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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 3131845" data-attributes="member: 704">A few suggestionsUse The Entire ruleset:This may be a bit more towards the mechancial end of the game than you intend, but it is still a valid suggestion.  There are plenty of rules in the D&D book that simply do not often get used.  The rules cover all sorts of situations that dont always come up in your games.  So why not flip open the DMG or PHB to a part of the book you dont often use.  Design an encounter around using Balance and Swim checks.  Plan a combat to take place in a hip deep swamp, pulling out the rules for difficult terrain.  Run a game where the entire dungeon they want to enter is perpetually on fire.  The rules do cover these situations.  Go ahead and use them.Once in a while, do something very unexpected:If the current adventure your running is turning out to be not that interesting, why not interrupt it with a better adventure.  So lets say that trying to find an assassin in a large city is just taking too damn long, and no one is enjoying it.  Sometimes when your looking for your lost car keys, you instead find that DVD you rented last year and lost.  So when looking for that assassin, how about they instead find a sleeping dragon in a cavern below the city and accidently wake it up?  Or walk in on some apocalyptic cult that is in the process of calling forth a demonic army with which to conquer the city.And now, some non standard places / ways to introduce the party to one another.- Start the players off in jail and facing banishment from some city.  Tell each player that they must come up with a reason for them to be in lockup.  Also, an impending hanging will give the party reason to work together to escape.- All the players are traveling to the same city, and they are all aboard the same ship.  The ship then starts to sink / gets attacked by pirates.  You can either start them off on ship trying not to die, or start them off shipwrecked.- The players meet during the equivalent of a 4th of July festival in their own town.  Whether or not something bad happens is up to you.- The players meet when they discover that they all share the same father, and meet at his funeral.  This works best with parties consiting of all the same race, or of Humans + Half Elves + Half Orcs.  Things get even more interesting when daddy gets up out of his coffin.- A diety appears before the players and commands them to undertake some quest or task.  It can be pretty difficult to turn down a god.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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