Best advice. Players start the game knowing how and why they are going to stick together.
I’m also inclined to put my thumb on the scale a little as DM and give the players a loose connection that they can build on and incorporate into their characters while building. BG3 did it really well - everyone has a tadpole in their head, y’all gonna be mindflayers if you leave the group.
I recently had players all start as fresh recruits in an organisation - they got to decide the organisation - where the higher-ups put them together. Previously I did a one shot at level 5 where players already had an adventuring group together 20 years before and were called back together for one last mission.
I seem to completely misunderstand the dynamic.
As I see it, you have paid $700k for the house with the bank’s money (in this thread there is no deposit), bought back some of the house from the bank with $50k of your own money and then lost the house so you’re out $50k with no house.
If the bank does pay out some of the value of the house to you based on equity, it’s just going to be a smaller amount than $50k since the value of the house is lower and part of your repayment went to interest so you don’t even get $50k worth of equity. This feels like a worse position to me.
Like the bank has lost money for sure, but we are not getting that are we?