation by default.
The concept of “spend a whole session building the group/campaign together” also seems to have gradually evolved over time. My guess is that people started experiencing this as games began including more explicit and elaborate structures for group and character creation: You’d spend a few hours working through those processes and then be out of time for the night and say, “Okay, we’ll start actually playing next week!”
If you’re looking for a place where a game designer explicitly said that you were supposed to spend a full session on these activities, I’d currently nominate Burning Empires. (Although even here we can see the gradual conceptual evolution, because Burning Empires is really just an expansion of the procedures previously found in Burning Wheel.)
I remember people suddenly using Rule Zero and Session Zero for the first time in the early 2000s, on the WotC message boards. The linguistic origin of the term is without doubt a reference to pg. 4 of the 3.0 Player’s Handbook, which is a checklist of steps for making a character in 3rd edition D&D. The relevant passage is “step zero”:
>0. CHECK WITH YOUR DUNGEON MASTER
Your Dungeon Master (DM) may have house rules or campaign
standards that vary from the standard rules. You might also want to
know what character types the other players are playing so that you
can create a character that fits in well with the group.
This was the “rule” that folks on message boards used to point to when they wanted to say that the rules don’t matter, the rules are only guidelines, DM fiat is law, etc., etc. Constant reference during arguments to “Rule Zero” (as it came to be called) is also what ultimately gave rise to annoyed forum posters inventing and citing the
“Oberoni Fallacy” (commonly shorthanded as “the presence of Rule Zero doesn’t mean the rules don’t/can’t have flaws).
But you’ll notice that the passage from the book only makes an oblique reference to the possibility of house rules, and it says nothing about about fiat rulings during play. In fact, what the actual text of 3.0’s “zeroth rule” says is much more akin to suggesting “You should have (what we would now today call) a Session Zero when creating characters.” Now my memory of those days might be a little fuzzy anymore, but I seriously doubt that that’s a coincidence.
Fascinating. Reminds me of how inventions and ideas may be independently developed simultaneously, but the impact is muted because the idea does not spread or catch on until later when picked up by others and repackaged.
I’ve heard it said by dictionaries that most new words coined are used in speech about a decade before they’re used in print. They start as obscure slang, gain currency among a small group, and get to the point where people start using them in text later on. Another big landmark is when the word stops appearing in quotes, implying that they’re using it like a normal word and not simply raising it as a new concept.
I suspect the internet has changed these rules of thumb, because things make it to text way faster. But it’s an interesting viewpoint here, I think.
I remember I had a DM in the early-to-mid-80’s who regularly had us spend our first session answering lengthy personality questionnaires on behalf of our characters, while he read portions of his world bible to us. Often there were handouts to go through as well. All characters required approval, and might be modified according to his houserules, or to fit into his setting. And this was playing AD&D 1e.
And here’s me thinking my lightning strike of inspiration for my Traveller game (Session 0 = starting with a blank map and populating it based on the char-gen session) was unique and magical… already been done, of course.
Still a great way to start a campaign and works for D&D 5e as well.
And your PC gonna die in 30 minutes of session 1.
As far as doing detective work for this sort of thing… don’t forget that in the 20th Century, even the 90s, magazines were still relevant vehicles of discussion. Before there were the now-dead WotC forums, there was writing letters to Dragon.
I went the other way and am designing a game where you just start playing and do improv micro prep as you go. So far so good.
Follow up on 8:
In the open tables we play (https://strangeflight.blog/kenmore-role-playing-society/) the expectations and house rules are laid out in documents. There are pre gens for newbies, and experienced players bring characters generated according to the documentation.
The import of these rules is revealed a little each session whenever a “bump” happens, and if there are no bumps then we just point something out to make everyone notice.
Character backgrounds grow back in time session by session, and players tend to tie them in to the stories they have been experiencing.
In my dedicated games, session zero is still spread out over the first few sessions. The home brew elements, personal likes and boundaries etc. are given focus but allowed to blend naturally with players who trust each other a fair bit. There are still “bumps”, and with a dedicated table these bumps carry more risk to the game than in the open tables. So far, nothing heart breaking though some of my story concepts have had to be axed or rewritten due to player sensitivities. No biggie.