EHamilton said,

I know the most cliched opening for a sequel game must be “you are abducted and imprisoned by mysterious strangers who take away all the gear you collected in the previous game”!

I’ve always been a believer in games that don’t commit the players to a particular back-story, so that you can invent their own motivations for becoming adventurers. (Or if it’s a “greatness thrust upon you” opening, so you can invent diverse explanations for what they’d rather be doing instead.)

I also prefer games that include something akin to the “guild/tavern” central setting as a mechanism for adding additional characters to an existing group, Han Solo style. That’s something I’ve missed about more recent games, that seem to use a plot that’s beyond your control to unexpectedly add or take away characters from your party, instead of letting you actively decide when you want to seek out the services of a good rogue, etc. Though I don’t mind a mix of both.

McTeddy said,

You know… now that you bring this topic up… I realize that I can’t remember any RPG openings.

I mean… sure I can think of a few shipwrecked… wandered into new town… look at my happy life that will so go up in flames… yet none of them really stick with me.

Although they aren’t memorable… It’s important to put out that it’s never bothered me. Exciting openings are good for grabbing my attention… but in reality… the opening doesn’t have any influence on whether I’ll play. If the game play is good I’ll play it… if the game play is bad I’ll get bored and move on.

Besides, I’ve always felt the tavern scene was the only realistic opening.

Seriously… if you agree to fight a dragon… you’ve had too much to drink.

Lexx said,

You don’t have amnesia in Fallout: New Vegas. You got a bullet into the head and a doc is patching you up again, but nowhere is said that you don’t know your name or your mission prior to that ambush, etc. (in fact, you still know that you are a courier with a package for the town Primm and that you come from California, and so on and so on. So I’ll guess it qualifies more for the shipwreck-type of beginning.) 😉

Flux said,

The Temple of Elemental Evil had a pretty cool system. If you haven’t played it, there’s a different opening based on the alignment you’ve chosen for your party. Granted, they all lead you to the same place, and, of course, more could have been done with the idea, but it was something I don’t think I had seen before.

Menigal said,

I quite like the shipwrecked opening. It leaves your character’s past largely up to you, which I think is a major requirement for an RPG, but it surprises me how many people seem to freak out when they aren’t given this information. Why were you in prison in Oblivion? Who were you and your sire in Vampire The Unbunny Redundancy Payments? They seem to see it as an unanswered part of the plot instead of a blank slate for you to start from.

Just about any sort of opening can work if it’s done right, even the You All Meet In An Inn one. It’s always entertaining when someone finds a fresh way of doing it.

scragar said,

I have always liked games where the beginning is pretty normal, you aren’t in the middle of a mission, in hospital or in a strange place.

It’s your house, your street, it’s a normal day, then after a bit of time to get the hang of things, learn your character, etc you get the story unfolding, Grandia did this, your character gets a permission letter to see the ruins excavation on the third day, and that leads into a quest to find more about the ruins/spirit stone, which links right into the main plot.

I think it’s a really cool way to do things, you don’t feel forced to do the quest, even though you are being railroaded quite heavily.

Elwro said,

I loved the simple opening of Dark Sun: the Shattered Lands. Your party consists of slaves united simply by the decision of the Arena keepers to group you as a team of gladiators. This can explain even the most ridiculous party setup 😀

Chance said,

You have great timing, sir. I recently started writing a storyline for my first real foray into gaming. The world is full of characters and cities, but I had no idea how to begin. This article helped me to see the cliches of RPGs, and gave a bit of insight on how to create an interesting start. I think I’ll be taking a cue from Chrono Trigger on this one…

ngthagg said,

I’m a big fan of the in media res opening. FF7 did a really good job of it. But it definitely is better for a pre-designed character. If you want more control over your character it doesn’t work as well.

scragar: Grandia has an excellent start. It makes the plucky teenage lead fit in, which is pretty rare.

UDM said,

Gothic also had a pretty cool intro, where you’re just a random dude who’s given a letter by another random dude, and told to just follow orders, which of course escalate into a climatic showdown.

In fact, so nothing-out-of-the-ordinary is the introduction that you can basically not follow the game at all and just do your thing as a prisoner like the rest of the crowd, in a prison colony held in isolation from the outside world, even though your identity eventually culminates into the “chosen one” type. It’s almost as if the developers had concocted the world first, then the main storyline

Calibrator said,

I’m a big fan of the rather slow & quiet approaches where you commence with your live (as a working bee, college boy, whatever) and learn most of the basics while getting an idea of the game world & NPCs (especially if the starting location/city is the hub for later missions).

The better something like this is written, the more successful it is and a good example is perhaps Fallout 3 where you literally start off as a toddler ;-).
With the childhood time jumps you are not only getting older but you can see some changes in the other characters of the vault, too. Then someday all hell breaks loose…

I also think that if a game starts low and slowly builds up the player gets the impression that the game is rather epic in proportion. I don’t mean square miles here but the range of the experience the player can enjoy.
Morrowind is effective here in not only dropping the player right into a big gameworld as a lowly character (slave?) but later develops him into the Nerevarine. Quite a contrast!
Player characters with a special destiny like that are a trope as common, though, as the average Steven Seagal movie plot in which his wife/spouse/daughter/best friend is killed and where he sets off to avenge them…

However, in todays’ world with most gamers apparently possessing only short attention spans many triple-A games have to hit them early with some spectacular action to generate enough interest in them to actually keep playing.
A slow & quiet approch is perhaps not really feasible if you want to make heaps of money with your game.

LateWhiteRabbit said,

I love the “ship-wrecked” style openings.

I liked the opening of Oblivion, and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, were you are a prisoner or a slave. You can decide whether or not your characters deserved to be there or were wrongly imprisoned.

I really liked Chrono Trigger’s pleasant opening and fair, and it was neat because if I remember right, they played with doing a “deja vu” of that opening a couple of times in the game.

New Vegas had a great opening, dramatic, with your character getting shot in the head. New Vegas is also a little unique in that its main plot hooks work equally well regardless of whether your are playing an evil, good, or selfish character – all have equal motivation and reasons to pursue the main quest path.

As someone already said, FF7’s opening in the middle of a “terrorist mission” after a seamless camera shot introducing the whole of the city and then zooming in on the train you are on and throwing you directly into combat was breath-taking and a perfect hook. Only after an exciting mission full of character moments and reveals culminating in a massive reactor explosion do things slow down and introduce everything to you, and by then you are pumped for the ride.

Our DM in D&D never used the inn or tavern to start a quest or get us together. He always set up conditions to throw us together or naturally encourage cooperation. In one campaign it became a running joke as the party members squabbled and after every adventure tried to go their separate ways, only for coincidence or calamity to force them back together again. It was amazing how skilled a story-teller our DM was, because the party members could walk out of town in opposite directions and he could always successfully conspire to get them reunited in a very short time.

dcfedor said,

I think skavenhorde has a point here. Character amnesia is a nice way to put the player and character on even ground, and let them discover the world and its workings together.

On the other hand, games like Shadowrun (the P&P version) celebrated backstory and preexisting character/NPC relationships. It gave the GM lots of hooks for creating adventures if he knew who the character cared about or was running from.