NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6576859" data-attributes="member: 996">Actually it was several new players.  And, I had one player who was behind the party with a multi-classed character who really needed all the exp he could get, too.  It was a creative work-around to an  unusual situation that still kept everyone starting at 1st (as advertised), but it was a work-around (as you pointed out in your first reply to my anecdote, and, you'll notice, I didn't argue).  Working around a potential difficulty of a policy is not the same thing as violating that policy.   FWIW, this was 3 years into a campaign that ultimately ran for 10. I obviously haven't had a chance to see how this plays out in 5e, but, in 1e, if you didn't hold tightly to the training rule, the level gap was made up with phenomenal speed, and the new character would also get beefed up with surplus magic items (seems silly, I know, but that's how it sometimes was). It might have been problematic in other modern editions, but in classic D&D it tended not to be.  It's partly a matter of context, it may seem like a big problem when characters of different levels have vastly different levels of basic competence, for instance, but when the relative differences are smaller (due to bounded accuracy in 5e, or simply not having level-based rules for a lot of resolutions in classic D&D), the much lower-level character can still contribute in more ways than it might in other modern editions.  Players will be used to coping with a character that's much less effective than his piers in many ways, too, whether that's a class or race that starts out weak (only to get more powerful relative to the rest of the party later), or PC gimped by a curse or other inflicted disability (cursed magic item, magical trick/trap with a permanent effect, brutal critical hit variant, or whatever).  Similarly, putting some levels on a back-up character (or henchman, perhaps) doesn't seem like such a bad idea in the context of the lethality of classic D&D, and switching from high level (maybe on the edge or past the 'sweet spot') to low level for a bit also might not lack appeal in that context.</blockquote>

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