New Campaign-scale back characters?

[Mike7273]

I had DM'ed a campaign for 3 sessions with 1 group when 3 of my members quit. We added 3 more for the 4th session and I decided to continue with the same campaign and have the new players make 4th level PC's. We finished the session (a little early) and everything went great.

Here is my problem. I've decided I want to run the Cauldron campain series published in Dungeon Magazine. The campaign starts off at 1st level and goes beyond 10th (it's not finished yet). The storyline seems really engrossing and has many layers. I thought it would be best to have everyone scale their characters back to 1st ro 2nd level. My thinking is that this would best preserve the story. The adventure builds as you go.

Some of my players are baulking at this. They want me to adjust the CR's to be in line with their 4th level characters. I could do this, but I'm really afraid that it will hurt some of the early encounters and parts of the story. I've explained this, but I don't seem to be getting very far with a few players.

Any thoughts or advice?

 

[Mystery Man]

Just run it as is, with a percentage less XP given out until their levels fall in line with the given CR's.

 

[Keith]

By all means start a new campaign, with new characters, but don’t regress characters already in play. The story you should be concerned with is theirs, not the ones in modules. How would the characters experience this drastic loss in ability?

My suggestion is to leave the first few sections mostly as they are. The characters may well slaughter their way through them, but that is not so awful. They will gain XP more slowly for those sections, and you will reach parity fairly shortly, I would think. Throw in some extra challenges throughout the campaign (who wouldn’t want to anyway?), and you should be fine.

Again, I don’t think the process of de-leveling characters is a viable one, and doing it to meet module level requirements (which are always approximate anyway) does not seem like a good enough reason to try. Maybe new characters are the way to go.

Cheers

 

[Goddess FallenAngel]

Put down the module and step away from the DM screen!

*just kidding*

I can understand your player's point of view. I know that I would outright refuse to scale my character down several hard-won levels.

From a DM point of view - it wouldn't make sense storyline-wise. As Keith mentioned, how and why did the characters 'forget' what they had already learned?

I would suggest either scaling-up the encounters for the current CR (my preferred method) or letting them walk through the first part of the adventure. As mentioned, they will get almost nil xp, and will soon enough be on par with the module.

Or, simply create new characters. If the whole idea behind running this is that you got a new module and want to run it, not any storyline event in your campaign, then making new characters is the best way to go. If you eventually want to get back to the storyline you are currently running with these characters, then simply put the module down and get back to the current game.

 

[Mike7273]

All but 1 of the players created their characters at 4th level, and they've only played 1 session with them.