I'm gonna say it. 

I hate the 'we all meet in a tavern' scenario. 

I hate beginnings. 

I hate the 5 pages of posts that it takes for everyone to go through the motions of, 'oh, hi, I *TOO* am on a quest to drop a fucking piece of jewelry into a pit of lava! But because my misspelled personality tab says that I am stand-offish, I'm going to distrust you until everyone gets so bored with the introductions that everyone quits.'

A fundamental guideline in improv is to always have the characters know each other in some way. It just makes the dynamics way more interesting if they already have a relationship.

Maybe people drop out of roleplays because we all get hung up on the introductions, which are boring as fuck?

What if we started with all the obnoxious introductory box checking done, and just skipped to the fun bits, be they character driven backstabbing, stabbing, or just stabbing characters? 

Literally the only time in history that the 'they meet in a tavern' has worked as a literary device was fucking Chaucer, and it's easily the lamest part of Canterbury Tales.