Start At The Good Stuff

There's a Penny Arcade comic about the game God of War 2 with dialogue relevant to this subject:

Gabe: "I'm fighting the Colossus."
Tycho: "Whoa!"
Gabe: "I broke his arms in some water wheels and cut out his eyes. He chased me across an entire island! Then I climbed inside his body, draining his mystic energy with a sword I got from the king of the gods!"
Tycho: "Is this the last level?"
Gabe: "This is the first level."

There's a lot right about that.

All too often, RPGs are all about the cool stuff that isn't happening now. You get to have cool powers later. You'll have the scenes you want to see later. These are hints about an awesome plot you'll interact with later.

The things you get now are less awesome. Well, screw that.

As an example from my own play, I was running a D&D game. The PCs had started at 3rd level to get them out of the instant death zone, but they were still not exactly big shots in the setting. Then I introduced their opponent: The Earthquake Cricket.

Blatantly stolen from the Reign RPG, the Earthquake Cricket is the size of a small mountain... range. It sticks feelers into the soil and drains all the nutrients for miles around, creating a barren wasteland. When it's done, it jumps to new feeding grounds and lands like an atomic bomb. This thing had killed one nation already, and was nearly finished with another. Since any of the neighboring kingdoms could be next, they'd all sent their heroes to deal with the thing... and they'd all been killed by the enormous monstrosity.

So the PCs were plan B. One of the heroes, before dying, had sent her familiar back to tell of a possible weakness - a small hole on the back of the cricket's head. So the King called in a favor from the Eagles and had the PCs airlifted onto the cricket, where they entered the monster and began a desperate quest to kill the geography-sized monster from within before another kingdom died.

Wouldn't you know it, crawling around in the critter's veins while dealing with its biological hazards and immune system and parasites was a lot like a dungeon crawl with encounters of CR 2-4. So the PCs were facing level-appropriate challenges, but the stakes and scenery were the sort of thing that you'd associate with much higher-level shenanigans. It was awesome.

My next game is going to begin with finding out what the players want to see happen and having those things happen. If that means an epic duel between estranged kung-fu brothers on the walls of a siege that will decide the fate of nations while the general who betrayed them all offers a devil's bargain to those sent to bring him to justice... well, so much the better.