First impressions mean a lot! So, how your D&D party gets together can flavor the tone of their interactions for a while. A lot of people want to avoid the traditional “you all meet in a tavern” method. But, after experiencing and running a few other methods, I think I get why taverns are an effective way to bring the party together.

Taverns are meeting places where lots of people tend to gather. Newcomers to a town will invariably visit a tavern to get food and a place to stay the night. Rumors fly around naturally. You can also showcase the character of the setting in the tavern population. Even the demographics can say something—are the customers mostly humans or are other races more prominent? What sort of work is common here? What is being talked about?

You can also give your players plenty of room to interact with their new characters before the action starts. Here, your players can get used to playing their new character and get used to their fellow players’ new characters. Party dynamics start to form, opinions are decided on, and so on.

In the first campaign I DM’d, I put the player characters in an adventuring guild together. But, since both the guild and the other character were new, it seemed to slow things down a bit more. I also failed to communicate that they would start as members of this guild to the players, so everyone created their characters unaware of this, and that made things a bit more complicated than it needed to be. (So, let your players know that sort of thing ahead of time!)

Fortunately, things got smoothed over as they went on their first adventure together. They became a pretty solid adventuring party after they had spent some time interacting with each other.

In the first campaign I played in, we started as prisoners who had all been captured to fight in arena combat. That ensured we stuck together, since for a while, we literally couldn’t go anywhere else. Our characters didn’t have to be friends; we shared a common enemy and short-term goal. At the same time, when we all got out, that goal was completed, and a new one was needed.

In SBotLL, with the good squad, everyone was in the same city to attend an important event. Each of our characters met the others in different situations, and out of those bloomed various dynamics and first impressions. We had a couple of in-game days to conduct our own business as well as get to know each other before we put our powers together to save a victim of kidnapping.

After that inciting incident, we started to travel together!

I started my Curse of Strahd campaign in tavern to quickly introduce the characters to each other and deliver a certain fateful letter to them. Since the players knew beforehand that the intro to the quest would be quick, they cooperated and helped guide the adventure to its true beginning: walking through the gates into Barovia.

In one-shot adventures I’ve run, I try to get the adventurers as close to the start of the quest as possible. Sometimes they start in a vehicle travelling towards their destination, or in a meeting with the quest client. In others, I’ve started them trapped at the bottom of a pirate ship or right in front of the Shadowfell’s Fortress of Memories.

There are many factors to consider when writing the very first scene. How much time do you have to introduce everyone? How long do you want the adventurers to be free to interact casually? Do you want to allow enough time for different personality types to clash? What sort of pace do you want to establish?

Remember, first impressions are important! How will you, as the DM, influence those first impressions?