So far my best campaign start was I told the group: Look, until I say so, everything you try works. No rolls. Your bad asses. Something will go wrong at some point, but it's imposable for you to die until this opening is over.

They proceed to pull off an amazing heist where they had to break in and tamper with some evidence. Just add they do their NPC teammates betray them, set off a chain reaction that kills a bunch of civilians, and leave them to take the blame. The law is on their trail, they are running out of friends, and finally they dive out of a high rise building and land in a trash heap. Then the campaign starts.

Killing a player character immediately usually grabs everyone's attention and gives some compelling motivators.

(Usually the dead person gets cool powers and is revived, so its not super mean lol)

session 0.

make sure we're all on the same page about how we want to play the game, alignments, character cohesion, RP vs. combat...

that kind of stuff.

I haven’t done it yet, but ideas I’ve thought about are:

• on a flying ship (party, traveling, etc) and it’s attacked and crashes
• they are part of a town and witnessing an execution, coronation, etc, and someone attacks or stops the event scattering those watching and forcing people to fight for their lives
• dead and in a hell when they are given the opportunity to return to life and avenge their deaths
• plucked from their lives and brought to limbo where they are informed that their destiny must be fulfilled as they are now awakened souls who were sent to the realm to fulfill their duty as agents of good to stop a rising darkness and then they are sent back to reality with a drive to meet up at a certain place to gather their group and begin their duty

I try to have each character know at least 2 other characters in the game, this creates some overlap.

I ran a game (and after almost 11 months) finished a campaign with a bunch of teens who had never played any RPG of any kind prior to this, and while making characters they created a traveling circus or carnival kind of thing and every character had some ties to it. So even when they did not know one another they would see the troupe's emblem and become instant friends.

The other method I enjoy is trial by fire, starting the game with an intense situation and they have to work together to survive. I used this to start the other d&d game I am running. It also inadvertently happened when I was introducing two new characters to my Werewolf The Apocalypse game.

Really depends on the general theme of the campaign imo :3

Taverns are a good set up for a mercenary style campaign, getting ambushed and having to work together sets up a nice destiny plot, meeting at a town by happenstance sets up a nice mishmashed family all traveling for their own goals, but finding it helpful to stick together etc.