Has anyone started playing yet? What do your groups look like?

[FarHorizon]

So my play group has been anticipating the release for a while now, and we started building characters and figuring out what our vibe is looking like.

Three of my players and I are fully caught up on the cosmere, one of them has just read Mistborn, and the last one just started reading Way of Kings as her intro to Brandon in general.

I wanted to try and keep things spoiler free for everyone, so my setting pitch was the shattered plains just a few years before WoK starts. In response, they independently built what amounts to a minor noble house; a lighteyed lord and his daughter, a house guard, the ardent serving the house, and an Iriali guest calling on the lord’s hospitality. I never expected this fantasy adventure RPG to turn into Game of Thrones, but it’s definitely gonna be a fun way to stretch the system right off the bat.

What about y’all? Anyone else get started already? Any interesting PCs or parts of the setting you’ve gotten to?

[Jult]

I have a small group I'm GM'ing for. We're probably around 20 hours into a campaign (we started with the beta rules). We have a very motley crew:

• A Lighteyed Alethi Warrior in Sadeas' army with the goal of reclaiming his family's Shardplate that was lost when his brother was killed by a Parshendi. He's also a strict Vorinist.
• An Agent who belongs to a clandestine group that is attempting to steal any shards they can from the Alethi (the other players know this, but their characters do not). He has infiltrated Sadeas' inner circle to spy on him.
• And a Scholar originally from Azir who is obsessed with fabrials and very bad at respecting Vorin culture. Which contributed to him ending up on one of Sadeas' bridge crews.

What's crazy is they made these characters without coordinating with each other and managed to make 3 people with very conflicting ideologies and goals. I only told them that they needed to have a background that landed them in Sadeas' camp for the start of the story because that's where the Bridge Nine adventure begins. 

Without spoiling anything for that adventure, they needed to put their differences aside for the sake of short-term survival. And, to his credit, the Warrior bought the Scholar's freedom after their first adventure to show gratitude for his help. Since then, we've been running homebrew stories that I hope to eventually connect to the Stonewalkers Adventure now that it's out.

Spoilers for our homebrew in case the Warrior and/or Agent find themselves browsing this Topic:

Spoiler

The next session all 3 will be working together to track down the Warrior's Shardplate. The Agent is going to have a tough decision to make when they find it. He was planning to steal it for his secret organization. But he's grown attached to the party and feels guilty about betraying them now. Depending on his choices, he may impress the Spren that's been watching him.

[Sophrosyne He/any]

I've dmed a few times now and find that's it's fairly common for players to group up in this way. My first ever game DMing two players decided to be mother and daughter without skipping a beat. The only time I've not seen some level of this happening was in groups that don't focus on RP.

[FarHorizon]

Oh yeah, we've been playing other TTRPGs for years; Pact Dice, Delta Green, Fate, and Vampire the Masquerade. I did just find it interesting that the group has splintered off to do something the system isn't very inclined towards.

I guess in that regard, the fact that conversation and social encounters have much more system support than I'm used to is really helpful. Being able to modulate an NPC's responses based on how much focus they have, and the overall dynamics of being able to use skills in both a social and combat context is really helpful.