D&D 5E Everyone Starts at First Level

[Tormyr]

What are the Pro's of doing this?

I can clearly remember a few Con's from back in the good old days.

• 1st level PC sits in the back during any dangerous situation twidling thumbs for multiple game sessions
• 1st level PC gets killed by any area effect attack on the party, doesn't matter if he saves.
• Either the DM takes it easy on the new PC or he pretty much just dies to the higher level threats.
• The new PC levels up pretty fast anyway from the huge amounts of XP, so why bother.

I have in the past just brought new party members in at the level of the party, but I could see one benefit being that the player gets a bit of time to feel how the character is progressing before deciding on new class features.

What about giving the PC the hit dice equal to the party level so they don't die so easily? That way they can participate as normal. They just won't have all of the cool features yet. So a Level 1 wizard might enter a 5th-level party with 22 hp but only the level 1 class features.

 

[the Jester]

I would imagine revivify (aka combat rez) will be a very popular spell in your campaigns.

There are actually usually about half the pcs in my group who have DNR's- that is, they don't want to be raised.

In 4E I took the approach that when a character died, the player made a new character that was at the lowest level and minimum experience points of the lowest level member of the party.

That's a good approach IMHO. What I do is this: start with a new pc one level lower. Then take however many xp the old pc had over the minimum for the level she or he was at and add that many to the minimum for the new pc's level. Once in a while, if you were close enough to leveling up, you actually won't come in at a lower level, just fewer xp.

In my campaign I'm planning on doing something close to this (everyone will start at level 3 no matter what), but I also plan on giving everyone double XP if anyone in the party is higher level than them and triple if they are the lowest overall.

This brings up the second thing I do about lower-level pcs in 4e. At the start of each session, anyone who is lower level than the highest level in the party gets "catchup xp" equal to the value of one monster of the highest level pc's level. In addition, whenever there's a new highest level pc, everyone eligible immediately gets catchup xp, so if the high level guy in the party goes up a level mid-session, everyone else gets xp.

 

[Boarstorm]

I've actually been testing this out in my LMoP mini-campaign. So far, it has worked wonderfully. When they entered the last dungeon, 2 members were 4th level and 2 were 3rd level. Through smart play, they were all level 4 by the end. Everyone felt that they could contribute (maybe not as much as others, but still useful), regardless of level.

I'll be interested to see if it still works at higher level disparities.

ETA: The deaths occurred at level 3. So for awhile, we had two level 1 characters and two level 3 characters. The lower-level characters have since caught up, though they remain a few thousand XP behind.

 

[Authweight]

What are the Pro's of doing this?

I can clearly remember a few Con's from back in the good old days.

• 1st level PC sits in the back during any dangerous situation twidling thumbs for multiple game sessions
• 1st level PC gets killed by any area effect attack on the party, doesn't matter if he saves.
• Either the DM takes it easy on the new PC or he pretty much just dies to the higher level threats.
• The new PC levels up pretty fast anyway from the huge amounts of XP, so why bother.

The advantages could be:

1) Immersion: it's kind of odd in a game when, whenever a character dies, they are immediately replaced by a character of exactly the same level. Now, I have played like that plenty before, and it's not a huge deal, but it's still a thing. This can also have the effect that character death doesn't really seem very meaningful.

In the game I'm prepping right now, the game will be a series of expeditions into a lost island with a rotating cast of characters. In this sort of game, it just sort of feels right to have everyone start off at the same level (in this case level 3) as brand new arrivals to the island. If they survive, they level up. If they die, they're gone, and can't necessarily be easily replaced.

2) RP opportunities: it provides a new roleplaying opportunity to play a fresh arrival going out and learning from seasoned veterans. Since I'm giving large XP bonuses to lower leveled characters, it doubly makes sense to rp the whole new arrival, still learning the ropes thing. It also lets the players of more experienced characters feel cool when they get to be the mentor to new adventurers.

3) Friendly competition: when death means you come back at the starting level, there is a built in reward for managing to survive lots of sessions, which can create a sense of friendly competition among the players of the game. It can also make sacrifices and risks feel more meaningful, since it isn't just the character but also the player who stands to lose from a poor outcome.

Now, none of the above means you have to play that way. I typically don't, but I'm looking forward to pushing the system and seeing if this approach works for us.

 

[the Jester]

What are the Pro's of doing this?

It's mostly a playstyle and immersion thing.

I've always held to the notion that most high-level npcs are fairly well-known, and the same logic applies to high-level pcs. When a new 15th level pc enters the party, where have they been all this time? How come, all those times the pcs went looking for a wizard for hire in the same city, they never found this guy who was, apparently, sitting around waiting for them to need him?

In addition, it makes a high-level pc an achievement rather than simply a given. I don't know if you've ever played Paranoia, but if you're playing a classic or 'zap' style Paranoia game and your character ends up advancing to Green security clearance during actual game/campaign play, it TOTALLY makes you proud. You feel as though "ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!" Old school D&D was kind of similar; if you got a 1e pc from 1st to 10th level, that was a heck of a thing. I like that feeling.

I can clearly remember a few Con's from back in the good old days.


[*]1st level PC sits in the back during any dangerous situation twidling thumbs for multiple game sessions
[*]1st level PC gets killed by any area effect attack on the party, doesn't matter if he saves.
[*]Either the DM takes it easy on the new PC or he pretty much just dies to the higher level threats.

I run a pretty hardcore sandbox, so the pcs can pick their challenges and choose whether to address the low-level guy's low level status themselves or not.

[*]The new PC levels up pretty fast anyway from the huge amounts of XP, so why bother.

This is a feature, not a bug.

As for "why bother", you could ask that about literally anything in play. Why bother tracking arrows and rations? Why bother with encumbrance? Why bother with language issues? Why bother roleplaying your character? Why bother making the pcs check for traps, instead of just checking the DC against their trapfinder's skill? I really don't think this is a meaningful question when the answer is quite clearly playstyle preference, and I think it's laid out pretty well in the OP.

This also might not work as well for a converted adventure path.

Probably not, at least not without a lot of sidequests and expansion. But I run a homebrewed campaign, and when I integrate published material, I hack and alter it pretty severely. (I've actually been twining the 2e adventure Dead Gods into my 4e game since about 3rd or 4th level, and the pcs are mid-20s now. I have hacked the crap out of it, changing details, using exactly none of the encounters in the original, rewriting a lot of the basic story, etc. to suit my game.)

I could see this making players more tentative both because of dying in the first place and starting over as well as being fragile compared to the rest of the party.

Possibly. As I said above, the pcs imc have a significant amount of influence on what challenges they face, so they can definitely choose their own adventure (if you will).

 

[keterys]

Weirdly, I think there are two ideas stuck in this thread, and I approve of one and disapprove of the other.

1) Everyone should start at a common level; so if a character dies permanently, or if someone wants to change characters, they have to restart at that low level.

This is pretty campaign dependent, but can work for some campaigns. It gets a bit ridiculous at some levels of disparity, but I've seen something like start up to (6-12) levels below the highest PC or whatever for high level campaigns. Ie, you wouldn't have 1st level PCs with a 20th level character, but 10th say.

Either way, seems fine as a basic concept.

That said, I'd strongly suggest against:

2) 1st level is a good starting level.

1st level is awful. Make your base starting level like 3rd or 4th, and I'd agree that it's a good common level to start the campaign. It makes multiclassing a little more viable, puts feats into a reachable range, avoids the gross mismatch in playstyle between 1st level and _every other level_, etc.

 

[TDarien]

If I were running a game I would probably start new characters at the bottom of the current tier of play. (Level 1,5,11, or 17)

This goes along with how the Adventurer's League works, which is set up to allow mixed level play, and you can only play in adventures that are designed for the tier that your character is in.

 

[Agamon]

This certainly works in theory, and I'd have no problem having new PCs come in at level 1, but I've gone away from XP tracking and just level the party whenever it makes sense for the game. So either new PCs come in at the same level as everyone else, or they stay behind forever (or I arbitrarily decide when the lower level PC catches up, which isn't cool).

 

[Sacrosanct]

There are really three main schools of thought:

1. every new PC starts at 1st level (for reasons like immersion, there's no penalty for death if everyone just starts at the higher level anyway, etc)\
2. every new PC starts at level 2, 3, or 4 for instance. This is usually for people who prefer PCs to be somewhat competant, but not auto-high level like other PCs may be
3. every new PC starts at the same level as the rest of the party (convenience)

All three are perfectly valid, and go back to the first days of D&D.


As with the OP, I tend to prefer #1 even though I've done all, and with bounded accuracy, 5e is definitely conducive for #1 without much mess.


Also, it's not the DM's job to take it easy on new PCs. It's the DMs job to be impartial and run his NPCs and monsters as they would normally act. It's the party's job to protect each other because each PC will add some value or contribution at some point where other PCs may not be able to. An investment so to speak.

 

[Pickles JG]

This certainly works in theory, and I'd have no problem having new PCs come in at level 1, but I've gone away from XP tracking and just level the party whenever it makes sense for the game. So either new PCs come in at the same level as everyone else, or they stay behind forever (or I arbitrarily decide when the lower level PC catches up, which isn't cool).

Actually it's fine. You just let them catch up one level a session until they are the same (or whatever rate you want). I did this for a bit but now I am all for everyone always at the same level.

I am tracking XP in 5e though as I quite like the feeling of incremental improvement. I like PFS one xp per mission 3 xp per level thing best though.