WotBS Starting WotBS with fifth-level characters

[OnlineDM]

I'm looking for input from the community on this one. I'm about to serve as the dungeon master on a new campaign for my in-person D&D group and I've decided that I'd like to run War of the Burning Sky (I've been running it for months with my online group and I already have the maps and monsters set up in MapTool). However, the group is sick of low-level campaigns (we've done two short campaigns this year that each took us from level 1 to level 3) and we've decided to start with the characters at level 5.

What do you think would be the best way to do this? I see five choices, though I'm open to other options.

1. Start the story at the beginning, but skip over lots of encounters to get the party into the middle of the Fire Forest (where they're expected to the fifth level) pretty quickly. More role-playing, less combat. The encounters I do run will be leveled-up to be a reasonable challenge.
2. Start the story in the Fire Forest, giving the history in Gate Pass as back story.
3. Play from the beginning with the difficulty ramped up by four levels. Skip the Fire Forest and move straight to Seaquen.
4. Play the campaign straight through from the beginning, making every encounter more challenging forever.
5. Forget it and run something else instead.

I'm leaning toward option 1. If I do that, here's how I would run it:

• Meet Torrent as scripted. No bounty hunter attack.
• Move through the firebombing as scripted, but no actual skill challenges (though I might still run the weasel hunt because it was so much fun with my online campaign).
• Run my custom version of the depository encounter, with the party retrieving the case from the fake Rivereye (upping the difficulty level, of course).
• Move straight to escaping from Gate Pass, either via the scripted route (unlikely) or the sewers/natural caves (my custom version).
• Skip King Marben and probably the Gnolls and move to the Haddin/Crystin/Inquisitor encounter.
• Go into the Fire Forest with the party still around level 5, maybe level 6. Ramp up difficulty as needed, and skip a few encounters to aim to have the party at level 8 as they leave the forest, as scripted.

What do you think?

 

[RangerWickett]

That's probably a fine plan. I'm not up to speed on what all has been added to the 4e release, but realize that if you skip over some of the encounters in the early adventures, you may need to skip over related encounters in the later adventures. But, I mean, there's already plenty of plot, so I think you could easily have a satisfying campaign even if you excised a plot thread or two and just had the party level up at the appropriate time, XP be damned.

 

[corwyn77]

What is it that your players don't like about low levels. We had the same issue and ultimately the problem was the lack of options at low level - one encounter, one daily and spam at-wills ad nauseum.

What we ended up doing is giving each character 3 dailies, 3 encounters and 3 utility powers at level 2. When we would get a new power, barring Paragon Paths, we would instead swap one of our level one powers. It all balances out at level 10. It does increase power some so you need to beef up opposition some but it makes low level much more interesting.

 

[Nebten]

Disclaimer: All my experience with WotBS is 3.5

I would start out play in Seaquen with Shelter from the Storm if you want things to transition easier.
While Scourge is probably one of the best parts of the whole series and you meet a lot of key players in the first mod, they are not relavent until the 9th & 12th mod! By that time, my players barely remembered who they were unless they were directly tied to them from the beginning and kept those connections up. (like Rantle being a key figure in the Thieves' Guild)

Another option could be to do Scourage ramped up a little bit, then skip Fire Forest and go straight to Shelter at the appropriate level. That can save you time with conversion. Fire Forest is an interesting and orginal concept and introduces a main plot line. But the characters won't know how important that is until the 4th mod. When it comes up without doing Fire Forest, nobody would be any wiser. Sadly, the pacing really slows down in the Fire Forest and I nearly lost my groups interest in the series. A redeming quality is that the last fight can be very epic. That may not be how it went for other groups, but that's my experience.

Good luck

 

[OnlineDM]

Thank you for the input, everybody! In the end, I decided against running WotBS for a second group starting at fifth level.

I think the players wanted to start at fifth level mainly because this was going to be our third campaign in about nine months, and the first two sputtered out after only getting to third level. They just wanted to see what comes next in terms of character power level.

I decided that I was really interested in running a full homebrew campaign, mainly because I hadn't tried it yet and I enjoyed the flexibility. So far so good, though we're only one session in. I'll be continuing running WotBS with my online group (who, coincidentally, are currently at fifth level and in the Fire Forest).