Sampling-based planners have solved difficult problems in many applications of motion planning in recent years. In particular, techniques based on the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have generated highly successful single-query planners. Even though RRTs work well on many problems , they have weaknesses which cause them to explore slowly when the sampling domain is not well adapted to the problem. In this paper we characterize these issues and propose a general framework for minimizing their effect. We develop and implement a simple new planner which shows significant improvement over existing RRT-based planners. In the worst cases, the performance appears to be only slightly worse in comparison to the original RRT, and for many problems it performs orders of magnitude better.