People who always start a campaign at level 1: Does it ever get boring?

[Ace]

I start out at level 1, but give a little more background and survivability.

Everyone gets Wound Points equal to their Con (or 3/4 Con for small races). This means all 1st level characters can take a few hits before dropping. WP heals at a rate of 1/day, while HP heals 1/level/hour. This gets rid of the need to always use healing magic, and thus I can get rid of clerics (never was too fond of them).

Everyone gets 10 bonus skill points that they can only use for Craft, Knowledge, or Profession. This helps round them out.

But yes, low level play is fun. There's more ingenuity, usually, and less usage of the 'big guns' to kill off bad guys.

Like your houserules RangerWickett. I hate starting at level one personally. All low level charctewrs look about the same to me and they can't use a fraction of the options that are out there

JMO for my needs a long old style campaign is the last thing I want to play in. I expect to run at most 20 sessions (3 times a month) and than I am done with that character. YMMV of course but I'd rather start at 4th or 5th level than play to 20th

 

[Luddite]

I have only started one campaign and the characters are only at level 7. They know that they are significant but they are also far from being some type of force of nature in the world. It is all about perspective.

The first thing I did was get rid of the NPC level distribution in the DMG. Level one Warriors for Militas only occur in small towns that are realitively safe from conflict. And at that point they are usualy level 3-4 commoners instead, and they don't have any formal Militia.

Second, is setting the scope. The Primary villan for the PCs is in his high teens. He is also a Dwarf Prince with about 10,000 person military, not to mention other subjects/followers. So I don't even have to go far to have the Players come across an opponent who is in the low teens. On the other side, the players are part of a group with a smililar high level leader though a much leaner power-base.

If I were to start another game, it would depend on the players. If it were mostly new people, I would start them at level 1. But not realy introduce them to the world till about level 3. Otherwise, I would start at level 3 or 4.

-The Luddite

 

[belegost]

I don't like to completely skip the early levels because, as others have pointed out, so much character definition is done at this point. It makes sense for a level 1 PC to be "finding" oneself more than a new 5th level character. I prefer to have mid-level characters fleshed out through game play not just background stories.

In one case with an experienced group, we handled the situation by skipping ahead on the time line. In our campaign there was a gap of about six months (game time) where the characters were off doing some various tasks that included adventuring. Moving time along was important but we didn't want to roleplay the events. This gave us the opportunity to speed up the leveling process as experience was given to the PCs for their actions during this non-role played time. It was a happy medium for this group that wanted time to flesh out their characters during play but didn't want to spend all the time playing out the early levels.