I have been in too many games where the GM (and the players) starts in slow, building up to the action, emulating most books and movies. You see the protagonist in their regular day, normal lives, until something happens to pull them into the action.

In my experience, it's never as fun as it looks. Especially in a one-shot or a short-term series (2-5 sessions).

Example 1: We play Over the Edge. It is a one-shot, at a convention. We got pregens with cool secrets and goals. But the first hour of the game, more-or-less, is about excaping the frickin' airport. Yes, the book says the airport is a bureaucratic maze and a architectural nightmare, but who gives a damn about that when we're jonesing to bring our secrets and goals into the story. For me, the game didn't really start until we came out of the airport. This is when the game should actually have started.

Example 2: We play a Call of Cthulhu campaign. In my case, only the first session. A bunch of things went wrong with that game, I think. One of them is that all of our rag-tag team of investigators are called to a mission in a south-american jungle, but instead of starting there, we start in Chicago. We have to find our boat (wait, you didn't note the name of the boat down? Tough.), we have to suffer through an excruciatingly long and pointless poker tournament on the trip, then we got some unnecessary downtime in the city... Guh.

The best games start In Media Res. All that prologue happens before we start. We can talk about it quickly before we begin. But the we get to the action. Like in Star Wars : a bit of prologue about how we're at war and have won our first victory. And then "your ship is under attack by a much much bigger ship. You are about to be boarded. What do you do?"

That's part of the reason I find Poison'd to be so cool (though I have yet to play it). Prologue: the cook poisoned the captain, and now the latter's dead. The ship is in a poor state, we lack supplies and there's another ship on our tail, a warship called the Resolute. Damn! Now we have to decide how to punish the murderer (or thank him, whatev'), pick a new captain, fight off the resolute or escape it, repair the ship, get some food... That's a lot of things the PCs have to deal with pretty quick! And then all those characters start with a number of Ambitions to fulfill.

Too many games depend on the characters grabbing the adventure hook. They only really work for me if the characters are invested personally in the action. A trading outpost was attacked by Apaches. Okay, what do I care? I am not a lawman. Someone I like got kille/raped/kidnapped in the attack? I care. Someone's accusing me of being responsible of the attack? I care. A posse is being built to massacre my tribe in retribution? I care. It would also have been a good idea to have us create characters with a reason to be in that outpost when it was attacked, so we start In Media Res. Do put me in danger. Do put my loved ones in danger. Do put me in front of an impossible decision (save your lover's life to the cost of thousands of unknown others').

I also like kickers, and yet never got into many games that used them. Basically, a player-created hook for the characters. A device easily adapted to most games. Instead of the poor GM hurting his head trying to find way to bait the characters into the story, the characters, upon character creation, design their own story hook. "My character found Goldie, beautiful prostitute who slept with him for free, in spite of his ugly mug. The first woman to actually touch him after his mother. He woke up later, she's dead. Police cars are coming, sirens wailing outside."

In conclusion, start with a bang, in the middle of the action, get the players involved from the beginning.

I use in media res nearly all the time.

It's important to remember that, in many games, so much Exposition is accomplished by the time that chargen is over, that a formal Exposition phase in the actually played fiction is not necessary.

That being said, there are times when I don't use it. In Hex Rangers, in which the players play agents of a secret government organization hunting down supernatural threats, things start slowly. This is just an emulation of the Procedural genre. But things do quickly start escalating after that.

I find the trick with IMR play, that many GMs are dreadfully bad at, is staging the game in at the point where events have taken on momentum, but before the point where the important choices and emotional understanding come.

Frame too far out, and its slow and dull to get in. Frame too close in, and its a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, etc. Going back to the source, its significant that neither did Homer start with Paris stealing off Helen (or "the double egg") but neither did he start in the middle of the fight between Hector and Achilles.

In other news, I often like a "cold open" type of IMR. This is where you start the game with something happening in the midst of the sound and fury, and then cut out and back to before it all went to shit and play forward until you hit the part where you started. You see this in TV shows a lot, where the part before the opening credits shows something terrible happening, and then comes the opening credits, then the obligatory "earlier that day" or "two days earlier" or whatever. It works pretty decently if you've a group that is good at working together to make the cold open scene, and then at playing together towards it. (Of course, this method introduces all sorts of elements of plot control that don't work well with emergent style narrative play. But hell, that kind of play is so 2008.)

I agree, I have a player in my game who simply cannot and will not engage in in media res scenes. Her comment is, "If I don't know how my character got into the situation, I don't know how they feel about it or what they've done about it, so how can I be expected to know what they do in it?" She just flat doesn't play in in media res scenes. She tries, but when her turn comes, her reply is always "I don't know what my character does." Not "I do nothing", but "I don't know."

Though a combat is the most obvious action scene, it's not the only thing that I would find satisfying.

I would be fine with playing the scene where were given a mission, for example. And the next scene is starting the mission.

What I don't like is when we roleplaying downtime and suiting up. A few line should suffice. "Okay, we're going in a dungeon? We're taking torches, rope and rations" (or, as I prefer, we just assume we took the basic, obvious stuff).

If our characters are travelling to another location, and the action doesn't really start before they get there, there's no point roleplaying the trip. Just narrate what's going on. And move on to the good stuff.

And once it actually begins, let's start with a measningful scene. Let's not just be out there waiting for something to happen. If the Apaches are attacking a trading post, let's not be in a bar, waiting for someone to tell us about it. Let us be at the trading post, either being attacked, leading the attack, or after the attack, investigating the scene. If that's what's the story's going to be about, we don' need a scene when we actually decide if we want to investigate the attack, or defend the outpost.

If it's more of a sandbox campaign, it works the same way, except the players decide where they are, what they are doing. My confidence artist wants to infiltrate a cult? l'll frame a scene where I'm at a meeting, getting my loyalty tested, not a scene when my character is looking for rumors about where I might find people who would no about an evil cult. My sorcerer wants to control the mayor? Instead of framing a scene where I find out how I can do that, I'll frame a scene where I'm stealing an artifact that will help me bind the right demon for the job.

Note: research and information gathering isn't that bad, really. I'm fine with a scene where my character is interrogating someone or translating an ancient book. I have problem with my character trying to find someone worthy of interrogation or reading book after book before finding the right one. I don't want to roleplay my character going from bar to bar, looking for someone to interrogate. We can juste say that happened, and jump right to the part where I'm talking to him, and he's about to spill the beans (or not).

I think I'm rambling. What I don't want is:

A scene where nothing happens, our characters have no meaningful goals yet, and the GM says "alright, what do you do?" and just muddle around for 10 minutes before a story hook kicks in. Start with the damn adventure hook, and make it juicy. And then jump straight into the next meaningful scene.

Yeah, I suspect that wouldn't work for her.

Would she be satisfied with the prologue option I suggested?

I asked her about the prologue thing and she said only if the prologue gave her information about her current situation and how she ended up there. She pointed out that I already explain the "roller text" information before she even makes the character, so she already knows that stuff. Also she noted that most of her fun in roleplaying comes from interactions with other characters when nothing is on the line (banter, joshing around, etc.) so this pretty much skips a big chunk of the fun of the game.

I'm a big fan of this, also, especially to start off a campaign. You can fill bits in later, ask the players how their characters got there, etc.

However, I think it's correctly "in medias res" rather than "in media res," at least in my editorial experience. Latin scholars, feel free to comment.