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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8513490" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yes, in the sense that (a) I find these levels far far more tedious than challenging, (b) those are the levels WotC assigns to the first tier of play and so, in a very real sense, a new experience of play is intended to occur at 5th level, and (c) like trying to plan an outing that will be both challenging for a father and his five-year-old child(ren), it all too often ends in an authority figure carrying the tired little one(s) past the finish line because they weren't up to the task.Depends. 5th level is an intentional and, in general, shared level where things change for most characters. Subclass can occur at 1, 2, or 3 depending on which class you play, so if you base it on subclass, there will be lots of exceptions. 5th level is when 3rd level spells come online (iconics like fireball and vital support functions like revivify), when "heavy" martial characters get Extra Attack, when cantrips go up in damage the first time, when Bards get their Inspiration Dice per short rest, Monks get Stunning Strike, etc. No cutoff will be perfect, but the 4->5 transition is somewhat more clean than 2->3 in terms of "almost everyone undergoes a major change/gets a major upgrade."Yeah...if only DMs would actually like...ever consider listening to those signposts. I've played all of one 5e game that didn't start at 1st level. It's also the highest-level game I've ever played in, because games are way too likely to fizzle out....or to run into problems because low levels are simultaneously extremely sparse in tools and extremely deadly.For me, this would make 5e literally unplayable. As in, I would literally not be able to enjoy it anymore, doubly so since I don't tend to play with friends (I am my friend group's forever DM and 100% okay with that).Uh...what? Care to explain that one?If you're going to make claims of this nature, provide the statistics. Otherwise, stop acting like you know any better than anyone else here what the preferences of players are.See, this is exactly the problem I identified back during the playtest. People told me I was either straight-up wrong, simply had  a vendetta against 5e, or was blowing an issue way out of proportion. And then, lo and behold, my predictions were exactly right.Because yes, you are 100% correct. These are the deadliest levels in 5e, and by far the levels where you're most likely to lose a character forever. They're also the levels where the designers specifically provide few options at a slow pace, so that players can get used to them and feel comfortable with their higher-level characters. AKA, you are 100% correct in saying that these levels are trying to serve two different masters: both the "I want a meatgrinder!" rock-bottom-zero fans (well, sort of, as demonstrated by the "no I need to be even more zero" posts in this thread) AND the "I'm a total neophyte who has no idea what a 'saving throw' is nor why you would throw something in order to save yourself...?" folks who need help and guidance. It's completely baffling to me why they thought this was a wise choice, since the game really is stupidly lethal for the first couple levels and then dramatically less so thereafter.That would be beautiful if more than a vanishingly small fraction of games actually started higher than 1st level. Because they don't. Out of literally a dozen or more online games I've joined, all of one started higher than 1st level. And that was with me being extremely selective and usually ignoring opportunities because they didn't start higher.Shouldn't surprise you, there's plenty of derogatory terms thrown at people who prefer higher-level games, as you well know.Sadly, IME, they have not been. I have had multiple DMs drag these levels out for ages, both in PbP and in more "typical" session play. I believe, in the longest-running 5e game I've been in, we took three weeks to go from level 1 to level 2. (And, keep in mind, this was after I gave an honest attempt at convincing the DM to let us start higher than 1st level, since no one in the group was new to D&D/tabletop generally, but a couple were new to 5e.)In my experience? Badly. Have seen multiple level-1 TPKs that subsequently resulted in group dissolution.If you find character permadeath exciting, sure. If you don't, they're tedious slogs to test whether or not you'll be allowed to play any further. Which doesn't feel even slightly fun or exciting for me. It instead feels like, "Spin this roulette wheel and pick a color, red or black. Guess wrong and you'll be kicked out of the casino. Oh, no, don't bet any money, you'll get to do plenty of that once you survive the roulette wheel."Extraordinary compared to what, exactly? Compared to ordinary Earth humans? Of course! I don't know about you but I have absolutely, positively zero interest in playing "literally an actual Earth farmboy with literally zero more capabilities than what you could expect an Earth farmboy to have," for any amount of time, let alone multiple levels.</blockquote>

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