Zero to Hero!

[ForeverSlayer]

One thing about 4th edition that's different is the fact that you start out as a hero. While this is good an all for some people, it's not something for me. Also, the chance to die at low levels is a bit lower when compared to other editions and that's fine if you like that sort of thing but I don't. For some reason I like it when the odds are stacked against me and I like to go from a nobody to the hero of the land.

I think what happens is it gives me more of an appreciation and a sense of fulfillment when I know I have beaten the odds and come out on top. I have played Wizards since 1st edition and whenever I ran out of spells I always had to think outside the box to help out the other party members and make use of what I had left and I really enjoyed that.

Do you like your characters to go from a dud to a stud or do you like starting out as the hero?

 

[Dice4Hire]

I do not consider 1st level 4E characters as heroes.

A lot of people do, though.

 

[Klaus]

One thing about 4th edition that's different is the fact that you start out as a hero. While this is good an all for some people, it's not something for me. Also, the chance to die at low levels is a bit lower when compared to other editions and that's fine if you like that sort of thing but I don't.

(Emphasis mine)

Sorry, but you're just wrong in these assessments. PCs have lots of hit points and good defenses, but so do the monsters. A DM can pitch the PCs against overwhelming odds just as much as he could in previous editions. Case in point: Irontooth, a *goblin* in Keep on the Shadowfell, could very well wipe out a 1st- or 2nd-level party all by himself. If the DM plays safe, the game will be safe. But the tools for a deadlier game are there.

 

[jbear]

No, I prefer 4e 1st level characters and monsters in general.

Case and point: I was introducing D&D (3.5) to a group of friends with zero RPG experience. The adventure was set in a mine. There was a store room infested with sick rats. To cut a long story short the sick rats proved a huge challenge to the party. One of the players was absolutely exasperated that they were unable to kill a few aggressive sick rats. "C'mon, I stomp on its head! It's just a rat! What kind of warrior am I if I can't even kill a rat?".

One of the other players with more experience tried to explain that PCs began their careers fairly useless, but as you go along you become more skilled. It did little to aleviate his sense of frustration.

Things like a rat or an angry cat don't even exist in 4e (thankfully), you have swarms, which are far easier to swallow that they could pose some kind of a challenge or threat. And PCs can do cool things. They aren't just wannabes fresh from the farm. They kick butt. That was what my friend was looking for. That's what 4e provides. That's what I prefer.

 

[Imaro]

(Emphasis mine)

Sorry, but you're just wrong in these assessments. PCs have lots of hit points and good defenses, but so do the monsters. A DM can pitch the PCs against overwhelming odds just as much as he could in previous editions. Case in point: Irontooth, a *goblin* in Keep on the Shadowfell, could very well wipe out a 1st- or 2nd-level party all by himself. If the DM plays safe, the game will be safe. But the tools for a deadlier game are there.

I don't think this is correct. Just based off economy of actions I don't think Irontooth could defeat a party (5 PC's) by himself. If I recall correctly... what made that fight hard was that it was a level 6 encounter and it didn't alllow the PC's a short rest inbetween waves of foes.

 

[malraux]

Things like a rat or an angry cat don't even exist in 4e (thankfully), you have swarms, which are far easier to swallow that they could pose some kind of a challenge or threat. And PCs can do cool things. They aren't just wannabes fresh from the farm. They kick butt. That was what my friend was looking for. That's what 4e provides. That's what I prefer.

I never understood the theory behind older editions in which I start off as a farmhand with a sword and then suddenly just become an expert warrior. The 4e paradigm of starting as a competent, but maybe still inexperienced, example of my class makes a lot more sense in terms of who would actually choose to become an adventurer.

 

[FireLance]

"Odds are stacked against you" and "need to think outside the box" is a function of the DM, or possibly the adventure, not the system.

Equal-level fights tend to be fairly easy. Level+4 fights tend to be quite tough. The DM just has to pick the level of challenge that his group enjoys. It isn't all that different from the old days, except now we have better guidelines.

And yes, the default game assumes that the PCs are much tougher than normal men, but I see it as a bonus. I like it that there's a plausible reason why it's the PCs that usually get picked to do all the dangerous stuff instead of Joe Farmer down the road.

If you really want the PCs to feel not much more powerful than commoners, at least at the start, then it may be easier to just scale everything upwards to keep pace with the PCs. Minions don't exist. Every normal human in the game is a level 1 skirmisher with 16+Constitution hit points and hits with a club at +6 vs. AC for 1d6+5 damage.

 

[delericho]

With the exception of the move from 1st to 2nd edition, ever edition change ever has upped the power level of starting characters. The moves from 2nd to 3e, and especially from 3e to 4e are just more dramatic.

One thing about 4th edition that's different is the fact that you start out as a hero.

The thing is, that actually matches the genre pretty well. We never see 'young Aragorn' or 'young Legolas'. Luke Skywalker is pretty competent from the moment he leaves the farm. Bruce Wayne is a badass as soon as he puts on the mask. And so on.

It also matches what most people want to think of when they play the game. Generally, they want to be Conan, or Gandalf, or Han Solo. Most people don't want to be Samwise Gamgee fresh from his garden, or Joe the Guard, or, well, average.

I had hoped that WotC would one day provide 'sub-levels' for the people who did want to portray those formative years. It's a shame they never did. But as the baseline for the game, yeah, they got it mostly right.

While this is good an all for some people, it's not something for me. Also, the chance to die at low levels is a bit lower when compared to other editions and that's fine if you like that sort of thing but I don't.

It's all relative. First time out in 4e my players were absolutely disgusted because the game ended in a TPK due to kobolds. Kobolds! In fact, they concluded that they couldn't see any way the game could be anything but insanely deadly.

(However, that wasn't why that group eventually rejected 4e. There were other fundamental issues, notably the combat grind, that did that.)

I think what happens is it gives me more of an appreciation and a sense of fulfillment when I know I have beaten the odds and come out on top. I have played Wizards since 1st edition and whenever I ran out of spells I always had to think outside the box to help out the other party members and make use of what I had left and I really enjoyed that.

I actually agree with you - I never had a problem with the Wizard running out of spells. But we're the minority. The majority view was that they wanted the Wizard to be able to do wizard-y things every round, all the time. Resorting to the crossbow was a no-no.

I learned to live with it. Truth was, if a 3e Wizard ran out of spells (including from magic items) beyond about 3rd level, he wasn't doing it right. 4e just makes that explicit, and brings it down to 1st level.

(Actually, I think magic missile should never have been added to D&D, way back when. How different would the game look now without that particular spell? )

Do like your characters to go from a dud to a stud or do you like starting out as the hero?

You'll note that I said I think 4e gets it mostly right above.

Personally, I feel 1st level characters are just a bit too powerful in 4e. Just a bit too super-human. I would prefer 1st level characters to be the equivalent of special forces in the real world - clearly a cut above the norm, but just as clearly still mortal. (A good fictional example would be The Black Company.)

In fact, that should be the case right through the Heroic tier, with characters just edging into impossible feats as they near the end of the tier. (Obviously, 'impossible' when not using magic; we'd need to extrapolate to cover the magical world.)

In the Paragon tier, then, characters should be clearly superhuman, but not absurdly so - a couple of steps beyond what a normal human can achieve. So, they can wrestle a giant, but not a god.

And then, in the Epic tier, they are something else again. Clearly, at this point they are massively larger than life, with all the power and hubris that goes with it. They battle armies single-handed, wrestle gods (or at least demi-gods) to a standstill, conquer entire nations before breakfast, and are generally awesome.

(By that count, that makes Luke Skywalker 1st level when he tells Obi-Wan "I want to come with you...", Frodo and Sam low-heroic from The Shire to Rivendell, and Boromir high-heroic. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli would be low-Paragon at the start of LotR, moving to high-Paragon by the end. And Leonidas and Achillies (300 and Troy, respectively) would enter the Epic tier as they go to war.)

 

[DEFCON 1]

Do like your characters to go from a dud to a stud or do you like starting out as the hero?

I've run my players through both ways. And both ways are fun for the start of a campaign.

My 'zero to hero' method for the 3.5 game I had (and I've written about this before, so apologies to those whom I'm repeating info to)... the characters were all young men and women in a village who weren't adventurers. They didn't have any starting equipment... they didn't have a starting amount of gold to buy things... and they didn't have any class abilities whatsover. The first couple of sessions (when they overheard some bad guys planning something and they decided to try and stop it themselves) involved running through town and finding/borrowing/stealing equipment from the various farmers and townsfolk. Which was cool inasmuch as we had players using things like scythes for the first time in forever, because that was the only two-handed weapon they could get their hands on. Then, as the adventure progressed and they began dealing with the badguys, they found/stole more equipment from them, got treasure with which to buy some stuff too (the fighter was quite excited to finally be able to actually buy his first set of metal armor), and slowly but surely as they gained XP, I started feeding them parts of their class abilities to them one at a time.

This kind of thing obviously doesn't work for every campaign, and it does mean the DM has to actually work and manage this (instead of having a nice little "zero to hero" ruleset to follow along by rote)... but that's part of the fun and part of the point. You don't NEED to have rules for this kind of stuff in the game. Sure, it might be nice to HAVE (which is why people come on and post on the Fan Creations & Houserules page, so they can give/get new kinds of stuff like this)... but it's a small part of a small subset of campaign starters, and thus it's not REQUIRED to be.

 

[Klaus]

I don't think this is correct. Just based off economy of actions I don't think Irontooth could defeat a party (5 PC's) by himself. If I recall correctly... what made that fight hard was that it was a level 6 encounter and it didn't alllow the PC's a short rest inbetween waves of foes.

A bloodied Irontooth did 1d8+1d10+4 damage to two adjacent enemies with each action, and healed 5hp at the end of his turn. Two hits from his axe could kill pretty much any PC (never mind a crit).