D&D General Boredom in "Zero to Hero" Campaigns

[Guest 6801328]

100% agree. I love heroic play of higher level 5e and 4e but there is something special in the types of adventures you can have in lower level D&D. It is waste to a) makes these levels essentially a throwaway and b) so brief.

I occasionally start at higher level when joining an existing campaign. I find I never really get attached to a character I didn't start at level 1, and partly for that reason I wish the first few levels took longer.

 

[ccs]

D&D, especially in the current edition, seems focused on large 1-13 level campaign adventures. I'm not inherently against starting at Level 1 (especially for new players), but when you've been playing for years, Level 1 adventures take on a sameness: goblin ambushes, lesser undead in the cemetery, rats in the tavern basement, etc. Unfortunately, this design paradigm means that some players (and DMs) get bored before the campaign gets around to "the good stuff."

Starting at Lv.1 & climbing the ladder over & over? That's never bored me.
Where I get bored is when that climb is focused solely on one campaign goal/telling ONE story - such as {nearly} every adventure by WotC here in 5e. I don't want to spend all of my time/my characters entire run on 1 goal. I want a variety of adventures. Different things at different Lvs most of who's only connection to each other is that this particular group of adventurers did xy&z.
And now & then? Play a long one story campaign.

Take CoS for instance. People LOVE this adventure! But it's exactly what bores me as a player. From the time it starts (wether that's lv.1 or lv.3) you have ONE goal. Beat the vampire in the castle up on the cliff & escape his little kingdom.
Even newbies who've never played D&D or heard of this adventure figure this out almost immediately - because it's not a secret.
Great! Let's go on vampire hunt!
So what do you do lv after lv after lv? Week after week, for months (maybe around a year) of real time? You trek back & forth across this little kingdom full of every horror movie trope you can list, gathering the quest items, having the same flavor of play. When all you really want to do is hop in the black coach & go explore the damn castle.
But you can't. Not even if you'd began with all the items. Because you started at Lv.1. Or lv.3. And you need to lv way up in order to have a decent chance of success.
You know what's even worse here? As you run back & forth you're not actually getting to explore anything related to the characters you rolled up. Everything you do is in service to completing this one adventure.
But wait, things often get worse.... See, getting to "the good stuff" here? The actual vampire hunt? Starting from lv1/lv3 it all takes so long that 1) some of the characters won't survive the trek, 2) a TPK is completely possible, 3) Real Life can easily derail the whole thing.
So you've spent all that time not actually playing the part of the adventure you really wanted to....

Grrr.

As a DM? Very similar thoughts on 5e adventures (and many PF APs), but not as bad. I don't want to run the same thing for seemingly forever. I want to run a variety. And I want to run some stuff tailored to the characters.
Merely having multiple chapters/books in an adventure =/= actual variety (usually).



And yet the classic module this is all inspired by? I6: Ravenloft from the 1e days? An adventure I love as both DM & player?
Same plot & story. "For 6-8 characters of lvs 5-7"*.
Pretty much starts off going to the castle.
Explore the haunted castle, learn the "story", collect the McGuffins from throughout, & defeat the vampire.
You can accomplish this in a handful of sessions vs spending a year of your life not getting on with it.
It was a one shot story that presumed your characters had prior adventures & would have future adventures.

*AD&D had a way different assumption of party size. Either lots of players, multiple characters per player, npc hirelings, or some combo.
*Each class had a different xp chart. We always assumed the low end of these lv suggestions was whatever the slowest advancing character in your party should be at.
And vampires etc sucked XP out of characters, actually dropping your lvs until you died! To do this adventure you needed either that larger party size or just more lvs.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You can still play CoS as a (level 5-12ish) component of an ongoing campaign.

But the thing is, it is no longer economically viable for WotC to produce slim paperback modules like I6. They have to pad it out to fill a hardback to make it worth the cost of printing.

Personally, I find the adventure collections (TftYP, GoS) more useful. I supply my own arc-plots.

 

[dave2008]

@Lanefan those are some great ideas and definitely a step in the right direction of making the early levels feel less monotonous, but they still exhibit the problem that characters beginning a campaign aren't considered real adventurers. They are always playing second (or third) fiddle. Why is D&D so afraid to make early characters feel important, powerful, essential to the campaign world?

I assume what you really mean is why is WotC so afraid...? I mean D&D can handle heroic characters from the start, based on the make up of the PCs, that is actually the assumption in my world (I mean a level 1 PC is significantly better in a fight than the typical lvl 0 person).

However, as I have already noted, WotC has shifted more to toward what your asking for with Theros as I noted here.

So I will ask you @Retreater:

1. Why are you so afraid to look at material that supports the type of play you want, and...
2. Why are you so afraid to make your own stories about important level 1 PCs?

PS I'm just having fun, I don't think your afraid (of course neither do I think D&D is afraid).

 

[dave2008]

100% agree. I love heroic play of higher level 5e and 4e but there is something special in the types of adventures you can have in lower level D&D. It is waste to a) makes these levels essentially a throwaway and b) so brief.

Don't use XP and they last as long as you want

 

[dave2008]

Like, what harm would there be in having the low-level characters start off their careers special? Embroiled in the setting's politics? Saving the countryside from an otherworldly menace that could destroy the region (or maybe the world)? Fighting a creature that is more than just a slightly bigger version of everything else they've already been fighting?

Why do you think there is any harm in it? Several people on this thread have told that is exactly what they do. Heck, there is even the noble background which is great for starting characters off with power and influence. It is really starting to sound this is a problem of your own making.

 

[Krachek]

The concept of leveling is sometime hard to justify in storyline.
Sometime there is room for training, low start, but not always.
But the progression in multiple Levels in a sacred cow in DnD. We will never see a DnD with 4 levels : novice, professional, elite and legend. we are bound with a 20 to 30 level progression.
But this progression have its own bugs and problems, so a Dm should go over if he need to.
Published adventure go with the core assumption: start low level, and don’t ask too question about leveling pace.

 

[Wasteland Knight]

The reason for low level published material to be focused more on PCs as “zeros” instead of “heroes” is based on a couple things:
1. Making sure every published campaign is accessible to novice players/GM
2. Following the D&D trope of “start weak but become powerful”
3. Mechanics. If there’s an ancient dragon terrorizing the region, no matter how heroic 1st level PCs want to be, once initiative is rolled it will be a slaughter.

Personally, after a couple decades of playing D&D, I don’t like playing it GMing with 1st level characters. So my simple solution is to not start at 1st level and not to use published material, at least not exactly as printed.

it’s really a non-issue.

 

[Tonguez]

@Lanefan those are some great ideas and definitely a step in the right direction of making the early levels feel less monotonous, but they still exhibit the problem that characters beginning a campaign aren't considered real adventurers. They are always playing second (or third) fiddle. Why is D&D so afraid to make early characters feel important, powerful, essential to the campaign world?

Neither Bilbo Baggins nor Taran the Pig-Keeper nor the boy Tip start their campaigns as real adventurers but all of them are essential for the campaign. Its backstory and narrative that build that aspect into play. Theres nothing that stops you having the adventure featuring the Prince and his delegation on an important diplomatic mission to ’foriegn land’ where they become embroiled in a plot for Dark Fae to take over the world..

 

[Ancalagon]

?? What's a real life company who supplies natural gas got to do with any of this?

Your google fu skills are weak!!!

Seriously, it stands for the Goblin Laws of Gaming.

You can start here for a solid ruleset (there are many versions) OSR: GLOG-based Homebrew v.2: Many Rats on Sticks Edition

It's designed to be a fast, easy to learn, compatible with retroclones, low powered, and hackable. It also has some elements of 5e - no short rests, but you can take a lunch to heal, and a long rest heals a significant amount of HP. This is unlike a number of retroclones where natural healing is very slow. This compensates for the fact that there are almost no healing classes - no one is "stuck" playing the healer role. Also, apart from a few martial focused classes (fighter, barbarian etc) everyone has roughly the same combat capacity and daggers do 1d6 damage (and HP is low).

The spellcasting system is particularly intersting. You don't have "spell slots", you have magic dice (MD) that determine the power of your spells. Say you want to cast a fireball. You could make it weak and be 1 MD and it would do 1d6 of damage. Or you could go all out and make it 4d6 (again, hp is low). Or the duration of a spell could be 1d6, 2d6 etc minutes.... so the power is based on the number of MD you invest in it. Each MD rolled 1-3 comes back to you, and each 4-6 is lost for the day (but did more damage/effect etc).