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.
- Every single character that will appear all meet in the inn. Even the villains.
- The entire campaign is a thinly-disguised pub crawl.
- Downplayed:
- The party leader meets a ranger in a tavern, and they go off to pick up other party members they need for their quest.
- The tavern is the party's pre-arranged meeting place, and this is the first time they have all seen each other at once.
- Justified:
- Taverns are a good place to meet people for any reason.
- You'd have to be pretty smashed to agree to go on some adventures with some people...
- Adventurers and mercenaries love to celebrate at the tavern after their latest victories, which means that taverns are always full of adventurers and mercs.
- Everyone knows that adventuring parties meet up in taverns, so adventurers looking for a new job will go to a tavern to find parties.
- Given that there are laws against vagrancy, most common people are serfs who stay on their liege's property the tavern would be where all traveling freemen stay in town. Adventurers are just the subset they are interested in as opposed to merchants.
- 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.
- The party meets in a dungeon before setting off to fight an evil innkeeper.
- Subverted:
- There's a tavern scene at the beginning of the story. Then the point of view shifts to a prison...
- 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.
- The setting forwards to the Roaring Twenties. Therefore with alcohol made illegal with the prohibition it becomes a Speakeasy. Which gets raided turning it into You All Meet in a Cell.
- 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.
- Exploited: An Evil Sorcerer goes to a tavern incognito and waits for an adventuring party to assemble in order to lure them to their deaths with a seemingly-easy quest.
- 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.
- Double Defied: Said party member is forced to stay, and is even given water instead of the booze they got down there.
- 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."
- Implied: The campaign starts In Medias Res, but the DM hints that originally the party met in a tavern.
- 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:
- Despite the constant attempts by evil overlords, taverns remain standing thanks to adventurers guarding them - and the ones which are closely monitored 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.
- 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.
