D&D 5E New Players same level as Current Players?

[Pvt. Winslow]

I do not think that he was saying that milestones are a pitfall, or that it is impossible to come up with rewards for players and characters that are not experience points or levels. The way that I read his post, I think he was saying that if you are playing with milestones, you lose out on a mechanical system to convince a bump on a log player from contributing to the game.

Well, I believe he was pretty clearly saying that the pitfall of milestone levelling is that the characters who don't contribute "by taking risks" benefit from the 'reward' of XP when they shouldn't.

If he meant as you believe, then hell, I agree. If you have a bump on the log player who needs mechanical incentive to even bother role playing or taking part during your session, then it sounds like they aren't a fit for the group. Instead, that's the kind of case where you simply talk to the player and gauge what they were looking for in the campaign, or you find story reasons to spur them to action.

Withholding XP from them because they didn't 'earn' it seems like a pretty antagonistic and frankly dick move for a DM to make. They should have talked to the player well before they felt the need to punish them for their behaviour in game.

 

[Nytmare]

If he meant as you believe, then hell, I agree. If you have a bump on the log player who needs mechanical incentive to even bother role playing or taking part during your session, then it sounds like they aren't a fit for the group. Instead, that's the kind of case where you simply talk to the player and gauge what they were looking for in the campaign, or you find story reasons to spur them to action.

Withholding XP from them because they didn't 'earn' it seems like a pretty antagonistic and frankly dick move for a DM to make. They should have talked to the player well before they felt the need to punish them for their behaviour in game.

Nobody suggested that anyone should antagonistically or dickishly withhold XP or punish a player, you added that bit, maybe accidentally.

There are lots of ways to communicate, and "talking to the player" or "changing the game to suit the player" aren't always the best, or easiest ways to do it.

 

[MostlyDm]

Tectuktitlay: I wrote my reply while you were writing some of your recent posts, just saw them now.

I want to stress that I don't think your approach is bad; I use it myself more often than not. In most even loosely plotted/story-driven games, I like bringing in characters with a rich background. I like bringing in Landos and Boromirs and whatever Indiana Jones' dad's name was.

But there is also a place for games where there *is* no epic story where the party is racing against a BBEG about to destroy the world. Where the world is what the characters make of it, and there are myriad different important stories that different people may have become embroiled in, and challenges of every conceivable CR available at any given time.

And while in such a game you don't HAVE to do ES@1 (my game where people come in at any level from 1 to 20 as they see fit)... It totally works. ES@1 is a natural fit for such a game.

Your Druid of the Emerald circle isn't an established, respected circle member. She is a novice acolyte just emerging from seclusion. The practical knowledge of the ranger will put her to shame, even at spell casting! Sounds like an awesome RP moment as she realizes the world is a lot bigger than she ever knew.

It's a particular style of game. It's not for everyone. But it can be super fun, too, if you approach with the right mindset.

I think that mindset has gotten a lot less common over the last 20 years, though.

 

[Tectuktitlay]

I think this is the key observation. In a lot of cases the people who can't grok the sense of ES@1 are having a problem because they haven't checked their premises.

Just to reiterate, I don't think ES@1 works for every campaign. Like I said up thread, in my current longest running campaign new characters pretty much come in at whatever level they want, based on the character and backstory involved. Each player has a large stable of characters, including villains working for various NPC factions.

But in open world sandboxes ES@1 can be awesome. Jester has said repeatedly that one of the ways this works is that low level characters often seek out lower threat problems. Your new level 1 guy can slum it with the party of level 2-5 dudes that are staging an excursion into the Goblinwood, rather than tracking down your old party of level 12-16 that was in the midst of an assault on the city of Fire Giants.

Or not! Maybe the party of level 12-16 is investigating the murder at the high court of King Elfman III, and mostly they will be interacting with people and digging up dirt. Perhaps your level 1 rogue will be able to contribute meaningfully, so you hang out after all. The final battle when they uncover the Doppelgänger assassin is more of a formality anyway.

There isn't an overarching story pace being set by the DM. There isn't a set of challenges the DM is prepping for the PCs. There's just... A world full of stuff, that you can interact with at your discretion. You don't bring in a guy with extensive backstory. You bring in a guy, and *create* an extensive backstory for him through play.

In which case you are either, a) periodically asking the group to stop playing the characters and storyline they've been working on and possibly rolling up new characters of their own just to play with this new person (or new character replacing a deceased one), or b) staging additional sessions to accommodate this new character.

Either way, you are asking your players to be pulled out of the narrative they've been engaged in, and/or take up additional time in their schedule, else deal with the severe disparity and liability multiple people, myself included, have mentioned above.

This may work for some groups. In my experience, neither of those scenarios are likely to work for the vast majority of groups.

Great if it does, but those groups will be outliers. Hence the profound disparity in the poll results for this thread. And these results are in a forum likely to have a significantly higher percentage of hardcore gamer types, not your typical, more casual roleplaying gamer (and the former are also the types more likely to respond to a poll and a thread on a forum like this, as well).

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

Nobody suggested that anyone should antagonistically or dickishly withhold XP or punish a player, you added that bit, maybe accidentally.

There are lots of ways to communicate, and "talking to the player" or "changing the game to suit the player" aren't always the best, or easiest ways to do it.

Right back at you. No one said anything about changing the game to suit the player. I said talk to the player, and find out why they aren't taking part. That was just a hypothetical. I would clear any kind of campaign detail like level advancement with my players before the campaign even started, so the likelihood of it ever being an issue is next to zero.

I still don't believe that a player taking part in a campaign that uses milestone levelling could possibly not 'earn' their level up as long as they're playing, just like anyone else. Avoiding risks has nothing to do with it.

That is, unless you view levelling as the point of D&D, in which case I would posit you're missing some of the heart and soul of the game.

 

[MostlyDm]

In which case you are either, a) periodically asking the group to stop playing the characters and storyline they've been working on and possibly rolling up new characters of their own just to play with this new person (or new character replacing a deceased one), or b) staging additional sessions to accommodate this new character.

Either way, you are asking your players to be pulled out of the narrative they've been engaged in, and/or take up additional time in their schedule, else deal with the severe disparity and liability multiple people, myself included, have mentioned above.

This may work for some groups. In my experience, neither of those scenarios are likely to work for the vast majority of groups.

Great if it does, but those groups will be outliers. Hence the profound disparity in the poll results for this thread. And these results are in a forum likely to have a significantly higher percentage of hardcore gamer types, not your typical, more casual roleplaying gamer (and the former are also the types more likely to respond to a poll and a thread on a forum like this, as well).

It definitely works best in a living world "West Marches" style game with multiple simultaneous PC groups operating in a shared world, so players can move in and out of different groups as desired.

It's hard to find a group for, most places.

It's undoubtedly the minority of games.

Neither of those facts make it bad, though. It can really perfectly capture that old school, dungeon delving, death around every corner, swords and sorcery feel. Among other things.

 

[Nytmare]

Right back at you. No one said anything about changing the game to suit the player.

I edited my post poorly, in trimming down I removed a third option "find different people to play with". Those last two weren't meant as quotes of what you were saying, they were other common suggestions as to how people "fix" a hypothetical player. "Doing A, B, or C aren't always the best or easiest ways to do it."

Regardless, what I was pointing out with the first part of that post wasn't that you were misquoting someone, it was that you were inadvertently attaching a lot of unspoken and unalluded to negative actions to a play style you don't like. You accidentally managed to spin someone thinking that a milestone system player might get something they didn't earn to a DM in an XP based game being an antisocial jerk and refusing to give a player XP because they didn't "take an axe to the face."

I think you might be doing it again now by talking down to the people not in your column of the poll and telling them that they're doing it wrong because they're only worried about leveling.

 

[MostlyDm]

Tectuktitlay: another thought I just had, regarding your comparison of a campaign to popular movies/books/TV... Low level D&D doesn't model that stuff super well anyway. Nobody but Luke starts at level 1 in Star Wars. Nobody at all starts at level 1 in shows like Burn Notice, X-Files, etc. In LOTR only the hobbits start at level 1... And Never get terribly high level at all.

Most popular fiction doesn't start *anyone* as a novice, though. So the comparison kind of falls apart.

 

[MostlyDm]

If you wanted to model fiction where everyone is a competent hero with a rich backstory, you could play ES@5

Or higher, but I think 5 would be enough.

 

[Tectuktitlay]

It definitely works best in a living world "West Marches" style game with multiple simultaneous PC groups operating in a shared world, so players can move in and out of different groups as desired.

It's hard to find a group for, most places.

It's undoubtedly the minority of games.

Neither of those facts make it bad, though. It can really perfectly capture that old school, dungeon delving, death around every corner, swords and sorcery feel. Among other things.

Nope, never said it was bad. Just very difficult on many levels to pull of with even a modicum of success.

It is much more logistically difficult to juggle and have an overall positive outcome for everyone involved. And once even a small core group of the PCs survives to a decent level, they out of necessity need to be all-but retired; including even a single PC of significantly lower level immediately skews the session. It means that the group is either engaging opposition (either martial or social in nature, doesn't matter) that is trivially or moderately easy for them (meaning consistently engaging in low-to-no-risk scenarios repeatedly), else putting the lowbie PC at dramatically higher risk. Meaning the player controlling the latter might very well watch a character they're investing in die simply because they had the nerve to want to game with the group that night.

Death around every corner sword and sorcery feel is one thing. But...if only a small handful of players have characters strong enough to be the Conans and the Red Sonjas, then those characters will pretty much steal the spotlight while all the other PCs take a backseat every time those characters are in play in a session. And therein lies one of the biggest problems, and weaknesses. Those characters are either retired until others can have some characters make it high enough to not be outshone so significantly, or they are all-but forced to hog the spotlight just to keep the rest of the group from dying.

It's not a bad way to play, just very difficult to pull off successfully even with very established groups of players who know each other quite well.