You All Meet in An Inn/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: All adventures begin at a tavern.

  • Straight: An adventuring party assembles in a tavern before setting out.
  • Exaggerated: A small army assembles in a tavern, and then sets out.
    • Alternatively, every single character that will appear all meet in the inn. Even the villains
  • Justified: Taverns are a good place to meet people for any reason.
  • Inverted: An adventuring party celebrates a successful adventure at a tavern.
    • Or the party disbands and go their separate ways at an inn.
    • The party owns/are employees of the inn.
  • Subverted: There's a tavern scene at the beginning of the story. Then the point of view shifts to a prison...
    • Alternately, each future member of the adventuring party is present at an inn, but they don't actually form a party until much later.
  • Double Subverted: The inmates, who don't know each other, are released, and all hit the same tavern on being released.
    • The characters meet somewhere near an inn, but they were all at the inn until just before game start.
  • Parodied: Taverns form around adventuring parties in the process of forming.
  • Deconstructed: Taverns are systematically destroyed by evil overlords. The few taverns left are closely monitored or are obsessively guarded as sources of adventuring parties.
    • Adventures tend to meet in taverns, get drunk, and start absurdly high powered bar fights. This makes taverns effectively impossible. If you want alcohol, you'd better know the brewer personally, and not be an adventurer.
  • Reconstructed: The closely monitored taverns aren't monitored closely enough.
    • Taverns are built in big fields, and out of cheap materials if not just completely open. Booze is shipped in hourly to make sure they don't lose too much in bar fights.
  • Zig Zagged: Mind Screw during the first act to the point that it's unclear who knew who beforehand, whether any of them met in a tavern, or whether they even count as adventurers or the story counts as a quest.
  • Averted: The party doesn't meet in a tavern.
  • Enforced: The DM is a traditionalist.
  • Lampshaded: "I'm pretty sure sitting down at this table with you guys consigns me to a few months of death and horror, but I'll do it anyway."
  • Invoked: A party leader without a party goes into a tavern to look for new party members.
  • Defied: When a party is deciding where to meet to decide on their next adventure, one of the party members says he's a recovering alcoholic, and asks to meet somewhere besides a tavern.
  • Discussed: "If we can't find a wizard for hire at the Three Quails Inn, we can at least find out where there is one to be found."
  • Conversed: "Who would want to do business in an inn? It's loud and smelly and drunk people vomit all over the contracts you're trying to draw up."
  • Played For Laughs: The adventurers are all extremely drunk when they agree to go on the adventure, and when they wake up in the forest outside town, they have no idea how they got there.
  • Played For Drama: The adventurers are in the tavern to drink away the troubles inherent in being an adventurer when someone offers them a job. They take it, because they need the money, because they've spent all theirs on overpriced magic items, booze, and hookers. Repeat until dead.

You All Meet in An Inn. Yes, even Pete.

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