Reasons your party has gotten together

Without being railroaded by the GM into working together because you all woke up in prison, or something generic like you're all monster hunters or an explorers guild, what are some good ideas for your party to stick together and trust each other in a low magic / dndlike fantasy setting?

you're all cursed together and you need to all be together to lift it

A common enemy is a good unifier, in all honesty, especially when you've got all different alignments playing. The good guys want justice, the bad guys just wanna get even.

Our employer pays us well.

But seriously
>Not wanting everyone to be part of the same guild
>Not wanting to grow your guild and expand it's power and reputation together
>Not wanting to have companions dedicated to the cause whom you could trust your life with.

Why is it everyone else considers the best ideas "boring" and "overused" when I'd kill for games like that?

Sooooooo, you basically want to make a character who has no real reason to know or trust anyone else in the party, who hasn't been given a "railroaded" reason to work with them, and then still want him to have a reason to risk his life with a bunch of strangers.

>Yeah, I want my DM to make me work with the other player, but he doesn't get to tell me what to do and can't make me work with the other players!

Railroading can work if you give the players creative input into the situation. If they all start off in prison briefly outline their present circumstances, then ask everyone to describe how and why their characters arrived in this circumstance. Everyone who participants gets extra xp, luck points, or some other kind of bonus. Then everyone votes on the most entertaining of the character's stories. The story with the most points gets additional xp, luck points, etc.

I try to encourage them to come up with potential plot hooks within their stories. Doing that not only shows me what the players are interested plot wise, but it also takes some of the creative burden off my shoulders.

In my own campaign, the party belongs to a group called "The Re-Possessors", whose entire job consists of being given contracts for various BBEG's and Dungeons to go out and "Re-possess" their stuff. Basically legalized adventurers.

The whole campaign's just utterly silly but serious stuff like this. There's an entire city built by and for an Orc Merchant Lord, who runs it by himself with his seven-hundred-something sons.

There's a BBEG Gnome Lich whose entire backstory was 'he fell into a portal to an entirely different game setting, now he's on a quest to logically deduce the entirety of the core rulebook'. So far he's discovered the Peasant Railgun exploit, and abuses the everloving shit out of it with skeletons. Oddly enough every city in the entire world has him wanted because he tried to set up a universal email-service with skeletons, but then accidentally blew up an orphanage when someone's package was accelerated to a tenth the speed of light right into a skeleton that was coincedentally knocked over by a hobo.

I've got a clockwork city run by clockwork brains. There's people there whose entire needs are met completely, so long as they don't break any laws. But if they're caught breaking any law; no matter how petty, they're punished with execution by the lawful stupid clockworks. Naturally there's a rebel faction that wants to replace the clockworks with similarly lawful stupid skeletons. Nobody at all has enough brains to realize they could walk uncontested into the city's great courthouse and personally rewrite the laws so that everything doesn't have the death penalty. Because said city was founded by a democracy("What the fuck's a democracy? IS that some newfangled school of magic?").

>Peasant Railgun exploit

In my current campaign, my character is a warrior from a norse inspired civilization that has experienced severe and fuck up problems in its lands, so they send out groups of able bodied young men to find new lands for them to settle. My character is the past one of his group, and joined the other PCs as he stopped to rest in a town and told them about what he was doing. They offered to bring him with them to explore a castle/town in an abandoned area, so he joined up.

I stole some stuff from Traveller and FATE, and modified it. Here goes:
After character creation, I pick a player. They describe a quest or something they were on in their backstory, and pick another player. That player describes how their character aided the first, and then they pick a third. The third one describes a complication the first two faced, and they describe how they overcame it together. The third player then restarts the process, and this continues until each character has aided a character, and been aided by a different one.
It can easily become a Session 0 of prequel adventures, and in large groups additional players can add complications to be dealt with later in the campaign. For a two player game, the DM is the one that adds complications.

>After character creation, I pick a player. They describe a quest or something they were on in their backstory, and pick another player. That player describes how their character aided the first, and then they pick a third. The third one describes a complication the first two faced, and they describe how they overcame it together. The third player then restarts the process, and this continues until each character has aided a character, and been aided by a different one.

This might work. Thanks.

New guys in local merc guild, hired to do work.

Sometimes it's just better to be railroaded in the beginning. We don't need to spend 3 hours trying to contrive a reason for Todd's rogue to travel with Bill's paladin.

The method is also easily expandable to have a fourth player add in an asset the first two players used. Since most groups are four players (mine are usually 2-3 players), this means everybody gets involved. Just don't be afraid to veto bullshit, and ask expanding questions (why were you there? How did you get involved in this quest? what was the name of the village this incident took place in? stuff like that).

It's some retarded 3.5 thing that doesn't even work because it tries to combine RAW with mechanics that don't even exist in the game for an infinite damage exploit. There's plenty of horrendously broken shit in that edition already without players making up their own mechanics.

They met in a tavern, complaining about a street preacher who obviously knew nothing. Bill appreciates a thief who knows theology.

I like this sort of thing usually.

My current game is a hub town used to pirate raids which made them somewhat xenophobic so the party all arrived at the same time and only really had one another until the townsfolk got to know them. Didn't stop the players from splitting up every session but at a certain point it's on them.

here's a more indepth explanation:
in D&D, you can ready an action to pass an item along to somebody next to you, triggered when you're handed an item from a dude on the other side of you, or something like that.
so the theory goes that if you get a long enough chain of peasants or adventurers or whatever, you can have an item travel like, i don't know, 80 feet a second if you have a chain of 100 peasants passing it along, because a round's only 6 seconds.
the last guy in the chain then 'lets go' of the item by.. i don't know, he drops it or throws it or something, but the important thing is that we use the power of belief to make it keep all that built up speed like it's mario 64 and send it flying into a dragon or a castle and clean out the other side with speed to spare.

now, anybody with even half a brain will have immediately noticed that i've had to use very vague terms about how you actually do this
this is because it doesn't work RAW. not at all. there is no 'peasant railgun' rule.
the actual effect, RAW, is that the item -does- travel the entire distance.. and is then dropped or thrown completely normally as if nothing unusual had happened, because dropping or throwing an item doesn't take into account how many people it's been passed along through beforehand, or the theoretical number of spaces it's passed through before you threw or dropped it.
ultimately, the effect is that it kind of 'teleports' that distance, which is kind of neat but not worth gathering 500 peasants in front of the dragon for.

in fact, to make this work you not only have to selectively interpret certain rules as written, but you also have to misinterpret other rules AND make up your own rules on the fly.
for instance, if i recall correctly the game doesn't even have proper rules for determining the damage of an item's impact based on its speed and mass - the formula the initial post used was from like, rules for dropping a boulder on somebody or something.

>The guild is filled with male human fighting men.

99% of Stupid Dragon Tricks are like this, based on willful misinterpretation of the rules.

Pun-Pun only works if your DM is too stupid to look up your choices and notice you're taking shit that's only meant for monsters.

Iron Heart Surge requires creative (read: retarded) interpretations of the word "effect."

etc.

There is one exploit that always works though. Play a caster and not a martial class.

I run introductory one-on-one sessions for all players, and so they each have their own reason for coming to the port town they start in, and (unknown to them right now) have all been marked by the same creature hunting them.