WotBS Starting WotBS with seven 3rd level characters

We've about to finish the WOTC intro scenario Keep on the Shadowfell, so the characters will be level 3, and there are seven of them. This probably puts the party at the start of episode 2. Has anyone tried starting at this point?

I'd not recommend starting at #2 - there is SO much set-up in #1 that a lot of the series simply won't make much sense. I guess you could narrate a bunch of info to them, but that's no fun.

Is there no way you can persuade them to start the adventure path at level 1 as designed, with the promise that they get to adventure through 12 superb adventures? It seems a waste to sabotage the whole saga and about 2 years of potential play because of one WotC intro scenario.

I had a feeling you would say that I'll see what they say.

I debated this same thing a few months ago. I have an online campaign in WotBS that started at level 1 and is having a good time (they're currently at level 9, deep into the third adventure). When they were around level 5 or 6, I started DMing another group in-person and had to decide what campaign to run. I was interested in running WotBS for the in-person campaign (in part because I already had put the maps and monsters and everything together in MapTool), but the in-person group decided to start at level 5.

I considered running an abbreviated version of the first adventure and the first half of the second adventure (just a few encounters, not a lot of XP). I considered dropping them right into the middle of the second adventure. But I ultimately decided to run them through a home brew campaign instead.

If the players really don't want to go back a couple of levels (and I wouldn't blame them), here's what I would recommend:

• Start the story at the beginning of the first adventure
• Run them through a low-combat version of that adventure, with the combats you do run scaled up to be an appropriate challenge for third-level characters.
• Skip the attack at the Poison Apple
• Don't run formal skill challenges as they head for the depository
• Run the depository in a way similar to what I did (see here for the blog post and here for the PDF) - the party should end up with the case at the end of this battle, with no eladrin ghetto side quest
• Pick one or two combats / skill challenges to get the party out of the city (I created an alternate path through the sewers)
• Skip Marben and the gnolls
• Run the fight with the Inquisitor at Haddin and Crystin's place
• Send them into the Fire Forest at the level-appropriate place (they should be fourth level at this point)

There are several extraneous combats in the adventure path already, so throwing them out and cutting some non-essential plot encounters should let you remove two levels worth of experience from the first adventure.

I'm also an advocate of ditching the whole idea of tracking experience points anyway and leveling the party when the DM deems it to be appropriate. That would help here, too.

I'll just add the general statement that with only minor tweaks, I thought adventure one was tremendous and would not want to skip it with a group.

Do as OnlineDM recommends. Start them with adventure 1, but cut out some of the combat encounters. There is a lot of extraneous combat that adds little to the story and is just there to level the characters up faster. You can easily cut much of it, especially in the first two modules. The level gap will disappear shortly. Encounters in the first few modules need to be adjusted for MM3 math updates in any case, so it should be easy to tweak things for their level.

When I did my own conversion to 4E from the 3.5 version, my group came out of module 2 at a much lower level than the official conversion. They added a lot of stuff solely for the purpose of making the group level faster.

Thanks for all the good advice. I checked the characters and discovered that they were actually level 2 - halfway to level 3 - so the problem isn't as big as I thought.

So, I'll just give them the "lite" version of episode 1 (using OnlineDM's plan), scale the encounters to match party level and strength (there are seven of them), and fudge the XP so they get to level 4 by the end.