Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hrothgar Rannúlfr" data-source="post: 6399072" data-attributes="member: 54436">Normally, our group plays everyone starts at first level and has since beginning 3E (and even back in Basic/Advanced D&D in the 80's).Our group has recently added a new player.  So, that threw us a wrinkle.We've been running a long time campaign in PF/3X that we've converted to 5E.  Under the PF/3X rules, my basic DM assumption has been that it's an E6 type world, though sixth level isn't the level cap.  But, sixth is considered high level.  Highest level PC's, so far, in the story were 7th level.  The players each run multiple PC's in different but connected adventures (so that there's a pool of PC's of higher than 1st level to join the higher level group in the event of PC death).  The character composition of each group changes based upon the expectations of the current needs of each group.  Higher level PC's may join the lower level group and lower level PC's may join the higher level group (assuming they aren't prevented from doing so by their location and/or timeframe in the game world).So, the discussion came up about having the new player's character join the group with 5th to 7th level characters and whether or not he should start at 1st level? And if started at 1st level, should he be given hit points as if he were 3rd level (to improve survivability)?Ultimately, we made the decision to start him at 1st level with normal 1st level hit points.  The rest of the group felt as if it were too much of a freebie to give him levels or hit points for free.  Also, his experience playing D&D is that of a neophyte, so we didn't want to rob him of the 1st level experience.So, he made up three first level characters.  And, each member of the group made up a new first level character.  One of his new characters joined up with the new characters of the experienced players for a mission to rescue one of the local farmer's daughters who'd been kidnapped by cultists and taken into an underground labyrinth.  This allowed him to gain some experience playing without being outshone by higher level PC's and to hopefully get a handle on the basics he'd need to survive with one of his other 1st level characters with the higher level group.  (Do to the logistics of the situation, the 1st level PC's from this group wouldn't be able to join or interact with the higher level group until much later on.)All that said, it was a lot of fun.  Ultimately, two of the new first level PC's died.  One was that of one of the most experienced players (his character's body was irrecoverable, being dissolved from the inside and turned to goo by massive amounts of acidic poison from a certain variety of monstrous centipedes).  The new player's character also died, but was brought back life through the use of an extremely rare Elixir of Revivification (only two of those have appeared in adventures since the 80's).The higher level group has a cleric of sufficient level to cast Revivify, if the neophyte's character needs it.  But, he doesn't have (or currently have access to) the diamonds to do so.  And, the highest level fighter in that group is in need of that same spell, too (having recently been slain due to very poor PC tactics by a skeletal monstrosity created by an insane gnoll huecuva cleric).  The point of which is that even the high level characters aren't immune to death.  So, if the new 1st level character dies, it's not anything that couldn't happen to the higher level characters.I don't always run encounters that are necessarily level appropriate.  Some are beyond the characters' abilities.  And, more often than not, the encounters are below the characters' abilities (as I run the game as if being higher level shouldn't be rewarded by increasing the difficulty of everything in the game world).  And, the experienced players know this and know that it's not always wise to fight, discretion being the better part of valor.  And, I trust that they'll help the neophyte character as much as they can, as their own PC's lives may depend upon him at some point.I'm looking forward to our next session.</blockquote>

Verification