Ruin Explorer
Legend
Same level as existing players. It's a social game.
Yep. Fairness has nothing to do with it. Practicality and making it fun do. I'd be fine, "fairness"-wise with starting at 1st. But holy crud as a DM I would not want to be writing around a 1st level PC, nor would I want the other players having to deal with it.
Also, given the speed of leveling if they get a full XP share, it'd all seem a bit silly, I think. They'd catch up to 1 level behind real fast - so fast it'd make you go "Hmmmmm".
That's a fine approach for certain playstyles, but it's awful in a true sandbox. In a true sandbox, the player chooses his or her pc options and then makes the most of them.
I think you'll find that sandbox dms tend to be the same ones who threw out the whole idea of the magic item wishlist, magic item shops, easy access to npc spellcasting and the like, too. Sandboxes don't serve softballs tailored to the party; by their very nature, there's no magic polearm just because you took Polearm Master- but there might be one somewhere even if you don't.
Bit of a tangent but I'm not convinced a sandbox that pure exists. Certainly not after a few sessions. For a sandbox to remain that perfect you'd basically need the DM merely interpreting rules, and a computer program or something generating content. Access to NPC spellcasting and magic item shops has nothing to do with sandbox or not, but rather to world design - it may be that sandbox DMs prefer lower-magic, often wilderness-set campaigns with none of that, but it's not inherent.
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